5 Mistakes That Hindered My Fitness Journey

Don't make these same mistakes!

I’ll be sharing an article on 5 tips to get your fitness journey right so stay tuned for that too!

Life is a journey. And I learned that the hard way.

But it doesn’t have to be that way all the time.

After years of experimentation, I finally figured out why I was not making the progress I wanted to.

I’ve never felt more confident and grateful for how my body looks now, then it did all these years ago.

So don’t make the same mistakes that I am about to share with you now.

I was consuming too much protein.

Since many years ago, I have been prioritizing building muscle. The general idea I understood was to of course consume an adequate amount of protein.

I sort of took that a bit too literally.

The main takeaway after researching was to consume 0.8–1g of protein per pound of body weight.

For me, that meant I just needed about 130g of protein. However, I was consuming levels of close to 200g of protein!

This meant chicken breast after chicken breast… after chicken breast.

At that point in time, I thought that this was the way to eat to build muscle. I’d see people on YouTube and other fitness influencers consume an ungodly amount of protein and I figured that if I wanted to look like them, this was the way to go.

I was wrong.

I barely saw any progress in the gym.

At one point I was feeling sick and tired of all the protein I was consuming, and I knew this couldn't possibly be the way.

Overconsumption of protein has been shown to also cause diseases, in the form of inflammation and cardiovascular diseases.

In some cases, it can even cause gout if you were to have non-lean sources of meat.

TLDR: Focus on the magic 0.8–1g of protein per pound of bodyweight, and you should me more than fine, guaranteed.

I was eating junk and not tracking Macros.

There’s this saying that goes:

You can outrain a bad diet.

That’s bullshit.

Even if you do have the best genetic makeup to get the best possible body, without caring much about where your macros are coming from, your body is still going to accumulate all that junk that you're putting into your body.

I used to eat whatever I felt like and only cared about hitting the protein requirements, and of course exceeding it.

This meant high-carb AND high-fat meals as well from time to time.

I would stuff myself with so much food because my notion back then was to try and get as big and muscular as possible.

Instead, I got FAT.

I barely noticed any muscle mass increase and started getting lowkey depressed with how I was doing things.

My belly started getting bigger and I barely noticed any increase in leg or arm size, almost on the verge of becoming skinny fat again.

I knew something was wrong. This was probably the worst mistake out of the lot that hindered my progress.

If you need a good food guide, that focuses on nutrition as a whole as well, you can check out my article below for more information. Its never too late to change.

TLDR: Eat a well-balanced diet. Please do not put your health at jeopardy by not focusing on the source of your calories.

I was not tracking my workouts.

If I was not strict about my diet back then, I was more than strict about ensuring I was in the gym working out.

But the biggest mistake I made was not tracking my progress.

Don't get me wrong, I had a plan all nicely worked out and I knew what workouts I would be doing each day that I stepped into the gym.

But, everything was just in my head.

I can't possibly remember all the sets and reps as well as the weights that I was using for each exercise all the time.

This meant that on some days I was either going too heavy or too light on some exercises, and sometimes I was doing not enough or too much for each muscle group.

Now that I think about it, it was a complete nightmare.

I did not see much results in the gym as a result and I also did not see any progress with the weights, maybe with just one or two workouts.

TLDR: Use a tracker, either writing things down on pen and paper, or using an app, like Hevy to track your progress in the gym.

I was training too much.

I felt so motivated, that I was in the gym almost every day, 6–7 days a week.

It felt great, and I thought I was going to make a lot of progress based on how often I was going.

But then I hit a wall.

I started feeling more and more tired and felt like I was dragging myself to the gym instead.

I started losing motivation and was feeling lethargic all the time.

There was even a bout of time when I was feeling sick multiple times in a row, and I knew this was not right.

The breaking point for me was when I started to feel sore almost every single day, and felt an injury coming up, be it on my knees or elbow joints.

I started feeling afraid that I might be overdoing it. And realized that I was.

Not giving myself enough time to recover meant that I was not having effective and productive workouts anymore, with reps and sets, not done with full intention. That was not it.

TLDR: Recovery days are also part of training. Prioritise them too.

I was not moving enough.

One thing that I failed to prioritize back then was my cardiovascular health.

As I was very fixated on building muscle, the thought never occurred to me to move more.

So before and after gym sessions I would live a rather sedentary life, thinking that my fitness was going to be on track just from gymming.

I think you know the common theme here.

I started accumulating more body fat than normal, and the bad diet was not helping either.

There was this stupid thinking that I had at the back of my mind as well, where if you do not move as much, you are going to get bigger.

I feared that cardio was going to make me lose my gains.

Instead, it did the complete opposite and made me more fat than usual as well.

Sometimes it felt hard to breathe and move around and I was panting more than usual when going up a flight of stairs or just walking from place to place. I felt heavy and horrible.

TLDR: No matter what, MOVE.

I’m always learning and these were just some of the mistakes that I have made in the past but have turned around recently. Having done so, I feel much better and “feel” a lot more healthy as well.

I hope this gives you a guide on what NOT to do when embarking on your fitness journey. Keep going!

Share with me some of the mistakes you made and how you overcame them in the comments!