To be successful at building muscle takes a lot of consistency.
You’ve got to be dedicated to work hard week in and week out, and put forth the effort even on those days when you’d rather stay at home, lie on the couch and relax .
The saying says that “80% of success is showing up”, and for the most part I’d say that’s accurate.
The same principals apply to your gym program.
No matter what, you have to do every sing routine, every single day. Even if your muscles are screaming at you to rest, you should always bite the bullet and hit the gym…
Or should you?
Here’s the thing…
Without a doubt, consistency is very important. Of course, you should be sticking to your workout schedule the vast majority of the time.Of course , simply bailing on the gym out of pure laziness is unacceptable.
However, I would like to bring up a quote from the late Mike Mentzer when he said… “Rituals have nothing to do with science”.
What you need to keep in mind is that the human body is an extremely complex biological “machine”, and that not every single workout and recovery period is identical.
In other words, just because a weight lifting schedule states that you must workout on days X, Y and Z doesn’t necessarily mean that this will always be the optimal schedule every single week of the year.
If you wake up on a training day and your muscles are still sore, you feel physically exhausted and your regular motivation to train just feels like it has been zapped… don’t you think your body just might be trying to give you a hint?
Why would you force yourself to workout in a situation where more recovery time is clearly required, and when you know that your training performance will be less than optimal? If your body, muscles and mind are clearly still recovering from the previous session, what sense does it make to force yourself to train despite this?
After all, we know that the recovery process is the ultimate “muscle builder” the actual process of adding new muscle tissue occurs out of the gym on resting days and that intense weight training is extremely demanding on the body as a whole…
There is no worry of losing muscle mass or endurance, as these decreases require 14 days or more of inactivity to be set into motion. However, there is the perfectly probable scenario of a positive gain in the form of proper recovery from the previous workout and improved performance on the next workout.
The most important thing is to pay attention to what your bodyis saying to you.
You do have to use this method with caution, though…
If you develop the mindset of only doing your workout routine when you “feel like it”, then it’s very likely that you’ll start delaying your workouts and convincing yourself that it’s correct to do so when in fact it is not.
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