The Top 6 Bodybuilding Mistakes to Avoid

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:20 1. Body part splits

03:01 2. Cheat meals

06:08 3. Excess cardio

07:42 4. Partial ROM training

08:33 5. Poor diet quality

10:16 6. Volume counting

12:02 My Online PT Course

12:21 Why bodybuilders win?

Transcript:

A popular narrative on social media is that exercise science is useless because it is merely validating what bodybuilders have known all along. Here are six ways that bodybuilders have traditionally been sabotaging their own gains, and science has shown us a better way forward.

Common bodybuilding mistake #1: Body part splits. Body part splits have been the norm over the last few decades in bodybuilding circles. A body part split in which you absolutely hammer a muscle group on one day of the week will give you an amazing pump and you’ll get very sore afterwards. Intuitively, these are great things. However, science has shown us that body part splits in what you hammer a muscle group on one day of the week with a very high training volume are decidedly suboptimal both from a time efficiency perspective, as well as from an absolute gains perspective.

A recent meta analysis found that the productive training volume per workout plateaus at around 11 sets per muscle group. Even before this point there are sharply diminishing returns to simply doing more volume in the same workout. You can see this in your work capacity. If by set number 6 for your chest you can only do half the reps that you could have done if you had moved that set to a different day, it probably would have been more effective, at least more efficient, to move that set to a different day, so that you could have done more sets and accumulated more mechanical tension on the muscle fibers, which is the primary signal for muscle growth. For strength development it’s even more important to spread your volume out over the week more. Strength gains plateaued after just 3.5 sets per session in this analysis.

These findings align with research on muscle protein synthesis, which finds that when you increase the set volume to or over 10 sets per muscle group, you are getting sharply diminishing returns in terms of muscle protein synthesis, and much of that is outweighed by increases in muscle protein breakdown. Effectively, you are annihilating, not stimulating the muscle mass after this point. I would note that I don’t believe there was a true complete plateau in muscle growth, but it is certainly the case that you get a very poor stimulus to fatigue ratio, and it is much more efficient to spread the volume out over the week more equally.

Indeed, if we look at research on training frequency, we see that if there is a difference between volume equated studies, and usually there isn’t because volume is king and frequency is secondary to volume, but when there is a difference it is virtually always in favor of higher training frequencies, and there is no evidence in favor of body part splits. Higher training frequencies and full body workouts always rival or exceed the gains of body parts splits.

This is especially true in real life circumstances because most studies equate for total training tonnage or repetition volume. This means that the groups with the higher training frequencies are not training as hard, because normally, and this is the entire point of increasing your training frequency and spreading out your volume over the week more, when you do this you can accumulate more repetitions and do more effective volume. And this is a greater stimulus for muscle growth because it drives accumulated mechanical tension on the muscle. So when it’s National Bench Press Day on Monday, you’re probably better off taking some of those sets that you do on Monday, spreading them to Wednesday, Friday, or even spreading them across the week equally into something that more closely resembles full body workouts.

Common bodybuilding mistake #2: Cheat meals. Intuitively, you might think that cheat meals improve diet adherence. Researchers found the exact opposite. People with more consistent diets are generally much better off in terms of long term diet adherence, especially when we look at our ability to keep off the weight that we lost, then people that have a more inconsistent lifestyle, people that have a different lifestyle on the weekends versus the mid-week, and in general, people that have a less consistent diet across the week. In fact, if you talk to a psychologist, and you tell them that you have a very meticulously controlled diet for much of the week, but one meal, or one day, you go bananas and you eat whatever you want, they will say – you probably have an eating disorder.

Indeed, a new scientific review concluded that: “Normalizing cheat meals as a form of reward for committing to a strict dietary regimen could be associated with the manifestation of eating disorder behaviors.” In my book “The Science of Self-control” I show that cheat meals have numerous psychological problems associated with them.

First: A cheat meal glorifies the cheat food. By portraying it as a cheat food you inherently glorify the food, and you induce what is called “a forbidden fruit effect”. This triggers what is called dichotomous dietary restraint, which is associated with a very strong “all or nothing” mindset. You either never eat the food, or you go bananas and you eat it without tracking your macros. This is not psychologically very healthy.

Second: By associating certain foods with happiness, you effectively turn it into a comfort food that you are then prone to self-medicate on when you feel more poorly.

And third: Introducing a food into your diet that you don’t want to consume on a daily basis changes your taste preferences. Your taste preferences adapt in large part to what you consume. So if you normally eat a lot of vegetables and you’re used to a low sodium diet, you actually learn to like that type of diet. However, if then sometimes you eat a higher sodium diet, then you no longer like the lower sodium options. You very much learn to like what you eat, so introducing a cheat foods on a certain day of the week makes all the other food appear less tasty.

We actually see this in reward pathways in the brain. When you’re used to eating McDonald’s people don’t like vegetables as much, but when they eat more vegetables, you actually see that the reward pathways in their brain light up more when they eat vegetables, and less when they eat McDonald’s. As a result, we see in research that people that indulge in a certain craving, such as chocolate, actually increase their chocolate cravings. As a result, what often happens when you have, for example, “Pancake Day” on Sunday, Monday to Saturday then turn into thinking about “Pancake Day” day. Feeding a craving typically only makes it stronger.

Overall, most people are much better off with a more balanced and consistent dietary approach. Think in terms of lifestyle whether you want to include foods into your diet or not, and think in terms of whether you can fit them into your macros. And if you do occasionally want to indulge in other types of foods, then don’t think of it as a cheat meal and certainly don’t go about planning or scheduling it. And yes, this includes refeeds. Research has shown absolutely no advantages of doing refeeds versus a more consistent diet, and they can have similar downsides. So a more controlled refeed is certainly better than an unhinged cheat meal, but it also doesn’t provide any advantages. So, at best it’s a form of personal preference. For more tips on diet adherence and how to have healthier cheat meals check out my book “The Science of Self-control”.

Common bodybuilding mistake #3: Excessive cardio. No pain, no gain. Right? Cardio makes you leaner. If you want to get very lean then you should do a lot of cardio. Well, the problem is that inducing high volumes of cardio into a strength training program induces what is called an interference effect, or a concurrent training effect. Multiple studies have found that when you do a lot of cardio alongside a strength training program, this reduces muscle growth, strength development and power development. When you are doing strength and endurance focused training in the same program your body is effectively drawn towards two different ends of the strength endurance continuum.

Strength and endurance adaptations differ in terms of what mechanical stimuli and growth pathways they activate, with cardio typically having a more catabolic type signaling response associated with, for example AMPK, and strength training having a more anabolic type response associated with, for example mTOR. And now you don’t have to obsess over this and think that walking to the gym is going to kill your gains, but when you are doing hours and hours of cardio, which is pretty typical in traditional bodybuilding circles, it definitely eats away at your gains. Therefore, cardio, especially higher training volumes that actually make you get endurance training adaptations should be done away from your workouts and should be seen more as a last resort rather than a primary recourse.

So when you want to get leaner you should first try to reduce your energy intake as much as possible and then only introduce cardio insofar as you want is for either other reasons or additional cardio when you wanted to increase your energy expenditure, especially when reducing your energy intake further is not very sustainable or would compromise nutrient quality.

Common bodybuilding mistake #4: Training with a partial range of motion. Bodybuilders love mid-range partials. We are all very susceptible to ego lifting. It’s nice to lift more weights and sinking down deeper into a squats takes a lot of effort, technique, and stability. However, it is decidedly the better way to train according to numerous studies. I’m not even going to bother to reference them because the internet has been exploding over the last few years with research on lengthened bias training and all the benefits of training at longer muscle lengths, especially when you’re increasing your range of motion. So while training with a limited range of motion and keeping the tension on the muscle might give you a great pump, and it might allow you to lift more weight, these things are not productive for maximum muscle hypertrophy. For maximum muscle hypertrophy you generally want to train with a full range of motion and extend your range of motion as much as possible to longer muscle lengths. Plus, a deeper squat will lead to a deeper personality.

Common bodybuilding mistake #5: Poor diet quality. In multiple studies the majority of bodybuilders are deficient in multiple micronutrients, and that’s not even taking into account that the bodybuilders have a higher body mass and that the exercise, so the requirements actually should be a lot higher than those for sedentary individuals, which is the standards that we’re looking at here.

Now, I understand that some of you just want to get jacked and you don’t care about your health. However, multiple micronutrient deficiencies such as those of zinc, magnesium, iron, and calcium have been associated with reduced performance in the gym, reduced endurance and things like irritability, higher appetite, and in some cases even directly with reduced strength and muscle hypertrophy in the long run. The biggest offender here in most bodybuilding diets is arguably white rice. For some reason white rice has become known as a health and a fitness food. It is decidedly not. On the NRF9.3, which is currently one of the most validated scales for nutrient density, white rice scores in the low 20s. That is over 10x lower than of the vegetables, and it is multiple times lower than that of legumes and even decidedly lower of potatoes and most root vegetables. Potatoes are a particularly good contrast to rice because potatoes are also exceptionally well tolerated, which is probably the only good thing about white rice.

White rice nutritionally is very close to sugar. The calories are almost empty, and it doesn’t have a lot of fiber. The only good thing about white rice is that is very easy to digest, and it doesn’t result in FODMAP issues or trigger things like IBS, for many people at least. Potatoes have many of these same benefits and they score dramatically higher on the satiety index, so they fill you up a lot better, and they also score much better in terms of nutrient density. So potatoes basically give you all the benefits of rice while having more nutrients and being more filling.

Common bodybuilding mistake #6: Not having a good system to count training volume. Many bodybuilders have legs and biceps in the same category. Legs should decidedly not be one body part. Back is also another body part. Now I understand if you haven’t had any functional anatomy knowledge that it might seem intuitive to think of either push-pull-legs or back or legs as body parts. But if you want to be serious about this, then for the back you should at least distinguish between the 3 heads of the traps, the lats, the rear delts, and the erector spinae, or the lower back. And then what you should do is called “fractional volume counting”. So every exercise stimulates every muscle group to a certain degree. In one of my last videos, for example, I show research that rows, especially dumbbell rows, train the biceps about half as well as dumbbell curls. This means that you should count the rows as approximately 50% as you count biceps curls. So if you do four sets of rows, that would count towards about two sets of your biceps volume.

Ideally, you also separate between different heads of muscle groups that have different functions, such as the short head of the biceps femoris, the long head of the triceps, or the different heads of the deltoids. These muscles can actually have opposing functions to some of the other heads. In case of delts or the traps where you have the front delts and the rear delts, which actually have opposing functions, so you want to count front, lateral and posterior delt volume separately.

A recent meta analysis found that fractional volume counting like this predicts muscle hypertrophy significantly better than just counting all exercises, or only counting exercises if they directly train the muscle group. If you’re interested in learning my full system of how to count volume and how to optimize the training program, as well as information on which exercises stimulate every muscle group or part of a muscle group exactly to which degree then check out my online PT course. It will teach you absolutely everything you need to know to take your physique to the next level.

At this point you might be wondering: “Menno, you arrogant douchebag! How come your physique sucks so much compared to all these bodybuilders, and how have all these bodybuilders gotten such amazing physiques despite doing everything wrong?” Well, the thing is, bodybuilders don’t do everything wrong. Bodybuilders do a lot of things really well. When it comes to optimization, science is a lot more effective than anecdotes. If you look really big picture, which is what you should be doing, when you look at the results of bodybuilders you will see the bodybuilders actually do the important things really well. When it comes to the details, which is most of the things that I mentioned here, it becomes a lot trickier and many bodybuilders do things wrong. It also depends a lot on which bodybuilders you look at.

When you look at, for example, Dorian Yates and Mike Mentzer, both amazing bodybuilders, you’ll see that they did things very differently than Phil Heath and Arnold Schwarzenegger, also both amazing bodybuilders. So what is it that we can really learn from bodybuilders and the things that really matter big picture?

At the top of the hierarchy we have two unfortunate reality checks. One, shocker, drugs! Drugs are extremely prevalent in bodybuilding circles, and they are absolutely required to make it to the IFBB pro level for the vast majority of individuals. This is simply part of the game. If you want to look like a superhuman you need super physiological doses of anabolic hormones in your body.

Two: Genetics. In some cases, genetics are even more important than drugs. There are tons of people on a lot of drugs that simply don’t have the genetics of elite bodybuilders, and they don’t look remotely like them. In fact, a part of being a good bodybuilder is having the genes responsible for having a good anabolic response to anabolic androgenic steroids. Many people take anabolic and they get massive side effects, and they don’t get massive gains. If that’s you, bodybuilding is probably not for you at the elite level.

Three: bodybuilders have amazing work ethic. Even if you have the drugs and the genetics work ethic, being very consistent, is something that bodybuilders do extremely well. They really live the lifestyle. They automate, they habituate, they consistently get their workouts in, they get them in with high effort, they stick to their diet almost robotically, and that is a recipe for long term success. You can have the most optimized, amazing program, but if you’re not following it diligently and actually training really hard in a gym and sticking to your diet like a robot you’re not going to beat someone that is truly living the lifestyle.