10 Reasons Why You Aren't Progressing In The Gym
If you’ve been really struggling to make progress in the gym and reach your fitness goal, there are 10 potential reasons why this is happening. Today we’re going to cover what those 10 things are and why they may be stopping you from getting results.
1) Not tracking your workouts
A lot of people think they aren’t making progress, but if you asked them how much they lifted on a certain exercise 3 months ago, they’d have no idea. They very well could be making progress, but they just have no way of knowing it.
If you want to be 100% sure that you’re making progress, you have to track the workouts. This lets you make small progressions often, and see which exercises you aren’t progressing on so you can swap them out.
At the start of your fitness journey, going to the gym and just…doing stuff... is going to work. Once the newbie gains are done, you have to be more serious about your training, and that means logging your workouts. Using an app or old fashioned pen and paper can work just fine.
2) Program hopping
Are you allowing enough time to pass to see if a program works for you and gives you progress? The answer might be no.
We’re in the era of wanting a quick fix for everything, and especially for reaching a physique or strength goal. This leads to people constantly looking for the new best thing in fitness at all times: A special exercise, a special diet, and a special workout program that might be better than the one they’re currently doing.
When you switch programs too much, you don’t give yourself enough time to see the results. Building muscle takes time. Getting stronger takes time. Losing fat and keeping it off takes time. How much progress do you honestly expect to make in a month? It probably won’t be a lot.
Make yourself to stick to a certain routine for AT LEAST 8 weeks to determine the effectiveness. And this doesn’t mean KINDA doing the program for 8 weeks, this means going ALL-IN with the program for 8 weeks.
If you make ANY progress at all, you can’t say you AREN’T progressing. It may not be as fast as you’d like, but it is progress, and constant progress is always the goal. You just might need to fine tune some things to get progress faster.
3) Choosing wrong exercises for your goal
If you want a bigger upper body, what exercises should you do? If you want bigger legs, what exercises should you do? If you want to lose a lot of body fat, what exercises should you do?
A lot of beginners have no idea where to start with their exercise selection, and even people with years of experience can choose inferior exercises for what their goal is.
Where people struggling to make progress often go wrong is picking exercises they are already strong in, or those they enjoy. The best exercise for your goal might be the exercises you hate the most because they make you struggle, feel weak, and feel sore. But guess what, if you aren’t making progress with the exercises you love, it’s worth it to see if those you hate get you the best results.
For example, instead of leg presses, you might need to squat. Instead of bench press, you might need to do dips. Try these types of exercise swaps and almost guarantee you’ll break through some plateaus.
How Skinny Guys Should Train For More Muscle
4) Having bad form
What should you do if you have the perfect workout plan, filled with the toughest exercises, you’ve stuck to it for months consistently, and you STILL aren’t progressing?
When’s the last time you’ve checked your form? When is the last time you recorded yourself, and judged the form of your working sets, as if it was a different person.
I’ve been in gyms for more than 15 years and seen a LOT of people training…most people have terrible form.
Bad form is going to limit your muscle breakdown in the gym, decrease your strength output, and increase your chances of injury.
It’s ok to take 1 step back to improve your form, so you can take 2 steps forward to being stronger and more muscular.
If you want a form check on a certain exercise, send me a message on Instagram with the video: B Lewis Fitness Instagram
5) Rushing the reps
Piggybacking off the point of having bad form, one way you can have bad form is by rushing your reps, especially if your goal is having bigger muscles.
To maximize your muscle development, you want to have a controlled tempo on the eccentric, (lowering phase of an exercise).
When people get to a challenging weight, or the challenging part in a set, they tend to speed up. This could be because the focus is trying to reach a certain amount of reps. Instead of focusing on the number rep you’re on, focus on treating each rep with control, and seek out that deep burn. When it burns, see if you can make it burn more by going even slower, not faster.
6) Ego lifting
Another factor that makes people plateau is also tied to the last 2 points on this list, and that’s ego lifting.
Ego lifting is when you are attempting to do more weight or more reps without it being reasonable to complete the rep with decent form and control.
Ego lifting isn’t necessarily a certain amount of weight, it’s more about the lack of control and ability. For example: Person A having a max bench press of 135lbs, that they achieved last week, attempting 155lbs this week is ego lifting. Person B having a max bench press of 405lbs, that they achieved last week, attempting 365lbs this week, is NOT ego lifting.
Lifting in the upper limits of your capability is fine, and preferred in the gym. When every session starts to turn into a max out day, you’re ego lifting. Remember this, doing a 1 rep max demonstrates your strength, but it doesn’t BUILD strength.
7) Having a lack of a killer instinct
Many beginners, with less than 2 years of experience in the gym, get great results without ever having to actually work hard. If you’re in that category of less than 2 years of consistent training, this may be a tough pill to swallow, but you probably don’t have the results because you aren’t training hard enough.
When you reach a plateau, do you immediately panic and try to find something else to blame for your struggles? Have you thought, maybe...just maybe, you haven’t had the killer instinct and gone all-out on your workouts?
I’ve trained people for over 10 years, TRUST ME, people B.S. in the gym all the time. Scrolling social media between every set, talking during the actual exercise, talking to people for 5+ minutes between sets, watching TV while training, taking phone calls, and a bunch of other stuff that distracts you from 100% effort.
Sure, doing these things can make your time in the gym more enjoyable, but what does that have to do with getting the result you want? You have to lock in and focus if you’re at a plateau. Remove the distractions, turn into an absolute monster in the gym for an hour, then revert back to normal the rest of the day. You’d be surprised how quickly you start making improvements.
8) Not training enough
So you aren’t reaching your fitness goal? How many total workouts have you done in the last 2 years? What about last year? What about this month?
The answer is probably lower than what you’d need for the result you want. When you have a ton of muscle, low body fat, and healthy habits already instilled into your routine, you honestly don’t need to workout a lot to maintain it.
If you’re reading this, that isn’t you, so the advice for you is different. You need to put the time in to get the result. Working out on the weekends won’t cut it. Working out a couple times per week, when you have time, won’t cut it.
You likely need to be training anywhere from 150-260 days per year to maximize your results. Sound like a lot? Well that’s the equivalent of training 3-5 times per week.
So again I ask you, how many days did you workout last year? If it wasn’t at least 150 times, I see an easy way for you to make a ton of progress.
9) Not prioritizing recovery
Let’s say you’ve been working out 300 times per year, until failure every workout, and you still aren’t making progress…what can you be doing better?
Well, how’s your recovery? Do you get 7+ hours of sleep most nights? Are you highly stressed from work and your family?
This stuff matters if you want to maximize your results. Training hard doesn’t get you results. Recovering from training hard gets you results.
Download an app like sleep cycle if you need more accountability to sleep better.
If you need help losing body fat, I have a free training that can help you out. My Fat Loss 101 Webinar will show you how fat loss happens, how to train and eat for fat loss, and underrated things that keep people from losing fat.
If you need to build muscle and bulk up, I have a free 28 Day Lean Bulk Blueprint that you can use where I’ll give you a training program and nutrition plan that will help you gain 5lbs in 28 days.
10) Not eating for your goal
What’s your nutrition plan for maximizing your goal? If you’re like most people, you eat what you want, when you want, and try your best to make it healthy. That’s great for longevity, but that doesn’t work when you’re at a plateau and want to break through it.
You need a concrete plan for what you’re going to eat. For most people, eating 1g/lbs of their goal body weight (ex. 150g of protein if your goal weight is 150lbs), lots of fruits and vegetables, and minimizing alcohol intake will be the most impactful nutrition steps they can take to make progress.
I recommend taking time to plan out a week’s worth of food intake so you know what your calorie intake will be, and you can quickly adjust it based on your goal.
Before you get frustrated with your fitness journey and give up, address each of these 10 factors. You’ll probably find that at least one of these could be changed, and that will make your goal happen quicker and seem more achievable.
If you have specific fitness questions, send me an email at: [email protected] and I’ll try to answer them.
