Why Is My Muscle Size Not Increasing?

Have you ever noticed the diehard people that go to the gym day after day training so hard it makes you feel embarrassed? But have you noticed they stay the same size?

If your problem is that your muscles aren’t growing please don’t think that you need to follow these people. Yes they might love being in the gym and look super passionate, but they are wasting their time and have false information.

Growing your muscles is all about putting stress on your body and then afterwards resting so the stress on your body gets repaired making you bigger. Dealing with the stress in the wrong way and creating too much stress stops muscle growth as a hormone called cortisol is taking over.

Cortisol hormones breaks down muscles in your body and actually makes your body store more fat and you want to lower this hormone for muscle growth.

How do I lower my Cortisol levels?

Avoid stress: This is both physical and emotional stress. You can read a book, get a massage, go on holiday etc. You should be resting your body too. It is a good idea to take a week’s rest after 6-8 weeks of intense training.

Do not over-train:  Don’t be like the people I mentioned earlier that train all day and every day. Do not train for more than 40-50 minutes a day using heavy weights and don’t train the same muscle group without having rested it properly. See my article on “How Long Should I Rest between Exercises?”

.Sleep: Make sure you get a good night’s sleep to reduce cortisol levels and stress. You will need to find your optimal sleeping time to get the best sleep possible.

What else can I do to make my muscles grow?

Are you eating enough protein? You need a substantial amount of protein in your bulking phase. You will need about 200-300g of protein a day depending on your body type and weight.

Are you training correctly for your body type? Many people make the mistake and train like a friend does but you need to train for your body type. In my article “How to Figure out Your Body Type” you can find out what body type you have.

You need to train with high resistance weights and low reps. I see so many people make the mistake of training with low weights and doing high reps until they fatigue their muscles. This is not stimulating the muscles at all, this is burning fat. You need to give your muscles a reason to grow, that means lifting really heavy weights to force them to grow.