The 3 WORST Workout Routine Mistakes (GAIN KILLERS!)

How many workout routines have you tried? 1? 5? 10? More. But are you again and again left dissatisfied with the lack of muscle growth that you get from those routines? Well, listen up because I'm going to show you three gain killers that your workout routine is likely guilty of and how to fix each one you've heard of. ADD Gain Killer number one is called Haddock Hypertrophic Attention Deficit Disorder. People who have hadd, they switch out their exercises too often and have no long term focus. Why is long term focus so important? Because guys who do the same boring exercises over and over, do them well and get stronger on them simply build more muscle than guys who switch it up for whatever reason. For instance, it's Monday chest day. You pop up your phone and find the latest best chest workout routine from your favorite influencer and decide to follow that next week. One of your buddies is at the gym and also training chess, so you hop in on his workout. Sound familiar? Well, if you're serious about maximizing growth and actually seeing results, then you need to instead go into every one of your workouts with a game plan written out. Rather than aimlessly following a random workout every single week, you need specifics on what exercises you're doing, how many sets you're doing, and the amount of reps and weight that you're going to aim to lift to try to beat your last workout. Otherwise, how are you going to know if you're actually making progress with your workouts and getting stronger instead of just getting a good pump? You're not. To illustrate this, a 2019 study had participants perform an eight week resistance training program using either a structured exercise program or having the exercises randomly generated every session by an app. Although the differences between groups did not yet reach statistical significance, the structured group had almost twice as much muscle growth, a greater increase in back squat and bench press strength, and a slight decline in body fat percentage. What this suggests is that had this study been carried out longer or had more subjects, there likely would have been a clear advantage to the structured program. The reason for this is pretty straightforward. It's well known that new exercises cause the most muscle damage, but after a while you adapt and less damage occurs. So while you may feel a lot more soreness from these random workouts, they actually don't provide as much growth as sticking to the same set of exercises and focusing on progressing those with more weight and or reps over time. In fact, research shows that early on, much of the increase in protein synthesis response that you get from training is directed towards repairing rather than Building Muscle Due to the excessive muscle damage it experiences from the novel exercises, only after a few weeks into a program is your body able to attenuate the muscle damage and focus more so on building new muscle, meaning that you likely need to do an exercise consistently for at least two to three weeks before you can really start to get the best growth possible out of it. In addition to this, during your workout at a minimum, you should be recording the exercises, the sets, the reps, and the weight that you're using. It's also a good idea to write down your effort on each of these sets and the settings that you are using on a machine or cable or any modifications that you made to your workout. This is going to allow you to control as many variables as possible, such that in your future workouts you can more accurately determine if you actually made progress or not. It also just serves as a plan of attack for your next workout. For example, if you see that last week you did bicep curls for an easy three sets of 10 reps using 35 pounds in each hand, you now know that you're capable of doing more. So this week you'll know that you should at least aim to do £40 or £45 instead of £35 or just aim for one to two more reps per set. If you didn't have this information written down, then you wouldn't have an effective plan of attack for your next workout. And trust me, even if you think that you'll remember week after week, I know how easy it is to forget, especially the minor details which are what matter the most. Its why so many people who go to the gym consistently week after week fail to actually progress. So track your progress and track it properly. Junk Volume Doing more sets than you should do in a single session rather than doing just enough to maximize growth. Most people are unaware that you only have a certain amount of productive sets that you can do in a single session. Adding sets above this threshold will not help you gain additional muscle, but rather seems to just increase damage and lengthen your recovery. Hence the term junk volume. Picture this. On a chest day you perform four sets of bench press, four sets of chest press, four sets of dumbbell press, four sets of chest dips, and then four sets of flys. By the time that you make it to the flys, your chest will be exhausted and experiencing much less tension than it was earlier on in your workout. By this point you've likely reached and surpassed your productive limit for that session and all you're doing now is getting a half decent pump at the expense of prolonging your recovery. So how do you know what your limit is? Well, just like total weekly training volume, it's actually very individual. Some can handle more and still grow, whereas others just can't. Based on the current evidence though, and an analysis done by researcher James Krieger, as long as sets are being performed to or near failure, it seems that the limit is around 10 sets per muscle per workout. Once again, this is highly variable, but it does suggest that if you greatly exceed this theoretical limit by regularly doing 15 to 20 sets for muscle group in one single session, then you're probably doing more harm than good. This is especially true if you just haven't been progressing very well despite all of this volume. A practical solution is to distribute that volume into more than one session per week. Instead of doing 18 sets of chest in a single workout, split it up and do nine sets in one workout and nine sets in another. Or, if you wanted to train your upper body three times a week, split up the 18 sets into six sets. During each of these three workouts, you can imagine just how much better quality those six sets would be and the increased amount of weight and reps you'd be able to lift for those sets, rather than by trying to do them all in one single workout. Game Killer Number three Redundant Exercises to Continue from our last point, if you only have a certain amount of productive sets that you can do per workout, that then you want to make sure that you're getting the most bang for your buck out of these sets. Most people don't by making the wrong exercise choices for these sets by doing exercises that do pretty much the exact same thing but just have different names. For example, take these two sample chest workouts. In workout A you do three sets of bench press, three sets of flat dumbbell press, and three sets of a flat machine press. In workout B, you do three sets of bench press, three sets of an incline dumbbell press, and three sets of a cable fly. Which one do you think would be a better use of nine sets? Well, if you look at workout A, you're actually performing pretty much the same one exercise for all nine sets. Whereas in workout B you're working several different parts of the chest with exercises that have varied angles and different resistance profiles. So for the same amount of work, you'd be able to provide much more stimulus to your chest with workout B and as a result get more gains out of those nine sets. The same goes for an arm workout. For example, doing three sets of a standing barbell curl, then three sets of a standing dumbbell curl, then three sets of a standing cable curl will all provide a very similar stimulus and target the same area of your biceps. Whereas three sets of a preacher curl, three sets of an inclined dumbbell curl, and three sets of a hammer curl instead would enable you to target different regions of your biceps and hence provide a greater overall stimulus for the same amount of sets and meaning that for your overall workout routine, just think carefully about the chosen exercises you're using for each muscle in your workouts. Are you essentially performing the same one exercise over and over again, just with different names? If so, then consider swapping some of them for other exercises that are biomechanically different and challenge the muscle at different angles and ranges of motion. By doing so, you'll be able to get much more stimulus and more gains for the same amount of work overall. If you're going to spend time and effort doing your workouts, then it would be in your best interest to ensure that you're getting the most out of it. What I went through in this video are just a few ways that you can do just that, but for a complete step by step science based program that shows you exactly how to train and how to eat week after week such that with the effort you put in, you're maximizing the gains you make and the fat that you lose. Then simply head on over to builtwithscience.com and take our analysis quiz to discover the best program for you and your specific body. Anyways, that is it for today guys. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Please don't forget to show your support by giving the video a like subscribing to the channel and turning on notifications for the channel as well. This all really does help me out and it's much appreciated. Thanks so much guys and see you next time.