7 reasons why you're stuck in mediocrity

1. you do not have a training log

If you don't have a training log, then get one. Here's why.

You trained your chest last Monday. You did 9 reps with 120 kilos on the bench. Now it's time for the next chest training session. You check your trusty logbook in case you forgot the numbers to hit today. It tells you,

"Here are your miserable numbers from your last training session. I really hope you don't slack off today like you did last time."

At least that's the theory behind a training log, and that's definitely what mine said the last time I opened it. I knew that I couldn't be as rubbish as last time. And that if I wasn't going to be less bad, I was going to be even worse than last time.

Then I performed 10 reps at 120 kilos and it said, "that's better, but still bad..."

This is the way I grow. My training log expects me to perform better to get better. To train harder and surpass my previous performances.

One of the most satisfying things in the world is opening my training log to find out what my damn numbers were, because when I wrote them down, my hands were shaking with exertion. The other most satisfying feeling was writing down bigger numbers than last time.

If your training log tells you in six months that your numbers haven't gotten any bigger, then you won't look any different than you do now.

2. you suffer from training ADHD

One of the most unproductive things you can do is look at a mega-muscular guy's training and somehow come to the conclusion that his current training style is responsible for how he looks today.

Anyone who has achieved a body or strength level that is admirable has usually gone through an evolution that has molded his or her training into what it is today. I was lucky because in my early years I picked up some really basic principles regarding building muscle and strength - principles that became ingrained in my mind. Pick up the weight and do reps with it. Do more reps the next week than the previous week. And do this with a handful of basic exercises. Do this for years and you will become more muscular.

And that's exactly what I did. I picked a weight that I could do 8 reps with. Then every week I tried to do more reps with that weight. When I could do 12 reps, I increased the weight.

That's all I did for 90% of my first decade of training. I may have changed a few things here and there, but for the most part this was my training. My exercises of choice at the time were:

• Squats
• Deadlifts with straight legs
• Pull-ups with an underhand grip
• T-bar or barbell rows
• Bench press
• Dumbbell incline bench press
• Overhead press (dumbbell and barbell)

I added the usual mix of curls, tricep workouts, dips, pull-ups, etc., but I stuck with progressive overload on these exercises. I knew I would become more muscular if I could increase from 8 reps with 35 kilo dumbbells to 12 reps with 45 kilo dumbbells. I knew that if I could go from 8 reps with 115 kilos of dumbbells to 8 reps with 150 kilos of dumbbells, my back would get bulkier.

That was it. For a decade or more. Today, you will have a hard time getting a trainee to stick with a program for 2 weeks.

If you want to grow - and I mean really grow - then you need to stick to tried and tested principles of muscle growth and a few selected exercises that you will perform for the next 10 years. There. There is no magic workout program out there that will turn you into a beast overnight.

3. you are married to modest, unproductive exercises

During my growing years, I limited myself to a few exercises and did them for a long time. These were exercises that felt natural to me and that I really enjoyed.

Because these exercises felt good to me and because I enjoyed doing them, I made fairly consistent progress. And because I was able to make fairly consistent progress, I achieved good gains.

I mention this because I must get a thousand emails a month with questions like "Can I do this or should I do that?"

I don't know. Can you? Should you? These are questions I can't answer. But my question to you is "Why don't you try it?" This way you will find out. This is the way I found out which exercises I needed to focus on in my training.

I didn't have to ask anyone for permission. Heck, there was no one I could have asked. I didn't take a piece of paper to write a letter to Dorian Yates after reading the latest flex assignment and ask his permission to do an exercise he recommended.

Here are two questions you should ask yourself to make your decision easier - without having to ask permission:

a. Does this exercise have a high potential for progressive overload?

Tight bench presses, for example, have a much greater potential for increasing weight than kickbacks. If you're a beginner or somewhat advanced trainee, why on earth would you choose kickbacks as your favorite triceps exercise to build up if you're using a weak 60 kilos on a close bench press? You still have a lot of work to do on the close bench press.

b. Do you enjoy performing the exercise

Not everyone likes squats. Some people have body mechanics that make squats uncomfortable regardless of how they are performed, which is why they don't enjoy the exercise. Squats on the multi press or leg press, on the other hand, feel more natural to many of these exercisers and they also feel this exercise better in their thighs. I don't give much weight to the opinions of some guys on the internet who claim that the alternatives I just mentioned are worthless when I don't even know if these people have ever entered a gym.

Anyway, if you throw the answers to these two questions together, you have a nice cocktail for gains. Stop doing junk that you hate or that is generally unproductive and that you only use because someone on the internet says you have to use it.

4. you focus on insignificant stuff

I feel sorry for many beginners who really want to grow. They live in a time where there is more information about training than ever before and yet people are more confused than ever when it comes to getting more muscular and stronger.

A big part of this has to do with the fact that sects of the training community love to present information in a way that reads like an excerpt from a Chinese nuclear science course. In many cases, I would have no idea what these people are talking about if I didn't have a video on the subject.

Let's take side lifting. Do you really think that making sure your pinky is in a certain position is the key to solving your problems with lagging shoulder muscles? Probably not. I'm not saying that exercise execution isn't important. It is. But it doesn't have to be so damn complicated either. Here's a pretty simple way to know if your exercise execution is good:

1. When you perform an exercise, can you feel the target muscle working?
2. Do you achieve a strong maximum contraction?
3. Do you initiate the start of the movement with the target muscle?

If your answer to all of the above questions is yes, then you are probably doing everything right. If you don't feel the target muscle contracting powerfully, then there is probably a reason for this. In most cases it is one of the following:

• You're using too heavy a weight to maintain the mind-muscle connection.
• Another muscle group is overly dominant and is doing a lot of the work in this exercise.
• You are not initiating the exercise with the target muscle, which is probably related to the first problem.

The answer to all these questions is really simple: use a lighter weight or choose a different exercise.

5. you have no idea what brutally hard training is

"Volume is the driver of muscle growth."

"There are studies that show that..."

I know many haven't realized it yet, but there are some things that studies can't account for. Studies rarely look at subjects who are advanced enough in their training to effectively train to muscle failure.

Training with brutally hard effort is a lost art. Not to mention that training brutally hard will naturally limit your training volume and eliminate unnecessary volume. Even though I keep harping on it, training brutally hard has benefits like time efficiency and metabolic benefits that you won't get from volume training.

Forget the studies, because every study has its limitations. They usually even admit this in the end. A group of college students with 1 to 2 years of training experience in the weight room who trained for 8 weeks has no relevance to advanced exercisers.

Instead, I'm going to show you the results of real-world training programs that don't fit so perfectly into a study, but still build mountains of muscle. Doggcrapp training, for example, has probably produced more mass monsters than any other training methodology.

Do you know what this training is based on? Train brutally hard for a few rest-pause sets, increasing reps and weights with each session.

I asked a bunch of really advanced guys how many real work sets they do for specific muscle groups during a training week. The average for legs? Six to eight sets in a training week. In total. And that's quadriceps and hamstrings combined. Certainly not twenty, as studies and "learned" trainers recommend.

If you are a beginner or somewhat advanced, then you may not have developed the ability to train at this extreme effort yet. And you will probably need more volume to compensate.

But you should still develop the ability to have that kind of "grow or die" mentality whenever you enter the weight room - and not focus on a certain number of sets because some study recommends it.

6. you pay too much attention to every gram

It's strange what social media has done to the world of weight training. It's nothing unusual to find a group of ridiculous clowns with a full film crew in a gym blocking off entire workout areas to perform stupid exercises for the sake of a social media post.

Their equally stupid followers who see this post then do exactly what they see: they imitate what their idols claim they do.

A few decades ago, a powerlifter could compete at a very high level for a very long time because there was an off-season during which he reduced the weights on the bar and focused on sets with more reps to preserve his joints.

Longevity is not something many people think about these days, which is why you often see athletes who dominate in weight training for a while and then disappear from the scene due to recurring injuries. It's hard to take your foot off the gas when every single training session is based on "likes" and "views".

In fitness and bodybuilding, there are men and women who basically follow a competition diet all year round to stay in shape for their Instagram photos. For those with massive amounts of followers, I can understand that. It becomes a profession and you earn a lot of money from it.

I don't blame anyone here for trying to make a living, but if you're a second-rate guy who weighs just 65 kilos and tries to keep his definition to the gram, then that's exactly why you're not growing.

With a few exceptions, I have yet to see a single person with impressive body development who hasn't spent time stuffing serious amounts of food into themselves. Show me a guy who is a lean 90 to 100 kilos and I'll show you a guy who has spent a significant amount of his training life struggling to find the energy to tie his shoes.

My two strongest growth spurts in terms of muscle growth were characterized by eating so much that I hated my life. It's true that you can't force muscle growth to any degree by eating more food, but at some point you should give that good old college approach a shot.

Accumulating more and more muscle protein over time is a slow and arduous process. And that process is even slower and more frustrating if you're caught in the no man's land between "I want to look like an animal but eat like a lean model".

If you're in your forties like me, then this is probably not an intelligent or viable option. It's not my fault that you've wasted the last few years hitting the gym or eating like a model. However, if you're a teenager or in your twenties and you're not eating in a way that puts the fear of God into little kids, then you're missing out on a window of opportunity for accelerated growth.

I've described some of my eating phases from my Fat Boy days in previous articles and received snide comments that they would bring on diabetes and heart attacks. I never said it was healthy. There's nothing healthy about pushing your limits on food and barbells when you're trying to maximize your genetic potential. But that's why I now weigh 110 kilos with visible abs, while no one recognizes that you're training with weights when you're wearing a T-shirt.

At the time I was building this foundation, there was no Facebook or Instagram. My training and nutrition were focused on my desires and goals - not on the approval of a bunch of stranger voyeurs.

7 You're overlooking what matters most.

Here's what matters most if you want to get better:

Break personal records for working out, break personal records for eating, and break personal records for sleeping. Get used to being uncomfortable when it's time to eat and exercise.

Stop switching from exercise program to exercise program every 3 weeks. Find 6 or 8 basic exercises that have a high potential for progressive overload and get brutally strong on those exercises.

Stop worrying about what others are doing or not doing. It has no relevance to your training. It's none of your business. You should be too damn busy eating, sleeping and training to even notice.

Are you looking for motivation? Do you need to clear your head when lack of progress demotivates you? One of my favorite quotes about what it takes to get better comes from Dr. Ken Leistner:

"I like to tell doubting exercisers that it's simply a matter of increasing the weight on the bar or doing one extra repetition. If you get to the point where you can do 20 squats at 180 kilos, 15 reps of deadlifts with your legs straight at 180 kilos, 10 reps of curls at 90 kilos, 10 reps of shoulder presses at 180 kilos, 10 dips at 140 kilos around your waist and pull-ups at 50 kilos, don't you think you'll be muscular? I mean terribly muscular. AND strong? Obviously!"

That's all it takes.

Source: https://www.t-nation.com/training/7-reasons-youre-stuck-at-medium/

By Paul Carter