Jason Ferruga - 3 Lifting Mistakes You MUST Not Make

Nice article from Jason Ferruga, originally discovered at Charles Staley's fine site - it can now be found on Jason's site. This is basic but good advice for any man wanting to maximize his efforts in the gym.

3 Lifting Mistakes You MUST Not Make

By Jason Ferruga Author of Muscle Gaining Secrets 

If you’re serious about building muscle and getting stronger there are three very critical mistakes that you absolutely can’t afford to make. I can’t tell you how many times I see guys in the gym committing these cardinal sins and how badly I wish I could help them all. Unfortunately I can’t save everyone but I’ll always do my best to give my loyal readers an unfair advantage over everyone else.

One critical mistake all skinny guys and girls make is they follow traditional bodybuilding advice and only train each muscle group once per week. If someone just arrived here from Mars and I told them the best way to improve something was to do it only once per week they would think I was absolutely insane.

To elicit a growth response you must provide the muscles with a certain level of volume, which should be absolutely no higher than the bare minimum. Research and empirical evidence has shown this to be roughly 50-100 reps per muscle group, per week. Anymore than this will lead to overtraining and less than this will usually not be enough for anyone but the inexperienced newbie who is just starting to train for the very first time.

How you reach that magical number of total reps is very important, however. If you do them all in one workout you’ll make far slower gains than if you broke them up into two sessions of 25-50 reps or three sessions of 17-33 reps. Doing that will allow you to get two or three times as many growth stimulating workouts per year, per body part. I think anyone can do the math on that one and see which option would be more productive.

The next critical mistake is allowing your workouts to last more than 45 minutes (not including warm up time). After your first heavy set of any workout your body will start pumping out growth hormone and testosterone at much higher levels than normal. Blood tests have shown this increased anabolic hormone release to peak at approximately 27 minutes. By 45 minutes you are back to baseline. At 46 minutes and beyond your levels actually start plummeting and the evil, muscle destroying, fat storing hormone, cortisol starts pumping like crazy. That is why you have to get in and out of the gym as fast as possible. I have always had my high paying clients track their total workout time with a stop watch and cut it off at exactly 45 minutes even if they had a set or two left to complete. That’s how important it is for you to finish your workouts quickly.

The third critical mistake I see on a regular basis is people constantly using the same weights. I’ve said this a million times but it bears repeating, the most important thing you can do if you want to build muscle faster than everyone else in your gym is to constantly add weight to the bar. Consistent strength gains in a hypertrophy rep range will build muscle faster than anything else you do in the gym. This may go against a lot of what you have read but think about it logically. If you took two twins and had one do supersets, drop sets, forced reps and steadily increase his training volume over the course of six months, then had the other simply double the weight he could do for ten reps on a squat, deadlift, military press and chin up, which twin do you think would be bigger at the end of the experiment?

The answer should be obvious.

Eliminate these mistakes today and start growing tomorrow.

Train hard,
Jason Ferruggia

About The Author

Jason Ferruggia is a highly sought after, world renowned strength and conditioning specialist. Over the last 15 years he has trained more than 700 high school, college and professional athletes from nearly 20 different sports. He is known for his ability to rapidly increase muscular size, strength, speed and endurance in all of his clients.

Jason is currently the chief training advisor for Men’s Fitness magazine where he also has his own monthly column called The Hard-Gainer. He has authored over 200 training articles for various other fitness related websites and magazines such as Men’s Health, Maximum Fitness, MMA SportsMag, Today’s Man, Muscle and Fitness Hers and Shape.