Why You’re Not Making Gains

The 6 Primary Reasons Why You’re Not Achieving Your Goals

     I think it’s safe to say that a whole lot of gym-goers aren’t making the gains that they want, aren’t reaching their goals, or aren’t making the progress that they thought they would when they first started lifting.  Maybe they made progress at first, but after those initial “newbie gains,” it just stopped.  When you first pick up a barbell, pretty much anything that you do will work.  But after those first 8 weeks or so, the gains come grinding to a halt and many a lifter is left bewildered and confused as to what to do next or what to do to get those gains moving again.  In this essay, I’ll look at some of the most common culprits for why you’re not making gains.  This list isn’t extensive, perhaps, but if you heed my advice, the gains will start coming again.  So, without any further preamble, let’s get started.  Here are 6 reasons that you’re not making gains.

You’re Not Doing the Basic Lifts

     When lifters come to me for advice, the first thing I want to know is what exercises they’re using.  Before I discuss full-body workouts, training frequency, diet, sets and reps, or anything else, I need to make sure that they’re using the big, basic compound lifts.  In fact, even if your programming isn’t perfect, or you're doing too much work or too little, or anything else, you will make gains—maybe not the best gains, but they will come—if you’re utilizing the correct movements.

     If you’re familiar with my prior articles, you probably know where I’m going with this.  The very first thing I ask lifters is whether or not they are doing what I call “the big 4.”  Are they pressing heavy weights overhead?  Are they squatting heavy stuff?  Are they picking heavy weights off the ground?  Are they doing some sort of loaded carry or other “odd” work?  That’s right.  Each and every single week, whether you do them all in the same workout, split them up over a couple of sessions, or do one of them each workout in a one-lift-a-day program, you need to do those 4 things.  To this very day, I have never had a lifter tell me that he’s doing all 4.  I’ve had a few lifters tell me they’re doing at least 3 of them.  Most aren’t even doing a couple.  And more than a few have told me that they’re not doing any of them.  If they were doing all 4 of them, they wouldn’t have come to me for advice in the first place.

     In addition to squats, overhead work, heavy pulls, and loaded carries, if you add in some sort of bench press work, some upper body pulls (chins or rows), and a curling movement of some sort, then you will end up with a near “perfect” program.

     Here is a list of movements that are great if you want to make fantastic gains, and it doesn’t matter whether you want to become a mass monster, be super strong but lean, or just look good with your clothes off.

• Squats: barbell back squats, front squats, overhead squats, hack squats, or some sort of lunge all work well; dumbbell and kettlebell squats of all types work, too

• Overhead presses: military presses, behind-the-neck presses, push presses, and both one-arm and two-arm dumbbell overhead presses

• Deadlifts: sumo, conventional, and deficit (sumo or conventional) are all great—you can also do rack pulls though, to be honest, they’re not as good as other full-range movements; also, they have very little carryover to building a strong deadlift if that’s one of your goals

• Quick lifts: power cleans, power snatches, and high pulls are an essential component for building strength and muscle mass; you can also do “hang” and flat-footed versions as well as dumbbell and/or kettlebell alternatives of each one

• Bench presses: barbell flat and incline presses, dumbbell versions of both are all great; you can do board presses, as well, if you’re interested in building your bench

• Chins of all types

• Dips (enough said)

• Rows: barbell rows, both close-grip and wide-grip, one-arm dumbbell rows, and t-bar rows are all good

• Curls: I think that you can’t beat the classic barbell curl but dumbbell curls, seated and standing, are also good along with incline dumbbell curls and even cable curls on occasion

• Loaded carries: farmer walks, sandbag carries, sled drags, stone carries, tire flips are all result-producing

• Heavy ab work: steep incline weighted sit-ups and the ab wheel are the two best in my book

     Once you’ve built a good deal of strength and size on a handful or a few more of the above, you can then move on to isolation movements and auxiliary work along with some machine work if you really want, though you could spend your entire training life just doing the above and you wouldn’t need anything else.

You’re Not Consistent

     You can train with the best movements on the planet, but if you don’t train consistently, you can hang up making gains.  Any gains.  Consistency really is that important.

     Many lifters start off a new training program with a gung-ho attitude.  They have a great week of workouts, maybe even several weeks in a row, but then they miss a session.  Missing one, or even two, isn’t so bad.  Life gets in the way sometimes, after all.  When something comes up in your life and you have to miss a workout, don’t sweat it, just get right back to it at your next scheduled session.  But if you start missing occasional sessions because you just don’t feel like going to the gym, you’re going to start having problems.  Occasional misses turn into frequent ones.  Before long, you’re only training haphazardly, here and there.  But then you just stop training altogether.  Eventually, you decide, okay, you’ve got to get back to the gym, so you start your routine again and you’re all in once more.  But it becomes a cycle where you train for a month, maybe more, then you start missing again, and then you stop again.  The cycle repeats itself repeatedly and you never make any gains.

     Be consistent.  It trumps everything else.

You Have Workout ADD

     You can train with the best lifts on the planet and go to the gym on a consistent basis, but you need to actually follow a program.  Get on a program and stay on it for at least 6 weeks—8 weeks is even better—before you try something else.  Too many lifters follow a program for a week or two, then they read about a new routine or watch the latest YouTube video of some new, shiny workout idea, and they switch over to it.  For a couple of weeks.  Then they’re trying something completely different for another week or two.

     Some lifters don’t even follow any program.  They just “workout.”  They go to the gym and do whatever they feel like doing.  Usually that means a lot of chest and biceps workouts but little else.  But they don’t even grow their chest or arms, or get stronger on bench presses or curls because they’re just doing random “whatever.”  As Vince Gironda said, and I’ve quoted more times than I can remember, “Are you on a training program or are you just working out?”

     I write a lot of different training programs.  If you tried all of my workout routines every time that I write a new one, you’re not going to make progress.  Ever.  Get on a program.  Stay on it for a couple of months.  Maybe it won’t work.  But you won’t know that until you try it.  And you can’t actually “try” a program unless you stay on it for an extended period of time.

You’re Not Following the Correct Program for Your Goals

     In my book Ultimate Mass and Power: A Collection of Training Programs for Getting Massively Big and Incredibly Strong I wrote this: “There seems to be quite a bit of confusion out there—whether it’s on the internet or at the gym—about how to train for BOTH hypertrophy and serious strength gains. The first problem seems to be that some folks just don’t know how to do either. Guys go to the gym to ‘get big’ but then spend most of their time attempting to max out on a lift. Or, conversely, a guy wants to be massively strong but spends too much of his time training for a pump or doing a lot of repetitions.”  So, first things first, what is your goal?  Do you want to be strong?  Do you just want to be as big as humanly possible?  Do you want to be lean and have a “six pack” come summertime?  You need to follow a program that is suited to whatever your specific goal is.

     If you’re just starting out, then you need to follow a basic, full-body program.  Whether you are after strength, muscle mass, or a combination of both, a beginner should do the same program no matter the goal(s).  Select a handful of lifts listed above, train your entire body at each session, and train 3 days per week.  2 days might even be plenty for some lifters.  The only issue with 2-days-per-week training programs is that you have to make sure that you will go to the gym for each and every workout.  Since consistency is important, I think a 3 day program is better.  If you train Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, then don’t miss any of those sessions.  Get on a Bill Starr-style heavy-light-medium program or an old-school “everything moderate” routine such as my Full Body Big & Strong regimen.  Either one of them will work.  Get on it and stick with it per my last tip.

     Once you’ve been training for at least 6 months on a basic program, you can move on to something more “specific” for your training goal.  If you’re after strength above all else, then try something like a Hepburn-style program.  If you want strength and mass, then follow a high-set, low-rep routine as I write about in my “big and strong” series of articles.  If bodybuilding is your “thing,” then get on a 2-way or 3-way split program that has enough volume and frequency to produce hypertrophy.  You have options but just follow a program that fits your goals.  Do that and you’ll succeed.

You’re Overtraining and Undertraining

     I’ve written about this in a couple of recent essays.  Let me explain.  Look at the way most trainees in most gyms in the world train.  I think it’s safe to say that the most common “form” of training is one that uses quite a bit of volume coupled with “hard” workouts and then plenty of time off between sessions.  That will work, assuming you’re a more advanced lifter and you’ve built up the work capacity to handle it and you respond well to a fairly low training frequency.  But that is not most lifters.  If you do 10 hard sets on a muscle group, that’s just too much volume for most lifters.  They get too sore and then, because of the soreness, they have to take off too long between workout sessions.  That’s what I mean by both overtraining and undertraining.

     The best advice is that oft-quoted (at least, by me) saying of the Russian strength coach Vladimir Zatsiorsky.  “Train as heavy as possible as often as possible while remaining as fresh as possible.”  An easy way to accomplish that—assuming you typically train with a lot of volume and infrequently—is to take your training workload and divide it in half or even a third.  Let’s say you usually do 15 sets for a muscle group and only train that muscle once per week.  Try doing 7 or 8 sets and training twice weekly or do 5 sets per muscle and train 3 days weekly.  You might notice how that is exactly what you do in a Bill Starr 5x5 program.  5 sets per lift done 3 days weekly.  That kind of training builds your work capacity and teaches your body to handle more frequent training.  The typical high-volume, high-intensity, low-frequency training that most modern bodybuilders do never develops work capacity.  When you train in such a manner, you are always sore and you never teach your body to adapt to more frequent training.

     If you follow a basic, 3-days-a-week program, you can slowly build up your work capacity.  You can start adding sets and exercises until you can eventually handle doing those 10 sets per muscle and doing it multiple days per week.  Eventually, when your workouts become too long, you can switch over to a 2-way or 3-way split program and do even more volume.  That’s exactly what old-school bodybuilders did.  I have a feeling that, if anabolic steroids had never come along or never became prevalent, it is exactly the way lifters would still train.  It worked in the ‘50s and ‘60s and it still works to this very day.

Your Diet Sucks

     As the saying goes, “you can’t out-train a bad diet.”  Too many lifters have a diet that is completely undoing their hard training.  I don’t care how “hard” you train, if you’re putting a bunch of crappy carbs in your system, you’re going to get fat.  Period.  And you’re never going to build muscle or an impressive physique.

     I haven’t trained in a commercial gym for years.  But I used to.  A lot.  I also worked as a personal trainer, too, back in the last century before the internet when bodybuilders wore stringer tank-tops and neon green and pink spandex pants, and do-rags.  (Whether or not I was one of those guys, I refuse to say.)  Anyway, every single day, morning and night, you would see the same overweight folks walking on the treadmill or riding a stationary bike.  I can’t recall seeing any of them lose weight.  Why?  Because they didn’t fix their diets.  In fact, you could go into a gym once per year and you would often see the same people doing the same “steady state” cardio and weighing the same weight.  Heck, they may have even gained weight.  So, no, you can’t out-train a bad diet.

     You need fresh vegetables and fruit, plenty of lean protein, and you don’t need to eat all the time.  Not if you’re trying to get lean or even stay lean.  On the flip side of that, if you’re trying to get BIG then you do need plenty of carbs and you do need to eat frequently.  For skinny guys who are tired of getting sand kicked in their faces—if you don’t understand the reference, I’m really sorry—you need to eat a lot of carbs, a lot of good fat, and at least 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight on a daily basis.  2 grams per pound would be even better.

     The same way that you need to get on a program and stick with it, you need to follow a dietary regimen and stick with it.  If you want to gain a lot of size and strength, then follow a program for the next 8 weeks and follow a diet during the same period.  Don’t miss a workout and don’t miss a meal for the entire 8 weeks.  Do that and you’ll be well on your way to being super strong and massive.  Conversely, if you want to get lean, do the same thing.  Follow a high-frequency, high-volume program and follow something like an intermittent fasting schedule combined with a diet of either low carbs or low fat.  Either way, get your protein on a daily basis.

The Sum of Things

     Maybe I missed something.  I don’t know.  But I think these 6 reasons are probably the primary culprits why you’re not making gains.  Follow my advice here and that will be a thing of the past.

     If you liked this essay and want to support my writing, consider purchasing one of my books.  Click on the link to find out details on all of them.  I have had several emails asking when my next book will be out.  I’m working on a book at the moment on old-school bodybuilders and their methods.  I’ve been adding some additional chapters to it and don’t want to have it published until it’s perfect.  I’ve also had some other issues that have delayed finishing it, but that’s outside of the scope of what I want to discuss here.  However, hopefully it will be finished soon, so I apologize for the delay for anyone who has been looking forward to it.

     As always, if you have any comments or questions, leave them in the “comments” section below.  You can also send me an email.  I typically get around to answering my emails every couple days.