5 Common Mistakes People Make When Building Muscle

One of our clients (@darcypreecephotography) worked with Mike and put on an impressive amount of muscle, so we thought we’d share a little bit about his story and the process. In particular, help others avoid some of the common mistakes people run into when looking to build muscle.

1. Too much weight gain

It’s common that people end up gaining too much weight. Ideally you want to shoot for a weekly weight gain rate of about 0.1-0.4% bodyweight, depending on your training experience; there are other things that affect your ability to building muscle, but your training experience is one of the biggest factors.

Training experience definition:

• Beginner = new to training (0-1/2 years)
• Intermediate = somewhere between 1-3 years of consistent training
• Advanced = somewhere between 3-4+ years of consistent training

	Monthly Goal:	Weekly Goal:
Beginner:	1.0-1.5%	0.25-0.40%
Intermediate:	0.5-1.0%	0.10-0.25%
Advanced:	up to 0.5%	up to 0.15%

The above rates might be slower rate than most think, but this range will optimize muscle gain and limit fat gain; gaining fat in the process in inevitable, and that’s ok, but you want to avoid gaining too much. With Darcy we aimed for roughly 0.4% bodyweight gain per week; we increased, or decreased, daily calories to meet this.

2. Eating more than needed

This picky-back’s off of point #1, but it’s common to think it’s open season with eating and eat whatever you want. “It’s ok, I’m bulking.” Most need to eat less than they think, especially considering the above ranges. For most, moderately increasing serving sizes at 2-3 meals is enough.

3. Not Having Enough Calories

This point contradicts #2, but it’s worth mentioning because some people don’t consume enough calories. This was the case with Darcy, we had to consistently increase his calories until he was eating around 3400 calories daily.

People often associate low calorie food options (eg. low fat calorie dressings, skim milks, etc.) as “healthier” – which is not necessarily true. You’re not going to optimally grow muscle in a caloric deficit, so that should be your first concern.

• Tip: One way to help increase calories: adding 2-4 tbsp of avocado oil (or another oil, like olive oil) to things like rice or salads; this will help increase 240-480 calories at that one meal, and you can do this more than once in a day.

4. Lack of Consistency & Program Hopping

A lot of people try new programs, or switch up exercises, every 3-4 weeks or less. Instead, pick 6-8 main exercises (eg. Squat, Row, Deadlift, Chest Press, Shoulder Press, Pull Up) and don’t change them for the course of 15-20 weeks; or longer. Week-to-week try to do more reps and weight with these exercises. Doing so will also help you evaluate your progress better.

Introduce variety in your program by changing up the other exercises, eg. Dumbbell Bicep Curls.

With Darcy, during one of our big muscle building phases we stuck to relatively the same program for 16 weeks. During that time Darcy was consistently trying to lift more weight with each lift, and we were increasing the amount of sets we were doing on a weekly basis over time.

5. Too many isolated muscle group workouts

You want to maximize the amount of times you can train the bigger muscle groups, like your legs, back, chest, shoulders. You want to train the main exercises, alluded to in point #4, at least twice per week (eg. squats on Monday, and again Thursday). If you’re exercising less than 5 times a week, you should be doing mostly upper/lower, full body, or push/pull type workouts. If you want to do an Arms days because you enjoy it, that’s totally ok. But, do it in addition to the other workouts.

With Darcy we were doing Upper/Lower/Full body workouts, and then one extra Arms day workout because he really enjoyed training arms –  it was his “fun” workout he saved for Fridays or Saturdays.

Some progress photos from Darcy (click to enlarge)

If you avoid the common mistakes listed above you’ll be well on your way to building muscle more successfully. But be patient, the un-sexy truth about building muscle (like most things) is that it is slow – especially in comparison to fat loss, which can range from 0.5-2.0% per week.