STOP Doing THIS If You Want to Build Muscle

0:00 Let's talk about the number one mistake people make when they're trying to grow their muscles. In fact, I'm going to show you actually five more mistakes that are equally as bad as the first one. This video is especially for those people that are putting in all this effort, but you're not really seeing a lot of results. But I do want to mention up front, personally, I am not trying to build my muscles any bigger than they are. I'm 61 years old. I'm 195 pounds. I want to maintain my muscles, but because of my massive arthritic joints from earlier, making mistakes, injuring myself, my main goal right now is cardiovascular fitness as well as flexibility and resiliency in my joints. The data I'm going to share with you is the absolute best information that you

0:45 need to know from the top people in the area of natural bodybuilding and especially those who are not doing steroids. Mistake number one, you are not training hard enough. There is a lot of research on this and the great majority of people who think that they're training hard enough are not even close to where they should be. So to make a muscle grow, there's a certain threshold of intensity that you must reach to be able to get that muscle to adapt and get bigger. And so the term for this is called proximity to failure. How close to failure can you get? So, let me just contrast this to what most people do. They do three sets of 10 reps. Okay, that's their workout. And

1:30 so, the problem is, how do you know how much weight to put on the machine or a barbell to be able to do this? So, let's say, for example, you do 10 reps, okay? And it's starting to get difficult. It's uncomfortable. And then at the 11th rep, it starts slowing you down. Then we do one more rep, number 12, and now it's starting to really grind, right? But at 13, it's physically impossible to complete that rep. This is where you need to be at the end of your reps. Right here, between 12 and 13. This is where all of the gains occur right here. But what do most people do? They quit here and then they compensate with more volume, never getting to the intensity

2:15 to create the adaptation of the muscle. Here's what I recommend you do, okay? Don't have a preset number of reps in a particular set at first. You might guesstimate how many you can do, but you really want to go to almost failure. Okay? And when I mean almost is you're grinding and you could barely actually complete that rep. So once you've done that, this is what I recommend. You wait 10 to 15 seconds. Okay? That's your rest. Are you recharging fully? Absolutely not. you're probably recharging 10 to 15%. Okay? Then you pick up that weight again and maybe you're able to do two, maybe four more and you're going to complete failure. Then you rest for an additional 10 to 15

3:03 seconds. Not 2 minutes, 10 to 15 seconds. Pick up the weight again. Maybe you could do one, maybe two more. So now we're really giving that muscle the intensity it needs to adapt. And I would not count these as additional sets. I would count them as a part of this one set right here because you're really not resting too much in between. All you're doing is you're pausing to give your body a little reset to be able to squeeze out some more injury or more intensity to that muscle. And it really has to do with differentiating uncomfortableness until you say, "I can't do anymore." Now, that being said, if you overdo this, you can really spike cortisol. Okay, that's the stress hormone. We don't want to jack up the

3:49 adrenal glands too much and create too much cortisol. So, what I'm going to recommend, especially if you're starting out, do no more than two sets of this per muscle group. I'm talking about within a workout. Okay? Now, as you adapt and you get stronger over time, maybe go to three sets. But because you're going so intense, you want to make sure you don't overdo it. Especially when we come into the mistake number two, okay, which involves parts of your body not recovering. Your muscles usually will recover between 48 and 72 hours. That's two or three days. Okay? But did you know that the connective tissue, I'm talking about your tendons, the fascia that surrounds

4:34 everything, take a lot longer to recover. In a day, if you're lucky, it'll recover between 0.5 and 2%. Now, let's take a look at your nervous system. The nervous system takes at least 5 to 10 days of recovery after this intense workout. And then if we're talking about hormones, we're looking at between three and five days it would take to recover after an intense workout. Do you see the problem? The problem is most people are focused on growing their muscles and they're not really looking at the recovery aspects of the other parts of your body. It doesn't make any sense to build up your muscles to end up creating a tear in a tendon and now you can't work out

5:21 because you're injured. So, how do we overcome this highintensity workout with trying to recover all of our tissues at the same time? Okay. Well, couple ways. Some of you might have heard of Arnold Schwarzenegger and he trained six days a week and I'm talking about two and a half hours in the gym every single day. How could he possibly do that? Well, steroids. Now, back when he was doing steroids, it probably doesn't compare with the steroids that they're doing now. However, when you take steroids for bodybuilding, there also is a benefit from those steroids, which by the way, I'm not recommending these, but there is a benefit because your assimilation and using of these amino acids to build more muscles is accelerated, but also the

6:06 repair and rejuvenation of your tendons, your cartilage is much shorter than if you weren't on steroids. It has anti-inflammatory properties, not to mention growth hormone properties. And this is exactly why Arnold Schwarzenegger was able to work out two and a half hours a day for six days in a row. If you take a natural bodybuilder that's not on steroids, they're not able to do it. They would overtrain because they don't have the recovery. I'm going to recommend you don't work out two and a half hours at the gym. That's going to be overtraining. Okay. What I would recommend is you only work out between 30 and 45 minutes. And when we're talking about a muscle group, I would

6:52 only work that one muscle group one to two times per week, okay? Not even three to four times a week because we're trying to bring our cortisol down to allow more recovery for the connective tissue, the nervous system, and the hormones. You have to realize the benefit from exercise occurs in the recovery phase when you are sleeping mostly. And so on one hand we want to create the messages for your muscle to grow bigger by using this but on the other hand we have to be very careful about not overtraining. Now a couple other points that I want to bring out. It's going to be really important to keep your cortisol as low as possible. So on the off days or even on the days

7:39 that you're working out, going for a long walk in nature, super important. Hyperfocusing on your sleep, super important. Making sure your diet is really rich in vitamins and minerals. And then every four to six weeks, I would take an entire week and do very, very light weights and not even do this right here. That way, we de load some of the excess stress that could be accumulating. So, a lot of people ask me, "What supplements do I recommend?" Now, of course, I'm not biased of my own high-quality supplement line, but if you go to Amazon and type Dr. Berg supplements, you'll find more information. Okay, next mistake is carb loading. A lot of bodybuilders carb load. They're increasing carbohydrates for several reasons. First of all, carb

8:26 loading will retain water. It'll make your muscles look bigger. They definitely do this before a bodybuilding competition, but also carbohydrates stimulate insulin. Insulin makes things get bigger. But the catch22 is that when you chronically stimulate insulin over a period of time, you develop insulin resistance and then comes the problem. Where's the problem? You start noticing your midsection starts getting bigger. You start getting a fatty liver and then you start getting a rounder face. So, if you're trying to build muscle, I'm not telling you to completely go down to zero carbs, but keep them at 50 grams per day. And maybe you get those carbs through berries and things like that versus the grains, which create inflammation in the gut, which then

9:13 creates other problems because you don't want to be inflamed when you're trying to grow muscle. After dinner, having no snacks until the next day gives you a nice fasting period. Fasting is a very powerful stimulator of growth hormone. So, it's good not to eat constantly and snack through the day. There's a natural bodybuilder named Ron Williams, the most winning natural bodybuilder in history. I'll put his link down below. He didn't eat a lot of refined sugars. He would never just eat carbs alone. He would actually combine fat, protein, and then some carbs to blunt the blood sugar spike. Now, these last three mistakes are from Ron Williams, who by the way won over 250 natural bodybuilding competitions. Seventime Mr. Natural

9:59 Universe, seventime natural Olympia champion, seventime Mr. Natural World. He was also inducted into the International Natural Bodybuilding Hall of Fame. And his definition of natural was extreme. He wouldn't even take creatine. Number four, training blind. Ron took his time to really study his own body. He mapped out every single zone and assigned specific exercises for each. Most people follow a generic program that they got from a book or something and they wonder why they don't have the physique that they want because they're not training for their specific body or improving their weaknesses or their gaps. So, I'd highly recommend subscribing to his channel. I'll put his link down below and you can learn a lot of his techniques. He gives them out for

10:45 free. But I really like his data. Mistake number five, and I've already talked a little bit about this hostile recovery environment. Ron emphasized that 80% of all diseases are rooted in stress and inflammation. And I think it's pretty close to that. Think about it. Stress and inflammation are connected with that hormone cortisol. That's the stress hormone. When you're doing all this right and you have chronic stress from other things related to other parts of your life, then that kind of nullifies your gains. And then the last one is obsessing over protein timing over quality. You see this across the board. People want to know, okay, what time do I eat this protein? What's major is the quality of protein that you're eating in the day. And I'm

11:30 talking about the protein powders which is filled with maltodextrin which is a hidden sugar thinking that oh I'm gonna get more protein I'm gonna get more muscle not based on Ron's observation in the 2025 meta analysis in the journal nutrients they found no significant difference in muscle growth between people who consumed protein immediately after a training versus hours later. Ron also recommended eating nutrient-dense foods. And when I talk about nutrients, some really key nutrients come to the surface of that conversation. Number one, magnesium. You can't build muscle without magnesium. So, that's really important. Zinc is very important for testosterone, which also helps increase muscle mass. You also have potassium,

12:16 which is really important with the activation of the nervous system connecting to the muscle. And I would not recommend consuming protein right before a workout. I just gave you six huge mistakes relating to this topic right here. If you have not seen my other video on how to grow muscles that got over a million views, you should check it out. I put it up right here.