#047 What held you back from building muscle in 2024 and how to fix it for 2025

Welcome back to the 47th edition of the Boats & Logs Lifting Club. I really appreciate you being here. We are the based fitness community that focuses on mastering the basics instead of getting lost in the details.

Today's newsletter will look at some of the most common reasons why most lifters are not making progress, and I will provide some no-bs solutions to fix them.

1. Lack of consistency with workouts

It’s obvious, but it's still a point many people struggle with: You need to train consistently to make progress.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but it’s the biggest reason why people fail to build muscle. But what can we do against it?

In my opinion, mainly two things:

First, pick a plan that fits your life. I wouldn’t advise anyone to follow a plan that requires you to train more than 4 times per week. The time invested is just too high, which makes it very likely for you to start to skip a few sessions here and there, which will snowball into skipping the majority of your workouts. So, pick a plan that requires you to hit the gym 2-4 times per week. It will increase your chances of success significantly!

Secondly, you need to remind yourself that it’s about showing up even if you don’t feel like it. Decreasing your training days per week helps to keep motivation high, but in the end, you will experience days where you don’t feel like training. Train anyway. There is no easy solution to that.

You can, of course, have your friends hold you accountable, but there will always be days where it’s just you vs. you, and you need to show up.

2. Not training hard enough

Besides actually showing up to your workouts, it is important that you train hard enough because otherwise, your workout is basically wasted. Training hard means taking your sets to failure.

A great way to ensure that you are making progress and training hard enough is by applying progressive overload. This basically means that you increase the weight or reps of your exercises every workout.

This way, you are making sure that you are training hard enough because you push to your limits to beat your workout from the previous session.

It’s absolutely crucial that you keep track of your lifts so you know exactly how much you need to do to outperform your last workout. Additionally, it’s great to remind yourself how far you have come if you look back a few months ago and can see your stats back then.

3. Switching Plans too often OR having no plan

Directly linked to the former point is that you need to have a workout plan to apply progressive overload. If you train without a plan or switch your plan every few weeks, you can’t really profit from progressive overload.

Most lifters HIGHLY overrate the importance of their workout plan, when in reality, most plans will have very similar results. So simply pick a plan you like and stick to it for at least 4 months.

We all know how tempting it is to change a plan because you are convinced it will result in better gains, but trust me: It won’t.

Please don’t waste your money on buying a plan. There are countless good plans out there for free.

4. Not active enough

This applies mainly to people who are losing weight, but most of them make the same mistake. They do their workouts and have a strict calorie deficit, but they completely ignore that they would either make faster progress or could eat a few hundred calories per day more if they were more active.

And it doesn’t even have to be more cardio. Do little things.

Walk more, take the stairs, ride your bike, …

If your goal is to lose fat, you should be as active as possible to burn as many calories as you can.

5. Poor diet

The hard truth about building muscle is that even if you applied all of the above points correctly, you would still make no or very little progress if your diet sucks. You need to hit your calorie and protein goal if you want to build muscle and/or lose fat. It’s not possible otherwise!

So starting out, you define your calorie maintenance rate - there are countless calculators for that online. And then, you add 200-500 calories if you want to gain muscle or subtract 200-500 calories if you want to lose fat.

This is then the calorie target you eat every day.

Within this calorie range, you pick meals that allow you to reach at least 0.7-1.0g of protein per lb of body weight (or 1.6-2.2g per kg).

I don’t care which foods you choose, but as long as you hit your protein and calories, you will make progress.

I know that meal planning can be annoying, but it is crucial. To combat this pain, I’ve developed an app that calculates your calorie and protein needs and then generates meal plans that fit this range.

I am biased, but I believe that it is the best gym meal planning app out there and that it is a huge help for everybody who is struggling to make progress due to their bad diet.

You’d support me a lot if you could check it out and leave a few kind words in the app store review.

» Check it out in the AppStore

» Check it out in the PlayStore

(Shameless self-promo end)

Thank you for reading today's newsletter. If you have further questions, simply DM me on Instagram.

Stay strong,
Boats & Logs

Disclaimer

This is not Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. Before starting any workout program, diet plan, or supplement protocol, please consult a medical professional. These are the opinions from an AI voice.