Natural bodybuilding is a discipline in itself. You’ll encounter all sorts of natural laws that you’ll have to navigate. This article explores the three most common training mistakes natural bodybuilders make.

1. NOT APPLYING PROGRESSIVE OVERLOAD

There are 1001 ways to stimulate your body to build muscle mass, see also point 3. For example, some people primarily use free weights, while others use machines. All fine, but you’ll only achieve sustained muscle growth in the long run if you gradually increase your training intensity. This is the only way your body will “notice” the need to build muscle mass.

This heavier training is called progressive overload. You can apply it in various ways, for example, by increasing the training weight, training closer to failure, or applying more training volume (doing more sets).

So whatever your training style, make sure you track your performance so you can apply progressive overload.

For beginning naturals, progressive overload is less important (as it is for steroid users). As a beginner, your body is so sensitive to training stimuli that you can achieve muscle growth even without a solid, progressive training plan. However, we also recommend that beginners train carefully. This way, you’ll see results faster.

2. TRAINING TO HARD

Go heavy or go home is the motto of many strength athletes. But as a natural bodybuilder, you have a limited recovery capacity. Exceeding that capacity will compromise the training stimulus and therefore your muscle growth.

The goal of muscle-building training is to stimulate protein synthesis. Once that’s activated, there’s no point in continuing to train a muscle — it won’t grow anymore. In fact, it may even shrink.

In concrete terms, keep the following in mind:

• Don’t train to failure too often, especially not in these situations. For most sets, keep 2 to 3 reps “in the tank” (2-3 RIR);
• Train with weights that allow you to do at least 5 repetitions (the absolute minimum is 3 repetitions per set);
• Don’t do too many sets. For muscle growth, the volume requirement is 10-20 sets per muscle group per week and 5-10 sets per muscle group per workout. You can survive doing more sets, but for muscle growth, that’s junk volume. So don’t do it, no matter how diligent you are.

3. THINKING THERE’S ONLY ONE WAY TO TRAIN

You often hear YouTube coaches say: this or that is killing your gains. As if you can’t achieve muscle growth with a certain training method. That’s nonsense, of course.

Admittedly, we often try to highlight the optimal training method on our site. But there’s certainly nothing wrong with training a little less optimally and still seeing consistent results.

An example is rest times between sets. Research has shown that three minutes of rest between sets produces the best gains . But that doesn’t mean you can’t achieve good results if you only train one minute between sets, for example, when you’re short on time. Muscle growth might be a bit slower, but don’t worry, muscle growth isn’t going to stop.

Ultimately, as a natural you will reach your maximum natural muscle size, some faster than others.