7 Gym lessons I wish I learned earlier

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:34 #1 The big picture view

04:24 #2 Meal frequency

06:12 My Online PT Course

06:36 #3 Food choices vs. macros

09:28 #4 Your health matters

10:38 #5 Supplements

11:48 #6 Injuries

13:35 #7 Lifestyle factors

Transcript:

I really wish somebody had told me these things when I was a young lifter. It would have prevented a lot of mistakes and saved me a lot of time and effort. So I’m making this video for YOU in the hope that it may help YOU avoid some of these mistakes and save YOU a lot of time and effort.

For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Menno Henselmans, I’ve been lifting for around 22 years, coaching people for around 15 years, and teaching people how to become better coaches for around eight years with the Henselmans PT course. I used to be a fitness model and I’ve competed in physique sports, and here are some of the things I learned along the way.

The first lesson is what I call “The Big Picture View”. Many people think of the effectiveness of their program, whether to incorporate cardio now, they think in terms of days, weeks, months, but many people don’t think in terms of years, and especially not decades. But you should. Lifestyle change is a cliche because it’s true. Most of my subscribers want to improve their body composition. And even if you don’t want it yet, the end goal for that usually is that you want to hit your natural muscular potential. So you have a certain muscle growth level and a certain level of body fat, and you want to probably get to a lower level of body fat with more muscle mass. That process is going to take years even if you do everything right . And you won’t. So it’s very important to have a long term view on these things. And a really key lesson here is that, because it’s such a long term process, you want to make sure that you’re progressing in the right direction, but you don’t want to obsess over minutia that are not sustainable. Many people go all in on a program for a couple of weeks, months, and then they have other periods when they’re not as dialed in and they make essentially zero progress. And that’s fine.

Progress is always going to be cyclical, but most people are best off making sure that they are progressing, even if it’s not at the ideal rate. Progressing faster in the grand scheme of things just means that you hit your natty max maybe a few months, or a year earlier. It doesn’t actually change much in terms of quality of your life. What does make a very big difference is whether you are progressing at all, and many people are not progressing at all. To know if you are progressing, you need some objective benchmarks. Ideally, you have measures of your body composition, skin fold calipers, waist circumference, your strength level, and you need to see objectively that these things are improving over time. It also helps to take progress photos, something like once per year, this is really a long term thing, then at a certain body fat level you want to compare your photos and really check with yourself: Do I look better than last year? Because for many individuals that is simply not the case. You’re much better off making slow, steady progress, but consistently over time, then making amazing progress for a couple of weeks and then having many months afterwards, or even years, for many people, where you don’t progress at all.

If you’re using strength as a proxy here, by the way, for your body composition, make sure that you’re progressing in all time personal record strength, not just strength on your lifts, because what many people do is they do program hopping. They go to a new program, then they progress in strength, but most of these adaptations are neural, so it’s just the brain learning how to coordinate the movement better. You get better at these new movements, then you stop progressing. You switch them out, you do new movements, and you just kind of keep zigzagging that way, but you’re never really building muscle mass. All that happens is that you’re getting used to new movements, and then you switch them out when things get hard. That’s not a way to make true progress. Personal records in strength are a much stronger indicator of muscle growth. You can also look at what I call “A Witness Lift”, which is an exercise that is not commonly in your program. Maybe it’s something like a Zercher squats or leg presses, if you don’t commonly use machines. If you see that you are progressing on that exercise despite not doing that exercise, that is a much better indicator of muscle growth than progress on an exercise that is currently in your program.

If I look at the main reason that I haven’t progressed for many years of my career, and this also goes for many of my clients and students, it’s bulking to aggressively and cutting too aggressively. And I see this mostly in men where in the bulk cycles they put on weight too much fat and in cut cycles they lose some of that muscle mass, and in the end they end up with the same body composition as when they started before the cut and bulk cycle. With women a common mistake that I see in particular is maintaining. So they never really bulk, and I see this in some men as well, when they got very lean and they got kind of addicted to being in a low body fat level, and they got scared to bulk. And as a result, when you’re at a certain level of advancement as a trainee, you just don’t gain any muscle anymore. As a beginner – sure. You can just recomp, you can “mangenue” your way to a pretty good physique, but after a certain point maintenance means just that – maintenance. So don’t obsess over progressing at the optimal rate, but do make sure that you are progressing objectively in the first place.

One thing that’s particularly important for many if there is nutrient timing, and in particular meal frequency. When I started lifting, the idea was that you had to eat six times per day. This is what all the bros did, that all the bodybuilders did, and you have to have a pre and post workout meal immediately before and after the workout, and I did that religiously for many years and it cost me so much time and effort. It was actually at the point that I could tell the time based on my hunger level, because I ate every three hours to the clock so religiously that my body got used to that, and my body rhythm was so in trains to that eating pattern that I could literally tell you almost exactly what time it was, at least within half an hour at any point of the day, based on my hunger level, because every three hours I would get hungry and I needed my protein serving.

The research has quite conclusively shown that eating six times a day like this is not necessary. There have been multiple studies finding that meal frequencies above three times per day are not beneficial for muscle growth, fat loss, or strength development. It does appear that we need to have at least three meals per day. Two meals doesn’t seem to cut it. There does appear to be a maximum level of muscle protein synthesis that we can stimulate in one meal. This is called “The Muscle Full Effect” in research, and therefore I recommend that most people have at least three meals per day. Also behaviorally speaking, once they got used to it, most people do best on 3 to 4 meals a day in research, and my experience.

On a technical note for the science lovers, there are a number of studies which do find benefits of higher meal frequencies than three meals a day, but those are in people consuming nothing but supplements. And I think that’s a crucial distinction, because the absorption and the digestion of the nutrients is very quick. And in particular, whey protein is absorbed too fast to sustain the anabolic response over time and fuel muscle protein synthesis over the course of all day, if you otherwise don’t consume that many meals. But in the context of mixed meals, where you have some fats, some fiber, and the foods are a little bit harder to digest, then the protein response is much more prolonged, and you probably don’t need more than three meals per day.

The third lesson I have for you is that food choices ultimately are much more important than your macros. Many people in fitness are absolutely obsessed with their macros and the ideal macros split. And the truth is that your macros just don’t matter that much. Yes, there are contexts in which they matter, but especially for a lifter that just does strength training at a moderate volume a couple times per week, the amount of carbohydrates and fats, whether that’s 20%, 40%, even whether it’s keto or no-keto, it’s just doesn’t matter that much. You need to have some fats in your diet, you need to have, in particular some fiber in your diet for health purposes and sustainability, and you want to get your protein in. But beyond that, the exact split of your macros is not something that is going to make or break your progress.

And behaviorally speaking, in the end you are eating foods. And what is much, much more important to my experience is what I call the two S’s. It means that you are “Satiated & Satisfied” with your meals. That determines long term whether something is truly sustainable. Even if your macros are perfect but you’re hungry all the time, that is not a sustainable way to live. So you want to be satiated, but you don’t just need to be satiated because you could just eat broccoli and drink some protein shakes, and for some men that will work for some time, but ultimately it is a miserable way to live, and you also need to be satisfied with your meals. So you need to find foods, and this is a really big part of becoming successful long term and getting lean sustainably is finding foods that are satiating and sustainable for you to eat because they fill you up and you like eating them.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that for many people in the very long term macro tracking is not the way forward. It’s not sustainable for many people, and most people want to gravitate, learn to gravitate to something called “ad libitum” dieting, which is basically just eating based on your hunger signals. That is a skill that you have to learn and master, and usually it’s very good to learn how to track your macros and develop calorie awareness before you master this skill. But it is for most individuals, something that I think is much more sustainable long term than tracking your macros every single day, weighing and tracking every single piece of food that comes into your mouth. I also consistently see that the ad libitum dieting module in my PT course is one of the more interesting ones for my students.

Personally, I don’t track my macros anymore unless I am either bulking, because then it’s quite important to get the energy balance quite precisely right, or when I am doing a physique contest preparation. I can usually get to something like 7% body fat without tracking my macros. After that point, it does become necessary, and when bulking it’s necessary because otherwise it’s just too easy to dreamer bulk. When you have a relatively fixed meal plan, it’s possible, but most people do need to track their macros during a lean-bulk phase if they want to keep the bulk truly lean, but at the same time make sure that they’re not just maintaining. When cutting, though, you have a lot more leeway, and you know whether you’re in 5% energy deficit, 20% energy deficit, in the long term, as long as the energy balance ends up approximately right, and you’re not in too excessive of a deficit, but you are in a deficit, again, making sure that you are progressing even if it’s not at the optimal rate that is most important, and you can do that without tracking exactly how many calories you need once you have developed calorie awareness.

Lesson #4: Your health matters. I know that when it really comes down to it many people are mostly in it for their physique. Esthetics is the main goal. You want to get muscular, you want to get lean, and then health is kind of a secondary nice bonus and I totally understand that. But definitely don’t neglect your health and do your annual bloodwork, in particular. Check your blood work and your blood pressure. It’s so important, and just living a healthy fitness lifestyle does not guarantee that everything is perfect. I see this all the time. I’ve seen it in myself. I’ve seen it in clients. I’ve seen so many people who eat a whole foods based diet, generally considered healthy, yet LDL cholesterol levels are super high because of a high saturated fat intake relative to other fatty acids and a diet that just isn’t quite as good as they thought in terms of fiber intake, micronutrient intakes, and fatty acid balance.

I’ve personally also had an instance where some of the food I ate in Brazil was iron fortified. It didn’t say how much iron exactly was in there, but apparently it was a lot because when I did my blood work my iron levels were sky high. If you have high iron absorption, which is common in men, then it’s actually not too difficult to develop iron toxicity if you have some of these super iron dense sources in your diet. So make sure you do your annual bloodwork and also check your blood pressure.

Lesson #5. You know those girls that buy a new skincare product every month. They don’t even finish the last one. There’s maybe the one shady study that found some benefits of the vitamin C that’s in the product, and therefore they can say it’s clinically tested or whatever. The products don’t actually do anything, the whole industry is basically BS, but people just keep buying them. That’s us with supplements. Almost all lifters go for these phases where they’re looking for the magic pill, or even they are ostensibly aware that the supplements don’t do that much, but still they buy them and they spend quite some money on them, and they’re looking for the best supplements. I can tell you, the supplement industry as a whole is mostly bullshit. There are no supplements that miraculously change your physique. The best supplements generally are things that just supplement what you cannot get in your diet. Maybe that’s vitamin D, Omega 3s, and then other than that there’s basically creatine. Creatine is by far the most effective supplement there is to build muscle and strength, if you are a responder at least, but it’s still not effective enough for most people to keep taking it. Many people, they start supplementing creatine because they hear that it works. They just don’t notice the difference and therefore they stop taking it. If you’re not happy or satisfied or impressed with creatine, I can tell you there’s nothing out there that is legal and safe that is going to impress you.

Lesson #6: Stop training through pain. Injuries are part of the game. Everyone is going to get injured, even if you’re not the lifter. In fact, non-lifters develop more aches and pains than lifters. But lifters are going to get injured and it’s going to be their own fault in all likelihood. I’ve injured myself many, many different times, and most of the times it was my own fault because I knew that something felt wrong, there was some pain, it didn’t feel quite right, and then there was a little bit more pain and it felt a little bit less right still, and I kept training through it because I was a hard core lifter. There’s this balance between being a serious lifter and knowing when to back down. And many people don’t have that balance.

Many people either, they get some a little bit of elbow pain and they’re like: “Oh, I think I should take the week off from the gym.”, and those also have a hard time making it because they’re just not hardcore enough, they just don’t train hard enough, they don’t have the grit and the discipline. And then there are the people that have a hard time succeeding long term because they don’t know when to put the brakes on. They just keep training through an injury. It hurts. It hurts more, it hurts more, and then it’s really bad. And then it takes months, and you turn up into one of those people that by the time they’re 40, they cannot do this exercise. they cannot do that exercise, their knees hurt, their back hurts. And they’re only 40 years old, halfway into their lives, hopefully. Even if you can stand the pain, injuries take a massive toll on your happiness. Being injured really, really sucks, especially if you’re a serious lifter and a big part of your lifestyle and enjoyment and relaxation, stress management is going to the gym. Not being able to do the exercises that you like and doing the program that you want to do takes a big toll on most people’s happiness. So, for God sake, stop training through pain.

Pain is not always a bad sign, but in the vast majority of cases, for serious lifters, it’s a very good rule of thumb not to train through pain, especially when you know this doesn’t feel right.

Lesson #7: Your lifestyle influences your training and your diet much more than the other way around. You know the saying: “To a hammer everything looks like a nail.” In fitness we have that same problem. We think that everything we do is because of our nutrition. If we don’t feel quite so good a certain day, then we think: “Oh, maybe I didn’t have enough carbs at lunchtime.”

No. The vast majority of the time your happiness level, your stress level, your sleep, they have a much bigger influence on your diet, whether you can sustain your diet, whether you’re hungry, whether you’re satisfied with your diet and your training, how hard you can train, how well you recover than the other way around. Yes, it’s good to train. It’s good to have a good diet, it will improve your life. You will be happier, your brain will function better, you will have improved cognition. But there are limits to that. And not everything is about your diet and your training.

Your overall lifestyle is a much, much bigger factor. Like, your overall happiness level has a huge effect on how easy it is to stick with your diet. A good diet, being six pack link is not going to make you happy. It helps, but it’s not the one thing that makes the difference if the rest of your life sucks. Sleep deprivation and high stress levels are particularly damaging. Research has shown that high stress levels, such as high academic stress in students, can double injury rates and double the recovery time for a given workout. It has also been shown that high stress levels can reduce strength development and muscle growth. At the same time, sleep deprivation has shown to have massive effects in some research, as high as 50 to 80% deterioration in nutrient partitioning.

Multiple studies have shown that if you’re on a weight loss diet and you sleep less than you should, you lose substantially more fat free mass and less fat mass than if you were well rested. And sleep optimization routines have been shown to improve your gains substantially So in the description, I have a guide for you to improve your sleep, and I also have a dedicated video specifically on stress management and sleep optimization that you can check out here or here or wherever the hell my editor put it. So go check that out. And if you’d like this type of evidence based content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.

I hope these lessons will help you avoid some of the mistakes I made, and save you a lot of time and effort.