Why You Should Stop Chasing Muscle.

Reading time: 10 minutes

Most of us begin lifting weights and exercising for one reason and one reason only.

We want to change our bodies.

Not many of us are all that different in that regard. But, the reasoning behind why is what begins to differentiate us more.

Many times it’s to please the opposite sex, perform better for a sport, or to boost our own ego and self-confidence – but, there is always a superficial drive leading us to subject ourselves to the physical discomfort of the gym.

The real reason that most of us begin lifting weights?

It’s because we feel some level of deep-rooted insecurity. And we feel driven and compelled to seek out a leaner and stronger body as the solution.

I’m no different. In fact, that’s exactly where it all began for me. To say things simply, I was an observably weak and unmotivated kid for the majority of my teenage years.

Mindset ➡️ Behavior ➡️ Results

This is an important progression to remember.

This entire process marked the very early stages of my training career. A period of time where all I wanted to do was build muscle. I literally couldn’t get it off of my mind.

And so I picked up a blue, off-brand 25lb dumbbell in my parent’s basement and got to work, proceeding to rep out bicep curl after bicep curl. Ugly rep after ugly rep.

Until eventually, I gained a bit of knowledge and realized – hey, maybe I need to start exercising all of these other muscles too. (why didn’t I think of that sooner?)

Eventually I got myself to feel comfortable doing a flat dumbbell bench press and the makings of a weighted squat which for years could best be described as a half-rep atrocity that vaguely resembled a squat. These were grim days.

Fast forward several years.

I was now a frequent-flyer at the local commercial gym, had put on nearly 40 solid pounds of “newbie gains”, and felt more confidence in myself than I ever had before.

But, after settling into my more muscle-bound and training-savvy body, I began to encounter a new problem — my gains had started to slow significantly.

I wasn’t yet satisfied and desired to keep building, but I’d started to level out and come to my first real training plateau when my results started to drastically slow down.

This important crossroad that I faced is the real focus of this article, what happens now?

The reality of muscle building is this. You’re not going to be able to keep it going forever, which is why everyone who’s been consistent with the gym for several years isn’t walking around looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime.

There’s a point physiologically where your gains start to diminish. In the very early stages (year one), you can expect somewhere around 2lbs+ of muscle gains per month. But after that, it nearly halves every following year until you see only nominal gains.

And it’s when you reach this point of slower returns that I recommend you to honestly re-assess the reason why you continue to train. Otherwise, you risk holding yourself to unrealistic expectations only to be sorely disappointed.

And trust me, that’s not a place you want to be.

This is precisely the point for me when I made the decision to stop solely chasing muscle. A decision that actually ended up benefitting my overall experience with training much more than I would have originally thought.

As a result of making the decision to not be totally and completely muscle-focused, I was able to continue to build at this new, slower rate but also receive the benefits from other areas of my fitness that I’d neglected up to this point.

I’m talking about all of these other key areas of fitness that the young, lanky, and ego-driven version of my former self was completely blind and paid no attention to:

• Gaining raw muscular strength
• Becoming more explosive and powerful
• Enhancing my cardiovascular stamina
• Training my body to be agile and mobile
• Improving my mind-body connectivity

These other facets of training began to open up to me as I started to shift my attention away from muscle and on to more sustainable ways to approach fitness. It was like stepping into a whole new world of possibilities for approaching how I trained.

And, honestly? What I noticed when I made the switch was that my gains never stopped. A year has yet to go by without seeing new physical changes. Not just through maturing, but as a direct result of subjecting my body to overload in other focuses.

So, now comes the part where we apply this all to you.

It’s likely you are currently somewhere within this timeline if you’re interested enough to still be reading. I want you to know that I get that urgency you feel to build muscle.

But, if you really want to stick with this for the rest of your life, enjoy this process, and see the results you’re after… you’ll listen to my story. You’ll open up your mind and begin to incorporate other ways of viewing results in your fitness.

Mentally? You’re going to develop an entirely new love for training. And you’ll be able to measure how you see results in so many new and exciting ways.

Physically? You’ll begin to realize that by focusing less on muscle, you trick yourself into honing in on fundamental training principles that actually contribute to better gains.

The bottom line is you should train in whatever way you want to and no one has any right to try and stop you from doing that. But, from a longevity standpoint, at some point making this switch is probably just going to make sense for you.

Find a reason to pursue fitness that goes deeper than that first superficial reason. Evolve your “why” and I can assure, things will go a whole lot better for you that way.