How many times have you heard these?

• You have to sleep at least 8 hours in order to gain muscles
• You must incorporate Squat, Deadlift, and Press into your program
• You have to eat humongous amount of food to get big, and you cannot skip meals either
• Etc.

Every time hearing something like that, immediately you say to yourself: I know I know, of course I know. And yet you still think that something is missing, that there must be some “secret” principle that you must follow in order to gain massive muscles. You think there exists a quick and easy way to get there, all you have to do is to look for it… instead of working hard in the gym and recovering properly.

Nobody wants to listen to a cliché teaching. We have already heard it a hundred times before. But just because you have heard a saying a thousand times does not necessarily mean that you don’t have to listen to it anymore. Until you have done what the cliché preaches you’re supposed to do, you will still have to listen to the cliché and try to follow it. So for training, what are some of the clichés? Good form, progressive weights, sleep a lot, eat a lot, lift heavy weights, never skip meals, never skip even an hour of sleep, and most importantly, never skip a workout session.

Of course it goes deeper after that. For example, for good form, you will need at least 2 to 3 sessions to learn the proper technique of exercises like Squat and Deadlift before you can perform them without supervision. Or for progressive weights, you gain different amount of weights for different exercises (e.g. you can gain more weights for deadlift than for bench press from one session to the next). However, all these things will become simple after a few sessions. The most important thing is that you keep all these clichés in mind and follow them instead of ignoring them every time they are mentioned.

RECAP: Set your ego aside, sit down, and really examine every single cliché teaching you know. Have you done EXACTLY what you are supposed to do to get big? If not, don’t bother looking for any secret principle for gaining muscles. There’s NONE.

1. First photo: www.ethelthefrog.net
2. Second photo (self-mixed from here and here): stupidgirlyshit.com and www.stormfront.org
3. Third photo (self-mixed): crossfithel.blogspot.com
4. Fourth photo (self-mixed): zuguide.com