What’s up, guys?
Sean Nalewanyj at www.SeanNal.com and in today’s video here I just want to share a quick piece
of beginner bodybuilding advice for the newer lifters out there.
And that advice is to try to not over analyze your physique in the beginning stages in terms
of which muscles you think need more or less work, and instead just focus on developing
your entire body equally and on building overall foundation of muscle and strength before you
start worrying about any potential lagging muscle groups or weak points.
I get these kind of quesions all the time from people saying that their arms aren’t
growing, or that their chest is weak, or that they can’t get their traps to grow and then
when I ask further it turns out they’ve only been lifting for six week and are pretty
much just getting started in the gym and there are a few issues with this.
First off, as a beginning lifter there’s a pretty good chance that you probably don’t
even truly know what your actual weak points are yet.
You might have inaccurate expectations about what a properly proportion physique actually
looks like, or you might think that certain muscles are supposed to be growing faster
than they currently are.
And you also don’t have enough training under your belt to know how well or how poorly
each muscle group on your body is going to respond because every lifter has certain muscles
that grow faster or slower than others, depending on their genetics.
And this is especially true if you’re starting out on the more over weight side and you’re
cutting down first, in that case it’s going to be really hard to know what your potential
weak points are because they’re going to be hidden by a layer of body fat and because
body fat distribution isn’t perfectly proportional throughout the entire body.
The second issue with this is that trying to work on weak points early on in your training
is likely going to take your focus away from other muscle groups that are just as important
to build.
And you’ll end up with uneven development and your overall physique won’t progress
as quickly as it could.
A lot of bodybuilding beginners will tend to focus on what they considered to be the
showy muscles like the chests or the arms.
When the truth is that every muscle plays an important role in bringing your physique
together.
And if you’re trying to build a strong and muscular upper body, the chest and arms actually
aren’t as important as most people think.
I’d actually say that the delts and the upper back play a bigger role in that.
So over emphasizing chest and arms doesn’t really make sense anyway.
And then there’s also, of course the issue of upper body training versus lower body training,
where beginners and just a lot of lifters in general will tend to put more effort into
their upper body as opposed to their lower body even if they don’t really realize that
they’re doing it.
And that’s another big mistake to avoid for obvious reasons because having a jacked
upper body with minimal leg development is never going to be a good look.
And then the third issue here is that by not focusing on developing your entire physique
evenly you actually end up increasing you risk for injury as well.
That’s because if you’re constantly favoring certain movement patterns over others, for
example let say you’re doing a lot of compound upper body pressing and not enough puling,
or you’re performing more work for your quads without also developing your hamstrings,
these things can eventually throw your body out of balance and they can increase the chances
of joint issues catching up with you later on.
So bottom line here, as a bodybuilding beginner in the initial stages your focus should be
on building your overall physique evenly as a whole and on getting the fundamentals down
first.
So, things like learning proper lifting technique, developing a good mind-muscle connection,
applying basic progressive overload and getting stronger on all the major key lifts, gaining
an understanding of nutrition and how to eat for your goals in terms of calories and food
choices, just getting in to an overall rhythm with your plan and staying consistent.
And then later on once you’ve added some decent muscle and some decent strength to
your frame, I’d say about six months of consistent proper training is a reasonable
time frame for with average genetics.
If you do build muscle faster then you might be able to spot weak points earlier on, but
about six months is a good minimum for most lifters.
And then after that you can optionally start looking at prioritizing certain parts of your
training to address weaker muscle groups.
So if it’s six months in, it’s blatantly obvious that your chest just isn’t responding
that well even though you’re using proper technique and enough total training volume
and intensity, or your quads are growing but your glutes aren’t then it might be fine
to increase the volume or the frequency for a certain muscle, or increased the exercise
variety for it.
And the topic of how to train aligning muscle group is something that I’ll cover in the
future video.
But again, just focus on the fundamentals on those beginning stages because building
muscle is a slow and gradual process.
It takes times and patience and so it doesn’t really make sense to put more emphasis on
a certain muscle group right out of the gate, because again you probably don’t even know
what true weak points are yet, you don’t know how each muscle is going to respond to
training over time, and it will likely just take your focus away from building a balanced
overall proportional physique.
So, I hope this was helpful.
If you do want to grab a fully structured plan that covers everything you need to know
to maximize your gains in those initial beginning stages and up to the intermediate stage and
further, the workouts, the meal plans, the supplement guides along with one-on-one coaching
so you can just put in the work and know that you’re doing everything properly with no
guess work involved, then you can download my Body Transformation Blueprint by clicking
here or by heading over to www.BodyTransformationTruth.com the link is in the description.
Make sure to like the video, leave a comment and subscribe if haven’t already.
The official blog is over at www.SeanNal.com and you can follow me on social media here
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The links for that are also in the description box.
Thanks again for watching, guys.
And I will see you in the next video.