The Top 3 Reasons You’re Not Gaining Muscle

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:13 1. Program hopping

05:42 MH Physique app

06:07 2. Ego lifting

08:46 3. Unsystematic volume counting

Transcript:

I’ve been coaching lifters and mentoring other coaches for over a decade. These are 3 of the biggest mistakes I see that are preventing lifters past the beginner stages from taking their physique to the next level.

The first mistake is program hopping. Many lifters change their program entirely every couple of weeks. They think that this changes the stimulus and reinvigorates their gains. The reality is the opposite. Changing your program excessively frequently is a big reason that people are not making long term gains, because it’s preventing you from actually tracking your long term gains and from having a sustainably high training volume. See, when you start a new program or do any type of new exercise muscle damage is very high. You also experience this in the form of soreness. Any type of novel stimulus causes a lot of muscle soreness. It also causes a lot of muscle damage. Muscle soreness and muscle damage should not be used interchangeably, but in this case they actually overlap.

As you progress, the repeated bout effect occurs and you experience a lot less muscle damage over time. Muscle damage is negative. It increases muscle protein breakdown and does not contribute to net muscle protein synthesis. It just delays recovery. It also reduces performance and lowers muscle activity levels when you train when the muscles are still damaged. So you want the benefits of this repeated bout effect. Over time, as you progress on a program that you are habituated to, you experience far lower levels of muscle damage and therefore you can tolerate a higher training volume.

Multiple studies have compared groups training either consistently with the same program to another group that implements more variety with “muscle confusion”. The “muscle confusion” groups did not gain more muscle despite training with higher training volumes on average. Muscle tissue does not get confused, okay? If you’re implementing “muscle confusion”, you are the only one confused. Muscle tissue is just a slab of meat that responds to tension. You actually want the adaptations to occur.

Muscle confusion, the idea that you want to prevent adaptation, is completely backward. Adaptation is the very goal of training. You impose stress on muscle tissue, and that muscle tissue adapts by becoming stronger and bigger. So the adaptation is the very goal of the training. Now, to get this adaptation progressively over time you need progressive overload. And this is the even more important practical limitation of changing up your program too frequently is that you cannot implement progressive overload consistently over time. You need progressive overload in your training for multiple reasons.

First, to actually progress. As you become stronger you need a significantly higher training stress over time, whether that’s more repetitions or higher loads, to increase the training stress in absolute terms. In relative terms the training stress stays the same because you are getting stronger and you can now lift more weight or do more repetitions. Now, in theory, if you just always lift with maximal effort, you wouldn’t need this. But in practice progressive overload is very much needed to make people train sufficiently hard.

Most people, when they do not have concrete targets in their programs, they do not train with maximal effort. And I genuinely think that the main reason that progressive overload works so well in practice, people that implement progressive overload get significantly better long term results than people that don’t, is because they just train consistently harder. If you don’t know that you have to get that ninth repetition instead of number eight, you just don’t get quite enough out of your comfort zone and you leave a little bit in reserve. That little bit can be the difference between making and not making progress for more advanced lifters.

Moreover, if you’re not implementing progressive overload, you don’t know if you’re progressing or not. Many people have the idea that progressive overload, adding weight to the bar, or increasing the number of repetitions is the cause of your gains. Progressive overload is not the cause of your gains. It is the measure of your gains.

When you are progressive overloading, when you can do that extra ninth repetition instead of repetition number eight as you did the previous time, you know that you have gotten stronger since the last workout. In terms of general adaptation syndrome, you have gotten out of the fatigue phase and you are now recovered and you are above baseline in terms of strength. So knowing that you have gotten through the sometimes called stress-recovery -adaptation curve is the signal that your last workout was effective and you are now stronger than before. If you don’t monitor that you don’t know if your program is working. If you don’t know if your program is working, you don’t know how to make adaptations to it.

And the crucial thing here is that for lifters past the novice stages adaptations take time. So just running a program for 4 or 6 weeks does not tell you much about its effectiveness. You cannot reliably measure muscle growth over a period of four weeks in someone that’s beyond the novice stages. At least not without gear. So what’s really happening with most people that change up their program all the time is that they are faking their own gains. They are fueling their lifting ADHD by running a program anew every time they stop making progress on the old one. In reality, most of the gains, or even all of the gains that people make on a new program are neural adaptations.

As you start doing a new exercise, your nervous system quickly adapts and learns to coordinate the movement better. That’s why it’s relatively easy to gain 5-10% new strength on an exercise, but gaining more than 20% strength on an exercise that you’ve been doing for a long period of time, that’s much harder. The latter, though, is what actually signals muscle growth. If the 1RM on your bench-press increases over 20%, that’s generally a pretty good indication that you have actually gotten more muscular.

Progressing for four weeks on a new exercise and new program, that really does not tell you that you’re actually getting more muscular. I often even teach my coaching clients not to think of their “program” as a program in the first place, but more as a system that adapts over time based on their progression. Systematically and consistently implementing progressive overload over time and the right type of periodization is the key to making long term gains that actually signal muscle hypertrophy.

The second major training mistake is ego lifting. It’s very tempting to move more weight by compromising on your range of motion, or involving muscle groups that you shouldn’t be involving. Almost everybody knows this, but so many people still do it. The most basic level of ego lifting is just not willing to accept that you have to lower the weight significantly to actually use full range of motion. Full range of motion has been shown in multiple meta-analyses and good quality studies to improve muscle hypertrophy, especially when it makes you train at longer muscle lengths. So you want to squat down as far as you can. And yes, that means you have to reduce the weight a lot.

Many people underestimate just how much they have to reduce the load to actually get full range of motion. In the dumbbell bench press, for example, so many people stop when the arm is about at shoulder height, but you can actually get the elbow way behind the body. And many people have to reduce the weight by as much as 50% to achieve that. In the squat we also see differences in research, and we got multiple studies on this of around 50% going from a half squat to a full squat, sometimes even more. This hurts and makes us feel weak, but this is a classic case of taking one step back to be able to take two steps forward.

I think most of my subscribers are familiar with this type of ego lifting, but they fall prey to the second type, which is that everything is good when you are starting your program, but then as you start implementing progressive overload, you do start ego lifting, and you start compromising on range of motion to hit your rep targets and to implement that progressive overload. This is fake progressive overload. You’re not actually implementing progressive overload. You’re just training in range of motion to lift more weight.

This technique creep over time is super common even in more advanced lifters, and it’s a reason why I recommend that you periodically evaluate your lifting technique, either with a coach or with a video of your own. The real solution, though, is your mindset. You want to always prioritize exercise technique and range of motion over to weight. Form first, weight second. If you can do one repetition with full range of motion squatting all the way down, you should squat all the way down. That means you basically never compromise on exercise technique or range of motion to just lift more weight.

If you cannot lift more weight, if you feel a repetition, or fail to get progressive overload, that means you have actually succeeded because you have done your job. You have put in the effort, you have put in the hard work, and now you have an indicator, a signal that your program needs to adapt. Not being able to progress like this is actually one of the most valuable signals you can have in a program, because these are exactly the signals you need to update your training program optimally. You shouldn’t switch a program just for the sake of it, that’s called program hopping, but you should update a program that is not working. Don’t fix what isn’t broken, but don’t try to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results either.

The final major training programing mistake I see across all levels is unsystematic volume counting. I see so many lifters that train “back” or “legs” as a body part, and then they also have an “arm day” and this results in massively uneven volumes between different muscle groups. You should know which muscle groups exactly you’re targeting, and “the back” is not a muscle group. “Legs” are also not muscle group. You should separate between the actual muscle groups involved, such as the quads versus the hamstrings versus the glutes, and then you should optimize the volume based on every individual muscle group. This requires a bit of puzzling and some work, but this is how optimal program design works.

The method that I teach to my students, which is also the best method according to the latest evidence and a 2025 meta analysis, is to count fractional volume. So for every exercise, you basically count which muscle groups it targets to what degree, and you give it a number like 100% or 75% or 50%. You can get very complicated with this, but you can also just count it or not count it if you want to keep it simple, and then you add the volume of all the exercises for every muscle group. And then you optimize for every muscle group that you want to target, how many sets per week per muscle group, so it’s the effective number of sets per week per muscle group. That’s the number one determining factor of muscle hypertrophy. And that’s the variable you should be optimizing.

Now what I commonly see is people that use my app is that they get a program, and they actually feel like the program is very uneven because they are used to extremely uneven training programs. So many men, for example, they start using the app or they get a training program from me and they feel like, oh, I’m not getting enough arm volume. In reality, their arm volume is actually on the high end of normal already, but they’re used to massively overtraining their arms, also front delts and some other muscle groups at the expense of “non mirror” group muscles because they, for example, don’t count compound exercises towards their arms. If you’re not counting pull ups and chin ups towards biceps volume, that you’re absolutely doing too much volume for your biceps, because research unequivocally shows that these muscle groups, the biceps in this case, get trained very well from compound exercises.

Now, doing this well requires some knowledge of how much every exercise actually stimulates every muscle group. So in my PT course I have an overview, a very big overview of how much, based on the research that we have, every muscle group is targeted by every exercise. You can also get a free program in my app, which actually optimizes this and does it all for you, and then you can see how this works in practice. So if you’re interested in seeing how this works in practice, I recommend that you try my app. You kinda get a two week free trial so it doesn’t cost you anything and you can just see how it works. And if you’re interested in learning all of the details of optimal training program design, then check out my online PT course. And if you like this type of free content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.