Mistake #1: Never Making Alterations to the Routine
This is probably one of the most common mistakes that can be made. More often than not, people who are not educated in the realm of the fitness stick religiously to their routine for months on end, maybe even longer. The main issue here is that the human body adapts to any stimulus placed on it, in time. When someone is performing the same routine day after day, eventually that person will reach a plateau of stagnation as the body has already adapted to that particular stress. That is to say, there will be no increments in performance, or muscular size. By constantly changing the routine, the body will constantly make adaptations and progress with respect to performance and hypertrophy.
Mistake #2: Resting Too Long
A pretty common phenomena in the gym deals with socialising between sets whilst resting. This is not necessarily a problem, but it can be depending on your goals. When we are dealing with muscular hypertrophy, scientific evidence highlights that optimal rest intervals for maximal muscle mass gains is around 30 to 90 seconds. When you see people chatting, quite often the chat will not last as short a time.
Mistake #3: Overtraining a Particular Muscle Group
One of the most important tenets to muscular hypertrophy deals with symmetry. When an individual obsesses over a particular body part, like the ‘beach muscles’ (i.e., the chest and biceps), he or she most often trains that body part too often. For starters, the muscles require adequate time to recover and grow, something that cannot happen if they are constantly trained. The other thing is that even if they do grow, what’ll happen is that they will ‘over-develop’. This phenomena can be seen in people who obsess over their chest musculature. What you tend to see is that they appear to be hunched-over, like an ape. This deals with them focusing too much on that one part, and neglecting the back!
