The training for a leaner body (gym goers)

Assuming that you are a gym rat that goes often to the gym with a structured training plan and that have a clean diet but for some reason you got stuck in your progress, neither you’re getting any stronger nor your body is changing for a while, you may started to feel that you have lost the motivation that you had when you started. This article is for you!

Before you address your issues you need to analyse what have you been doing training wise and what you can change. Again you need to have realistic goals in mind and start working consistently towards them.

There are few common mistakes that some of my clients do when they seek my help. I’ll point you out two of them mistakes out on this article and will show what successful changes we’ve done together.

The first mistake that I’ve came across is what I call training routine.

Your body loves routines, wether is with or training or your diet, the body adapts to your routines and doesn’t feel the need to change. So if you’ve been training the same muscle groups at the same day of the week with the same weights and same exercises for over 6-7 weeks, your body has adapted to it and that is the reason that its not changing anymore. Try different exercises, heavier weights and less reps, more reps with lighter weights, whatever it takes to bring that soreness feeling again. If you stopped feeling sore the day after your session then that is a good sign that your body adapted to your training, change it. I personally like to do overload weeks( up to 5 reps a set, max effort) alternated with volume weeks( 12-16 reps/set max pump).

Another mistake that I have came across is the excess of cardio training. I had clients starting training with me that did as much cardio as weight training and couldn’t get any progress.

The reason for that and as I’ve explained in previous articles, basically they were building muscle on their weight training sessions and burning that muscle mass on their cardio sessions. If you look that way sounds silly and a waste of work. And actually is.

Ask to any bodybuilder how much cardio they do ( except the slow pace cardio on their per contest, mainly to drop their bF%). The majority won’t do any cardio and if they do will be that odd 30 minutes cardio on a gym bike or cross trainer that hardly makes them sweat. Why is that? Because they know how hard is to put muscle on and can’t afford to lose that muscle on silly cardio sessions. And they are the masters of dropping body fat, the goals that the majority of people have at the beginning of the year to drop one or two stones by the end of that same year, a bodybuilder does it in 10 weeks. Without cardio. If you love your cardio, don’t stop doing it but don’t expect to have a six pack by summer as that won’t happen.

Filipe