Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:19 Mistake 1
05:08 Mistake 2
08:23 Mistake 3
10:11 Mistake 4
12:05 Mistake 5
14:48 Outro
Transcript:
I’ve been lifting for over 20 years. I’ve competed in physique sports and I’ve been a fitness model. During this time I made a lot of mistakes. Here are the five biggest mistakes I made that lost me years of gains, so you don’t have to make them as well.
The first major mistake I made in optimizing my body composition is not having good long term metrics of progress. I would go on a certain training program. I would make some progress there or at least gain strength. And then at some point I would switch to a different program. And again I would gain some strength, and then I would switch to a different program. And there was only one moment per year during the early days of my lifting, that I really had an honest checkup of how I was doing long term, and that was before surfing holidays. Every year, me and my friends would go on holiday, we’d go surfing, so before that, of course I did a cutting phase, make sure I had a six pack and made photos. And I realized when I took those photos, I compared them to last year’s photos that I kind of looked the same, like exactly the same. And I did that for multiple years before I realized, yeah, I really look exactly the same, which means that over the course of the year on balance, I have not progressed. So there are three good tools you have to make sure this doesn’t happen to you.
So ideally you track your body composition not just your weight. Your weight alone is not sufficient, knowing a lot of people that when they go on to optimized program they experience positive body recomposition. I see this all the time in my clients and their weight doesn’t decrease, but they are losing fat and they are gaining muscle, which is excellent progress. It’s pretty much as good as it gets for a trained individual. And if you just look at your weight, you think you’re not progressing, which leads a lot of people to reduce their energy intake to really low levels. And they’re like, whoa, why do I have to reduce my energy intake this much? It’s because you were already losing fat. Now you are in excessive deficit and often people end up losing muscle. So having a measure of your body fat level, you don’t have to necessarily track your body fat percentage, just your body fat level can be very effective to prevent this. And also to make sure in the long term that you’re not just putting on fat when bulking, and that over the course of a bulk and a cut cycle you end up either at the same weight with a better body composition, or you can see that the ratio of weight to fat gain is acceptable. Tracking your body composition is practically difficult for a lot of people.
Most people don’t have access to things like DEXA scans or multi frequency bioelectrical impedance scales on a regular basis. And even if you do, they’re not that accurate, honestly. It’s good to get a ballpark level of your body fat percentage, but for tracking progress over time they’re not that good. So for most people circumference measurements, especially, or waist circumference and skin fold calipers are much more practical, much cheaper and easily available. It takes some practice. You have to be very consistent and find a method that works for you to very consistently do the measurements and you track your body fat level. Don’t try to estimate your body fat percentage. Just look at the level and see how that changes over time. The second way you can track your long term progress is by keeping what I call benchmark exercises in your program.
A lot of people do this by convention with the powerlifts, for example. keep the powerlifts in their programs pretty much all the time. They rotate all the other exercises and stuff, but the powerlifts stay in the program. That’s actually a good practice, not just for powerlifters, because when you keep an exercise in your program long term, the longer term you keep it in your program the more it starts to correlate with long term muscle growth. We see in research that short term measures of progress are mostly neural in nature. So if you add 10% 20% of strength to a new exercise, congratulations. That’s mostly just your body learning the exercise. There can already be muscle growth, and if your program is good there should be, but it’s not clear evidence of muscle growth. In contrast, if you put 100 pounds on your bench press, even though you’ve been bench pressing for years already, for sure you have gained muscle mass. It’s because the relative component of morphological adaptation, namely muscle growth, becomes larger as you keep the exercise in your program for longer. Because the neural component, the neural adaptation, your brain learning how to coordinate the muscle, that component decreases relatively speaking. So by not switching out exercises and program hopping, having exercises in your program long term and looking at your PR strength, that is a far better metric of your total muscle mass level than just progress on short term programs.
The third way you can look at your long term progress, even if you don’t have consistent benchmark exercises in your program, is to look at what I call witness lifts. A witness lift is an exercise that you usually don’t have in your program, or essentially never do, maybe it’s Zercher squats or something, and if you see that that exercise, the witness lift is progressing, despite not having done that exercise in your programs that is a very good sign that you are getting more muscular because strength is highly movement specific. So if you get stronger on one exercise, say deadlifts, it will increase your Zercher squats, but only to a very limited extent. so you will see that your strength gains on the deadlift will be very high, and the strength gains on a Zercher squat will be far less. The strength gains on a Zercher squat, however, they will be a much better demonstration of your real long term strength progress and muscle growth. Because you didn’t have the neural adaptations that coordinate the Zercher squat better. So having a witness lift and doing a 5 RM periodically, say, every six months or every year can be a decent proxy for your level of muscle growth in the involved musculature.
The second major mistake I made had majorly delayed my ability to get a six pack and stay six pack lean sustainably whilst going overboard on cheat meals. this will upset a lot of people, but cheap meals are generally not a healthy psychological habit. If you describe the standard approach to cheat meals from bodybuilding, which is extreme dieting essentially, crash dieting for most of the week in order to have the weekends with cheat meals or one cheat meal in the weekend planned ahead of time. If you tell that to a psychologist, they might say that you have an eating disorder. That is a trait that most people with eating disorders have. In my experience, if you plan your cheat meals and say Sunday is “Pancake day”, then Monday to Saturday become “Thinking about Pancake Day” days. The cheat meals have a lot of negative effects that we also see in research. It glorifies the cheat meal and it causes a restraint eating mindset, which is one of the single biggest predictors of unsustainable dietary practices. Black and white mindset of having on and off switches where you have extreme diet adherence, like almost compulsive obsessive type diet adherence, and then you go completely overboard with a cheat meal at some point. So the switch just goes off and you do whatever you want. That type of black and white mindset is really destructive, and the amount of damage you can do in a cheat meal, some people will say, oh, it’s just one meal.
No, you could do a whole lot of damage in one cheat meal. if you have not done heinous amounts of damage in a cheat meal, I know that you’ve never been contest lean because the leaner you get, the bigger your appetite gets and the easier it is to fall into this obsessive mindset. So when you get to those levels and you have a cheat meal, you can literally cause your entire week of fat loss to be negated. The result is sometimes even negative body recomposition I see in clients. And for me personally also, there have been many weeks where I ended up spending a lot of willpower to diet the whole week, only to have that one cheat meal that negated all the fat loss for that week. So throughout the week as a whole, I ended up not losing any fat. but I did exert a lot of effort for six days of the week. The solution for me here was to find a much more balanced approach to cheat meals. For one, if I want to have a cheat meal, I just have it. And the whole concept of a cheat meal is a little bit toxic in terminology, especially if you plan them ahead of time. I think planning a cheat meal is inherently a very questionable practice. If you want to have a cheat meal, you can just have it. It should be a rational indulgence and you should weigh the pros and the cons.
Moreover, when you have cheat meals, don’t let all dietary restraints go out the window and just do whatever you want. A few simple tweaks, like making sure you still get your fiber in before you go to the junk food can have a massive impact on your energy intake, and it doesn’t decrease your satisfaction with the meal. We also see this in research, by the way, and that is massive, because a lot of people have this idea that when they have a cheat meal, that they have a happiness meter and the more food they stuff in themselves, the higher up the meter goes. and it doesn’t work like that. The happiness you get from the cheat meal is derived from the satisfaction of curing the hunger. It’s the reduction of the negative effects from the hunger that give you dissatisfaction. And it doesn’t have anything to do with what you end up eating. Some thing will of course taste better than other things but the actual satisfaction But your actual satisfaction with the meal, especially over the context of the whole meal and how you remember it is not so strongly affected by what you eat especially not the proportions. It’s much more strongly influenced by simply being content and full and not feeling restraint. If you want to learn more about the psychology of cheat meals and how to make cheat meals more effective, I go into that in detail in my book “The Science of Self-control”, along with many other tips to improve your diet adherence.
For here, though, I’m going to move on to the next major mistake I made which is spending a lot of time on stretching. Yes. It may sound weird to say that that is a fatal mistake I made, but it’s a fatal mistake because I spent a lot of time stretching and doing cooldown routines and preparatory work and activation drills at this functional training phase, like this was over a decade ago, mind you, so I had this functional training phase where I would spend tons of time doing stuff that didn’t really produce anything. And I learned that stretching just made me better at stretching. So I would have these dynamic stretching before the workout, static stretching after the workout because I felt I had to. I felt that flexibility was essential component of fitness. And we see clearly in research that it isn’t. I experienced this myself. At some point I started to question whether all of that stretching I was doing, the foam rolling beforehand, the cooldown afterwards, if it really amounted to anything. So from one day to the next, I went from doing tons of dynamic stretching, foam rolling, static stretching, preparatory work in my warm ups, and I just dropped all of it and I noticed nothing. Nada. Zilch. And that really told me, okay, I can just stop all of this and it doesn’t have any impact on my squat mobility. I can still squat deep. It doesn’t have any impact on my lifts, my range of motion, my daily life. So if that’s the case, what is it doing? And the answer is, well, pretty much nothing for most individuals. Stretching just makes you better at stretching. Now if you are an athlete for example, then you probably do need some stretching For me now, for example, I actually do some stretching to improve my high kicks in kickboxing. If you don’t have a specific purpose like that tho, you can probably just skip stretching and it won’t affect you. And if you think about it, if you are doing full range of motion strength training, then you are essentially doing weighted dynamic stretching already. And we actually see in research that strength training over a full range of motion is as effective to improve range of motion and mobility for most individuals as stretching routines. Up to a point, of course.
The fourth big mistake I made in my training is not counting volume per muscle group per week. Early on I had this bro mindset of back being a body part and legs being a body part. And then later on, when I got to the functional training phase, I organized my training like push-pull, push-pull legs or like upper push. And I realized that that classification is extremely rudimentary. As I gained more knowledge about functional anatomy, I learned that some of these exercises can have the same classification and train different muscle groups, or they have a different classification, but actually be very similar.
Dips, for example, are technically a vertical push, but most people would categorize them more as a horizontal push in terms of the musculature that they train, namely the chest, triceps, and anterior deltoids, rather than the side deltoids like a vertical press normally would in terms of an overhead press. And then you have exercises like upright rows, which are a vertical pull, but they train musculature that’s very similar to something like a lateral raise, which would be a push, I guess. I mean, you’re not really getting closer to the body or moving away from it because you’re moving in a rotary fashion. So that’s an exercise where you can’t even classify it. And most people just say it’s a push because it trains muscles more like a pushing exercise. But really the whole classification is just a massive simplification that you shouldn’t use if you have any understanding about functional anatomy. And the result for me was that I developed some serious muscular imbalances, such as less focus on the chest and overdeveloped deltoids and back compared to the rest of my body. So it’s much more effective to directly count the volume per muscle group per week, which is essentially how bodybuilders do it just in a more precise manner than most bodybuilders do. Because like I said back, it’s not a body part dead lifts and rows or chin ups are completely different exercises in terms of which musculature they train, even though you can also say they train back. And for legs squats do not train the legs. They don’t train the rectus femoris of the quads. They don’t train the calves very well. They don’t train to hamstrings barely at all. So you really have to be a little bit more precise than just “lower body”, because that’s literally more than half the muscle in your body.
Mistake number five was far worse. Crash dieting and dreamer bulking. I have a very all or nothing personality. I either do something well or I don’t do it at all. I don’t like to drag things out and I like to be efficient. So my natural instinct when cutting is to crash diet, just get it over with. And my natural instinct for bulking is I don’t want to count calories, I just make sure I’m in energy surplus. Well, I learned the hard way that what happens when you do that is when you dreamer bulk as a natural trainee, just gain a whole lot of fat, and we see this in research as well. Beyond a very tiny energy surplus that the body will use for muscle growth, which really isn’t all that much if you just do the math and see how much energy the body needs to build that amount of muscle, most of it will be stored as fat afterwards. So, you know, you built maybe a kilo of muscle. That’s like a metabolism net energy density of 2500 calories or so. It’s debated, the exact number. But even if it’s let’s say 3000, that would be only 100 calories per day in net energy storage. So you really don’t need a lot of energy surplus as a natural trainee to pretty much maximize muscle growth. And the ratio of fat gain to muscle growth beyond that point becomes really, really, really terrible. And what I’ve experienced the hard way, and also seen a lot of people, is that when you bulk and cut that way, what happens is when you bulk, you store a lot of fat and then you have to do a very prolonged cutting phase afterwards. And if you don’t do that well, you’re too aggressive, you lose muscle. And the end result is that you end up a year later at the exact same weight, with the exact same body composition.
So this is a mistake that really cost me a lot of time. And I learned that you can measure the success of someone’s diet quite well by the ratio of bulking to cutting. if I look at my clients, I see that the best ones with the best diet adherence, where we manage our energy intake super well, they can bulk and cut in about a 6 to 1 ratio. So you spend six times as much time bulking as you spend cutting. And this makes sense if you look at the ratios of energy surplus and balance. Because 5% energy surplus, 30% energy deficit, that would be about 6 to 1. So would be excellent. And then you’d probably be talking mostly about mini cuts. For most people, 4 to 1 is a good target, 6 to 1 being excellent, and if it’s below 3 to 1, then you’re doing something very inefficient. A 3 to 1 means that for every three months of bulking, you have to spend one month cutting. That may sound reasonable to some people, but if that’s the case, it means there is room for a lot of optimization left, because that’s simply how the mathematics work and also what the science now supports, because we see quite clearly that excessive energy deficits, especially at low body fat levels, cause muscle loss and pretty much prevent the ability to recover successfully. Whereas in energy surplus, like I said, most of the excess energy surplus leads to fat storage with minimal effects on muscle growth and strength development. So it’s very important to get that ratio right and to lean bulk rather than dreamer bulk and to have a reasonable energy deficit based on your body fat level, your goals, and how high the risk in general is of muscle loss.
Alright. That’s it for my mistakes. I hope this helps you not make those mistakes yourself. If you found this content helpful, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe. If you like this video, you’re probably a serious lifter that appreciates science just like me. You’ll probably also like my online courses them. For fitness professionals, I have the Henselmans Personal Trainer Certification course. For non professionals, my Personal Development Course will teach you everything you need to know to reach your maximum natural muscular potential, at a sustainably low body fat percentage. Moreover, I’ll cover how to optimize your lifestyle to be happy and fulfilled. I cover what the research shows about how to choose your career. Where to live. How to find the best match for your romantic partner, and how to invest your money to build wealth with minimal effort. My goal is to give you evidence based directions to make the most important decisions of your life. Check out the link in the description for more information. I hope you’ll enjoy it.