5 BIG mistakes you're making!

Not hitting your fitness goals? Struggling to drop the last few KG's? Not gaining the muscle you think you shold be?

You're probably making one of these five mistakes:

1) Not lifting heavy enough weights. This goes for muscle building, weight loss, strength training, everything.

If your last two reps of an exercise aren't challenging you, you're lifting too light. Keeping good technique for all reps is crucial, but if you breeze through a set easily, you're not giving your muscles the stimulus they need to grow, get stronger, increase metabolic burn for weightloss, etc.

Muscles need to constantly be pushed to make gains. You should need 1-3 minutes to be able to go again. Up your weights!

2) You are not consistent. You've stuck to your plan for three weeks, made every session, hit every macro and results are coming. Then life hits, and it takes you three weeks to get into the gym again. All your hard work is gone.

Time, effort put into training, nutrition changes and money (if you've had a trainer) is wasted. Muscles have a three-week reversability time frame meaning: use it or lose it. When we are young - 18-23 - it is four weeks on average, as we get older, consistency is key.

Same for if you go all-in for a week, then take it easy for a week. Results are not gonna come. It's hard to get people to understand how hard it is to make real changes to your body. You need to commit fully to a training plan and nutrition plan for six weeks to even start to see changes.

For really noticable changes, 3 months. For a transformation, like 8kg fat loss, big muscle gains, up to year is needed. If your trainer says less, they're lying to you and just want the money.

3) Your not eating right. You can have the best training plan, lift heavy, and consistently, but if you're not eating properly to fuel the body, it's another waste of time.

Muscles need protein - a lot - to change. Take your bodyweight in kilos, double it, thats how many grams of protein you need per day. Same for weightloss. If your calories are higher than your nutrition plan suggests, you won't lose body fat.

And yes, protein is vital when losing weight too. If fat loss is the goal, high protein is needed to preserve muscle tissue. If we simply lower calories we just become a smaller, fat version instead of our bigger fat version.

4) You're not recovering properly. Sleep, nutrition, water, sports massage sessions, stretching and time between sessions is real recovery.

Muscles need 24-36 hours to recover. This means if you train lower body on a Monday, you need to typically wait until Wednesday to go again. But you can do upper body on a Tuesday!

Recovery/de-load weeks should be built into a good plan to minimise fatigue. Here are the simple go-to points for top recovery:

Sleep 8-9 hours, drink 3 litres of water a day, nail your nutrition plan, get a regular sports massage and results follow.

5) You are expecting too much too soon. Your favourite influencer is probably also selling a quick fix plan to get you 'in shape' in three weeks. Ain't gonna happen. Unless you're starting from a good place (low body fat, good muscle developement), you need to commit for longer.

Generally two to three weeks into a training plan I will see neural fatigue in clients - this is nothing to with sleep or recovery - just a by-product of a solid training plan. They might feel tired, hungry and less powerful. Many give up at this point if they don't have a trainer. They've trained hard, they don't see results (remember it takes 6 weeks to see something generally) and they feel dead. They haven't seen 5 cm gains on their glutes, raising them up another 3 cm and they wanna quit.

Don't expect too much too soon. It took you longer then three weeks to gain belly fat, get a pancake butt, so allow that longer amount of time to reverse it.