5 Red Flags You’re NOT Gaining Muscle!

Ever feel like you may not be gaining muscle as fast or as much as you would like to, despite going to the gym and being consistent with your workouts? In this video, I’m going to show you 5 red flags that can help you determine that this may be the case before it’s too hard to do something about it

[Music] no I have danced no did not go on no no I’m not skinny whoa Jesse well Waco wake up oh man I was having the worst nightmare thought I was losing all my gains lose your games yeah teach you some sure see if I had this hundred bucks here right if I already give that to you right you could potentially lose it right correct but since let’s say it was never yours in the first place you really can’t lose it okay wait are you talking about my dance also can I have that 100 bucks what’s up guys jeff cavaliere athleanx. com you’re just teasing me oh I didn’t even notice this is here yeah you’re looking for I’ll tell you what if that intro of yours actually delivers that everybody’s waiting for then maybe you can get this okay all right guys actually talking about things that are coming since that intros never coming what it there is a way that you could tell something was coming up and actually do something to intervene before was too late well today I want to give you five red flags they are actually not gaining muscle you see we all go to the gym when we’re trying to build muscle when the focus of our training is hypertrophy we go to the gym with the goal of actually trying to build muscle but we may not be and the good thing is that there’s actually some signs that will come in ahead of time that will point you in the right direction to change something up you’re not on the right track today I want to cover five of those one by one break it all down so that you can do something about it realize that it’s going on and then most importantly do something about it before it’s too late all right number one the first red flag you should be aware of is if you’re not getting a pump you’re not making gains now look I know you’re probably saying I thought the pump was long ago sort of brushed off is not that important other than maybe Arnold the fact is the pomp is important and actually new Sciences point to some additional ways that it might be important but what I think it is is it potentially is indicative of the style of training that you’re adopting right now because let’s face it if you’re healthy you should be getting an increased blood flow to the tissues that are working in a similar way that when you eat your stomach should have more blood that flows to it however if what’s happening here is you’re not getting a pump from your training because you’re relying on one single method progressive overload and building strength to produce your size gains then I’m inviting you to look into other opportunities to train for hypertrophy because that’s what it’s all about here and one of the best ways to do that is through metabolic training metabolic training is going to involve many more repetitions done with a little bit lighter weight but we know again as we’ve talked about many times in this channel there is a great opportunity for hypertrophy through metabolic training and it doesn’t dry up as quickly as the progressive overload route does meaning you can’t continue to add weight to the bar to produce all of your games the secondary benefit I will say is that we have seen recently that even the increased stress on the muscle cell as it gets engorged becomes a stimulus for hypertrophy so we don’t want to discount the benefit of the pump and if you’re not getting it in your training you’re either too dogmatic and you know dimensional on how you train which means you should start opening your eyes to other ways to train or you just really need to start embracing the fact that the pump will help you to actually add more size all right the second red flag here is that when you do this you can’t feel anything like you can’t get sore or discomfort here in your arm see I’ve covered this topic before and we’re talking about the inability to create muscular discomfort under contraction what does that mean it’s not the same as muscle soreness I’m talking about the ability to create discomfort because of the act of contracting a muscle and it’s key because it represents your ability to create a my muscle connection with the muscle that you’re trying to train and why that matters when you’re trying to create muscle hypertrophy is that overall you need to have a good ability to recruit the muscle you’re trying to train in other words to recruit as many muscle fibers to the action as possible so that we are supplying enough of a stimulus for growth so do this for me take your tricep here straighten out your arm and get your arm back behind your body right here if you don’t get a tightness that actually is uncomfortable then you likely don’t have a good mind muscle connection with let’s say the triceps and with the biceps if you bring your arm up contract and then even raise your arm up higher into shoulder flexion that should elicit some type of soreness if neither of those does and you can do it even with your chest as well across your body if none of these things are causing a real contraction discomfort then you don’t have that line muscle connection needed to create optimal hypertrophy because this is the thing even though we’re talking about isolated muscle groups take them back into a compound movement with each contributing better to the overall lift and your gains are going to be better I promise you so look into these deficiencies one by one and if they’re there guys it’s an indicator that you’re not getting the best games you could all right red flag number three actually should be yellow one because if yours is yellow you’re in trouble and that is the color of your urine guys you shouldn’t actually be peeing yellow it’s not a good thing you should be more on let’s say like the north side of clear just a little bit yellow as a matter of fact you also should be going pretty often nine ten eleven even twelve times a day so here’s the thing if you’re not if you’re not going off and enough or the color is too dark you’re likely dehydrated and I don’t care how on point your training is that is a major red flag because you cannot build muscle in a dehydrated environment just like you can’t really grow a flower really well in a dried out potted plant you’ve got to make sure that you’re providing enough hydration to your muscles in order to keep them growing so what I’m recommending is you simply increase your water intake throughout the day I’ve given a tip in the past where I tell you to keep some rubber bands around the outside of the bottle and every time you drink that bottle you fill it back up again take off that rubber band it’s an easy way for you to keep track of how much liquid you’re taking in but regardless of the fact if you’re not going often enough or clear enough then the symptom is actually just telling you right away what the cure is and that is drink more rim flight number four is actually a commentary on your under recovery from your training and we know that in order to build muscle you have to recover from each bout of training and we could do it here measure it with this and I talked about this before in an individual video I showed you how if you get one of these old-fashioned scales that has the dial on it still the non digital version and you simply get up and you squeeze it like that it will give you a measure of what your output is in your grip strength if you do that each morning at a consistent time and you look for changes in the output in your force through doing that you can determine whether or not your central nervous system is actually recovering ahead of your actual body and it’s good when we have the ability to sort of predict what’s gonna happen to our body beforehand so we could actuall