The 10 Most Dangerous Pitfalls To Making Bodybuilding Progress In Your Physique

4. Not Resting Enough: Too much of a good thing can hurt you. Training is wonderful, but you have to be able to recover from it. You must rest at least 72 hours in between large body parts and at least 48 hours in between small body parts to fully recover. Many seasoned professionals won't train a body part more than once per week.

When you are expending maximal effort in the gym, i.e. you're training as hard as possible with very heavy weights, it taxes your body tremendously. Remember that it is outside of the gym, while you are resting that your muscles are actually growing. Rest time must not be underestimated.

Quality sleep is important; research shows that we actually need more sleep than we think. 8-9 hours for a growing bodybuilder is a minimum.

If you are a hard gainer, or you have a fast metabolism, you should limit your extracurricular activities outside of the gym.

Working out and then participating in highly energy intensive activities such as playing basketball, football, etc. several times per week will actually increase the recuperative time needed in between workouts, not to mention increasing nutritional needs. Keep these things in mind as you are trying to put on muscular weight.

5. Not Sticking To Basic Exercises: In bodybuilding, the steady ship wins the race. Stick to basic heavy exercises such as squats, deadlifts, bench presses, and military presses as the foundation of your training at all times. These exercises are compound movements which incorporate the use of more than one joint and several large muscle groups. They have the most profound effect on muscle growth by taxing the maximal number of muscle fibers in the major muscle groups.

Many beginning bodybuilders lose sight of the fact that it takes time to gain muscle. When muscle gains don't come as fast as they would like, or the first time they hit a plateau, they think about changing basic exercises. Many will look to the pro's programs featured in muscle magazines for ideas. This leads them to discard time-proven basic exercises.

What most fail to realize is that the professionals featured in magazines have built the bulk of their physiques using basic exercises and that the exercises presented in their magazine workouts are advanced and used for shaping and polishing their physiques.

These finishing exercises do not do as much as the basic exercises in promoting muscular bulk, so if you want to grow stick to basics. Leave the shaping exercises to advanced bodybuilders and pro's.

6. Lack Of Motivation: In order to succeed, you must be a person who is able to perform hard work repeatedly over a long period of time. Persistence is one virtue that bodybuilding has taught me over the years. You must have something that "fires you up" and gets you into the gym.

You must clearly define your purpose for being in the gym and expending the hard work in the first place. And let's face it, the diet needed to support your workouts is not easy either. It requires a commitment of discipline, time, energy and effort. Motivation can be built, just like a muscle. But it requires a crystal clear idea of why you are doing this in the first place and constant reinforcement of that idea.

7. Not Setting Goals And Timelines: It is all too easy to fall into a routine. Over the long run, routines can be beneficial, but they can also be self defeating if you fall into the habit of just "going through the motions."

To keep yourself positively motivated in the gym you should always have a goal in mind whether that is an extra half-inch on your arms, getting into the best shape of your life for an upcoming competition. It is important not only to set goals but to also to put time lines on them.

In other words, you might give yourself a timeline of 8 weeks to attain that half inch you want on your arms. Once you have a goal and a timeline, you can positively motivate yourself to reach it. You become a man on a mission, so to speak, and all of your efforts take on new meaning. Always have a goal and a timeline in mind when you go into the gym to train.