7 Mistakes You’ll Regret Not Fixing in 10 Years!

When it comes to building muscle and nutrition, we all have made mistakes. However, it’s what we learn from those mistakes that matters the most. In this video, I am going to show you 7 training and diet mistakes I’m glad I made as the lessons learned from them apply not just to me, but to you and your muscle building journey as well.

It all starts with the big three. That is, the three foundational compound lifts; the squat, the bench press, and the deadlift. Too early in my training did I abandon them and skip building my foundational strength with them. This was all because I had no spotter in the gym with me after my brother left for college. I was too afraid of failing the lift and having to strip the weights, rerack the bar, and put all the plates on again.

Too often do we skip out on these foundational lifts for one reason or another, but it is imperative for beginners to work with them and progress with them. These exercises are the most conducive to progressive overload for not just strength, but muscle size as well. I think that when someone is starting out in the gym, mastering these exercises is important to kickstart their muscle building journey.

However, while I have seen these lifts been given more love and attention, they are not utilized properly. It seems that people think that just by doing the exercise, they are checking all the boxes. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. You need to progress on these exercises and continue adding weight to the bar to increase your strength and muscle mass. Performing the same number of sets and reps at the same weight over and over again is not progressing.

Mistake number two in this list of training and diet mistakes I’m glad I made is not understanding workout volume. I grew up in the era of muscle building magazines featuring the workouts of legendary bodybuilders such as Shawn Ray and Lee Labrada. What I saw were workouts with massive amounts of volume for single muscle groups; think 30 sets just for chest.

While I was hammering away at these workouts, expecting myself to look like them by doing their workouts, I didn’t understand that these insane amounts of volume weren’t going to work for me or any other natural lifter, for that matter. It was later that I realized that there is a relationship between volume and intensity and I would have to find the proper balance of the two.

I always say, you can train long or you can train hard, but you can’t do both. That means if you are taking your sets to failure, as you should, you are going to have to cut back on the volume in order to recover well enough to grow bigger and stronger and avoid overtraining. When it comes to building muscle naturally, I suggest trading in the volume and opting for more intense workouts .

The next mistake I made was avoiding dietary fats completely. In my younger years, I was following a no-fat diet to the point where my meals would be completely absent of all dietary fats. I suffered for it. Not only was I unable to regulate my body temperature, but I had photosensitivity issues, especially with sunlight.

Not only did I realize this was unhealthy for me, but this exclusionary diet was not sustainable and that’s what nutrition comes down to – sustainability. No matter what your goals are in the gym, at least 70% of what you look like is related to what you eat and when it comes down to leanness and lower levels of body fat, nutrition makes up 90% of that.

The reason I don’t recommend exclusionary diets to people is that the large majority of them cannot sustain that style of eating for very long. Deprivation leads to falling off the wagon more often than not and by not having a healthy relationship with food, you are setting yourself up for failure.

The fourth mistake that I am glad I made is believing that supplements were replacements for food. Jesse has a lot of experience here with his use of mass gainers in order to gain size early in his training life. The problem with this is not just the fact that relying on shakes leads to a lack of essential nutrients that are found in whole foods, but he wasn’t actually increasing his appetite.

Eating more food, especially throughout the day, will train the stomach to be able to handle more food in a single sitting. When trying to pack on size, being able to eat more food at one time is the best path to follow.

For the rest of the training and diet mistakes that I’m glad I made, be sure to watch the video to the very end.

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