You and your friend have been training for the past 2 months, doing the same exercises,
lifting the same weights, and drinking the same double chocolate protein shake in the
parking lot together.
Yet, for some reason, your friend seems to be making new gains between each and every
rep while you... well, at least your gym check-in calendar is looking pretty solid.
So what's the deal here?
Well, in this video, we're gonna cover some very likely explanations, some a bit obvious,
some not so much, as to why your friends are seeing better results than you.
First, I wanna preface this video with something very important.
Even if your friends are truly achieving better results, you should never discount your own
achievements.
As the old saying goes, "Comparison is the thief of joy."
My goal with this video is not to make you feel bad about falling behind, but to hopefully
help you improve your gains by identifying potential differences.
So if any of these explanations resonate with you, I do advise to refrain from self-judgement
or even judgment of others, and instead to work on being the best you possible.
With that in mind, let's get to it.
The first thing to consider is yes, your genetics.
Now, for certain aspects, the impact of genetics are more obvious than other.
For example, your height can make a very obvious difference.
If a shorter and taller person made similar gains, the shorter person might look like
they made more gains than the taller person because the muscles will likely look bigger
on their relatively smaller frame.
Another more obvious genetic factors would be body and limb proportions, which can partly
explain why your friend might be able to lift heavier in certain exercises if their proportions
are biomechanically advantageous for it.
On the other end, the genetic variance on performance and physiological factors might
not be as obvious, variances in factors like cardiac output, lung capacity, muscle attachments,
hormones, of course, and many more.
However, in terms of specifically knowing how much impact genetics can have on these
factors, the science isn't there just yet.
Sure, some data models and systems have tried to pinpoint genetic variances in muscle and
performance, but we still have a long way to go for it to have practical and public
utility.
What we have seen in science, though, is that genetics come into play more so when reaching
our ceiling, or our upper genetic limit for gains.
For that reason, researchers have been able to identify many overlapping genetic characteristics
between elite athletes in the same sport.
But, if you're not an elite athlete and far from your genetic ceiling, then the impact
your genetics have is not gonna be anywhere as evident outside of, again, the obvious
stuff like height.
Ultimately, genetics do matter, but not something to really get caught up about.
Another thing to consider is everything else that happens outside of the training sessions.
Unless you guys really keep tabs on each other, the only time you truly know what your training
partner is doing is for that one hour or so that you guys are actually training together.
And what happens in the other 23 hours of the day can be a big deal.
You guys might be eating very different meals, where your friends are getting more protein
and calories than you, which undoubtedly will mean better gains.
Your friend might also be getting more sleep, which means more recovery, which again means
more gains.
More sleep can also improve their mental and emotional state, which can can mean better
physical performance.
Also, what if your friends are participating in extra activities, like playing sports,
doing cardio, or heck, what if they're sneaking in some extra training sessions?
Also, maybe they're taking extra fitness supplements, like protein, creatine, or a pre-workout.
Thing is, if the only thing identical between you and your training partner is that one
hour at the gym, then it's not too surprising if you guys end up with different results.
So, keep that in mind.
Now here's one that might surprise some of you cause it might be hard to believe, and
it's that you might not be putting as much effort into your training as your friends.
Now, before you scoff at this, I'm not saying that you are NOT trying to put a lot of effort
into your training.
However, there might be some level of misunderstanding or lack of experience of true full-out effort.
And this becomes very apparent when we talk about training to muscular failure, something
people think they've experienced but many truly haven't.
Fact is, reaching muscular failure, which means lifting a weight until your muscles
absolutely physically cannot produce sufficient force to concentrically move the weight, is
quite a difficult endeavor.
Even in the scientific literature, researchers found that even advanced lifters still have
a propensity to underestimate the amount of reps it takes for them to reach muscular failure.
And that variance will only be greater the less experienced you are.
So, if your training partner has been consistently training closer to failure than you, which
also means they're getting in more training volume than you, then they're probably going
to get better gains as well.
So you really want to make sure that you're putting in a decent amount of effort, probably
more than you realize, and get a good sense of failure by practicing training to failure
from time to time.
The next thing you want to consider is that your baseline, or starting point, might be
very different to your training partner's starting point.
There's actually a very little chance that you and your friends are starting at equal
footing in all aspects of fitness.
Your friends might seem to be doing better, but it might be because they started with
already lifting more than you or already having more muscle than you.
Or, they might have started with a bit less bodyfat than you.
Even just a few bodyfat percentages can make a big difference to your muscle definition
and aesthetics.
They could have also watched videos before on how to properly perform the exercises,
which gives them a leg up.
They might have even watched some PictureFit videos and realized how important training
close to failure is.
And again, if your friends are engaging in other activities or sports, then they're likely
going to have better conditioning, which can improve their gym performance.
And you also wanna know if they tried making gains before, which if they did, then they'll
benefit from something called muscle memory, which makes it easier for them to regain any
muscle they lost from before compared to you who is trying to build gains for the first
time.
Simply put, your starting points are almost guaranteed to be different, which means your
end points will inevitably be different as well.
And finally, the last potential and possibly most important explanation is simply the fact
the everyone responds differently to the same training.
In the science, when we look at outcomes for strength and muscle growth, it's normally
done by taking the results of each subject and then calculating an average.
But what's not discussed as often is the fact that the range of results between subjects
can be very high.
One subject might achieve something like a huge 25% jump in the squat 1 rep max.
But another might only see a 10% increase or even no increase.
And this happens even though the subjects all performed similar interventions under
similar controlled environments.
So, for you and your friends, which will be a smaller dataset in a largely uncontrolled
environment, it's not only common but expected that you and your friends will respond very
differently from the same workout without any outward explanation for it.
Sure, some can be explained by the other factors mentioned in this video, but many times it's
just the fact that every single person will respond differently.
In other words, that's just how life is sometimes.
But just because your friend might be responding better to training right now, the script might
flip down the line.
Or, you guys can try to change things up and see if you respond better to something else.
Now with all that said, I want to leave you once more with the old saying:
"Comparison is the thief of joy."
Just focus on yourself.
Knock out the fundamentals, do the right things, or look for a bit of extra help if you need
it.
You can always check out more of my videos or join our PictureFit discord community.
As long as you put in the work, you will make some decent gains, I'm sure of it.
Other than that, if you enjoyed this video, please give it a genetic thumbs up and share
it with your gym-loving friends.
Subscribe for more and let me know what you think in the comments.
As always, thank you for watching and don't forget to get your PROTEIN.