When you hurt yourself squatting with a rounded back, you learn never to squat like that again. After getting sick (and losing 5 to 10 pounds) for getting drunk as hell and running around in the snow with just a T-shirt on (sounds crazy, but I live in Maine, and I’m a student, trust me I know), you learn to be smarter next time. When you throw up for going to the gym (doing squat and deadlift) immediately after eating, you know to take some more rest from now on. When a major event happens and sets us backward, of course we try to take lessons from it. However, is that enough?

Remember, you want to make progress in your training, each and every single day. Even standing still is not good enough, not to mention falling backward. Yet, that is exactly what happens when major incidents like those happen. If you only learn something after such events have taken place, you will never reach your goal. Why? Because these incidents were never supposed to happen in the first place.

In order for ectomorphs like us to gain some serious mass, there are a lot more to worry about than just these major events. Pay attention to every little thing you do, because it’s all the little things together that counts. An ectomorph will not gain a single pound of muscle until he has gotten every single aspects of training right (from exercise selection, exercise techniques and forms, to proper nutrition and sufficient rest). Thus, we don’t learn from major events like injuries or sickness (they must never happen). No. But we do pay careful attention to and learn from the little things like:

• When it is time to switch from 5 pound increment in squat every session to 3 pound and then from 3 to 2.
• When it is time to up your level of calories intake (e.g. from 3000 to 3400) to keep the muscle gain coming
• When you should stop stuffing more food into your mouth (before you throw up. This will be a problem for some of you)
• The perfect combination of cereals to eat day after day without making you wanna puke (you will have to eat a lottttt of cereals)
• Quick motivation tips to get you through a hard exercise (e.g. when squatting 20 reps (in one set), I want to stop squatting when I get to only 8 reps. Thus, the urge to miss the last one or two reps is unbearable. I make sure I finish 20 reps every time by logging down into my log book that I have squatted 20 reps even before squatting. For me personally, that works!)

Training should not take up your whole life, but it WILL definitely take a large chunk of your life. It’s not a question of how you can spend less time on training and still get awesome result. It’s rather how you manage to achieve other goals in life while still gaining serious muscle mass. And the only way to do that is to start paying attention to every little aspect of your training. Ask yourself questions like: Why am I doing this, or Is this the best way to do this (how can I improve)? Try to take lessons from the little things, you’ll be surprised at how much you can learn just from asking the right questions.

Read How many goals should you have beside your training goal? and Every day matters

RECAP: For ectomorphs to gain massive muscle, you have to pay attention to every single aspect of your training (forms, nutrition, rest). Ask the right questions and take lessons from every little thing, and you will learn more from it than to wait till some major events like injury and sickness happen.