Do you want to know why you have stopped building muscle? Do you want to know why you have gained more fat over the years while continuing to exercise? Do you want to know why you have reached a plateau? It’s simply because you’re more concentrated on weight than working your actual muscles.

What I mean by this is that most people don’t work on the muscles effectively when they are in the gym. Many people do exercises completely wrong. These people scratch their heads because they are putting in a lot of time and effort in the gym and not seeing any results. What most people do wrong is that they try to get the “weight up” at all costs, sacrificing their muscle gains to do so. For instance, when they perform the bench press they load up the bar with as much weight as they can put on there and they do everything in their power to get the weight up. They move their legs, squirm their bodies, they scream, and they break out of form just to get the weight up. However, they completely neglect what muscles they are intending to “work on” in order to do so. They use their triceps, traps, shoulders, and mostly momentum to get it up without ever hitting their chest. Don’t become one of these guys.

Instead, when you enter the gym, you want to achieve what’s called the muscle pump. This is the process of infiltrating so much blood in the muscle that you have a sudden tightness feeling in your muscle that feels so intense that you can’t flex the muscle. It’s a very hard feeling to describe but the feeling of this is so memorable that you understand completely what I’m talking about if you’ve ever experienced it before. And if you haven’t, well there’s no wonder why you’re goals have been put to a halt. The muscle pump is necessary to build muscle mass because it delivers blood flow, and therefore, essential nutrients into the muscle that you are trying to develop. Furthermore, the fibers get torn and the muscle gets stimulated and a response mechanism is achieved where it forces your body to adapt and grow to better itself from the trauma presented to it.

To achieve this, you need to actually work the muscle you intend on building. So in the instance of the bench press, you want to work your chest and you want to minimize the use of your triceps, lats, and shoulders; you NEVER want to use any momentum to get the weight up. Remember, when you enter the gym, you are not in competition with anyone to see how much weight you can do. You are in there for a purpose and that purpose is to build muscle.

Below is a demonstration of how you can build more muscle in the chest by doing it right and using less weight than you are used to. Apply this principle to all exercises and all muscle groups.