Why do so many people go to the gym on a consistent basis and follow a muscle building routine, but make little to no progress? It doesn’t seem fair if you think about it. It’s hard enough to consistently go to the gym or even work out at home, but to not make any real progress can be hard to swallow. In this article I am going to go over what it takes to trigger muscle growth and why so many people’s workouts fall short.

Many factors go in to muscle building

There are many factors that go in to building muscle, and the actual routine that you follow is only one part of the equation. Your diet needs to support muscle growth as well, and you need plenty of time to recuperate.

So for growth to be possible from your muscle building routine you need the following to occur:

• Growth to be triggered from your workout
• Adequate diet that supports muscle growth
• Plenty of rest to allow growth and prevent overtraining

I am going to focus on the actual workout itself in this article. Regardless of what body part you are training, the best exercise is the one that recruits the most muscle fibers at the point of contraction. Many people believe that isolation exercises are not useful for building mass, I disagree. Many isolation exercises cause maximum contraction especially if you stop the exercise short at the point where resistance decreases. A concentration or cable curl is a perfect example, once you get so far up on the lift, resistance decreases and the exercise becomes less effective. You will get more out of it by stopping the curl at the point where the stress quits at the biceps and transfers more to the front delts. It may seem better to go through a full range of motion, but in this case, you get more resistance by stopping short.

Multiple sets can be counter productive

If you try doing barbell curls with strict form, at a slower pace for around 8-12 reps, stopping as I suggest, you will definitely feel the difference versus throwing the weight up and allowing your shoulders and momentum do most of the work. Another important point to consider is that once muscle growth is triggered, you do not need to do more sets. One or two sets to failure in the manner described above will trigger muscle growth as if turning on a light. You don’t need to keep turning the light on, once it’s on, stop and save your energy for the muscle growth that will take place during rest. Continuing beyond this point is only going to reduce the effectiveness of your workouts.

You can use this same concept of stopping short for other exercises as well, such as bench press, flyes, lateral raises, etc. I’m not suggesting that you never go through a full range of motion again, I just think that you should give this a try for a while and see how it feels. Just slowing down your reps a bit will make a big difference, especially if you normally go faster and cheat through your sets. By stopping short, you maintain constant resistance on the muscle and progressively overload it with cumulative fatigue throughout the set.

Muscle growth will not occur without progressive resistance

One final point that you need to keep in mind is progressive resistance. If you are not progressively doing more each workout, you will not grow. It’s really that simple. You need to either do more reps, add more weight, or rest less during the workout to cause muscle growth. If you have been bench pressing the same weight give or take for the last few years or longer, like so many people you see at the gym, you need to make a change. You need to do more, whether you need to change exercises and work up in weight, or you need to go slower, or any number of ways to progressively overload your muscles. If you don’t, it won’t matter what muscle building routine you are following, you are not going to see any real results.