How do you explain people who struggle to make progress at gym?

>it's psychologically difficult,
wtf i didn't expect that argument
this board is full of homosexuals afterall

Well stop he should talking about it then and find something else that suits him
If you cant lift weights you just fail at being a male im sorry

I would also add that the kind of lifting that gets you respectable lifts is absolutely painful, physically and mentally. A lot of people have been doing it so long they’re dialed in on that aspect of things, but for someone who has never lifted much it’s a big hurdle to basically cause yourself pain to improve.

>genuine inability to understand

Yes, it's possible to be regular at the gym (the main factor which, according to you, explains the stagnation of people who stagnate) but just not do things well while thinking they're doing them well. You just sincerely don't understand what's wrong and/or how to fix it.

The problem is the delegitimization of the concept of "understanding" in lifting. For many people, there's nothing to "understand" in lifting because it's simple and instinctive. As a proof, some would say that "even stupid people are muscular". Perhaps there's something to be explored about that? What if those who don't progress aren't necessarily ONLY people who lack rigour, but also people who are well-intentioned but just objectively do things badly? Good wil and rigor aren't everything. We've all known hard-working but mediocre students at school, haven't we?

>ive never seen someone who genuinely works hard and still is mediocre in school

Some people work hard (at least in terms of hours worked) but they just don't know how to revise, it's not instinctive for them, it's not in their head. And the further along you get in your education, the more complicated it is to assimilate new knowledge and concepts, because you need to master the ones you've learned before to get them. But if the ones you've learned before are already poorly mastered, it has a snowball effect.

They might THINK that they study hard but they really don't, the results are actually telling you that they're not lol, same goes for the gym, you can tell yourself all the lovely stories you want but at the end of the day, progress is or it isnt there

well duhhh
what else could it be

Yes, but you can't say that "efforts haven't been made" then, they were just not the right ones, not correctly targetted, or whatever

So people who push themselves hard at gym will always get satisfactory results?

>they have been fricking up

In what sense?

>people are fricking around ALOT

What do they do so badly? When I go to the gym I mainly see muscular young males, so I don't assume they are "fricking around a lot"

I'd say the opposite, look at what others are doing. Look at dudes (in the real world, not YouTube influencers) that have a good body and observe how they train. Compare it to your plan and make adjustments. You also need to fundamentally understand that it's not simply about repping the weight but the quality of each rep. You'll see them set up before the lift, isolsate parts of their body to optimize the targeted muscle group, usually do athletic quick concentric motions and some degree of controlled eccentric. You'll maybe find the upper 1% guy that can go full gorilla mode and bang out quick heavy reps by I just assume that guy is enhanced most the time.

Also you need to change your understanding of how you track your effort. The quantitative measures of total reps/sets is a good measure to track progress but you need to also know that you're hitting the goal of actually stimulating growth which is entirely qualitative and personal through muscle soreness. If it doesn't hurt to move the muscle the following days then you have room to improve.

The second group of people are entirely incorrect, if you're not sore you're fricking up and it means your muscle can in fact lift more than what you're currently doing, or your form is shit. Add more sets/reps if you can't actually move more weight, this might mean altering your program to allow for more time on certain exercises.

How many lifts are you doing in an average session?

>have never experienced muscle soreness for my pecs
thats a very very bad sign
how you you claim that you go to failure and never get soreness, i don't believe that

Yes I control the weight on the way down, as I said above I was even more controlling the weight on the way down TOO MUCH (= for too long) which hampered my progress. I think the thing is that my pecs are my weakness, I've made very little progress in bench press for the practise time I had (started with the empty bar, barely able to lift 60kg)

Yes I do pec flys

haaa so you go on holidays, would you say that you take time off the gym regularly?

This was just an example, I do not go on holidays regularly

You won't feel the soreness unless you try to use your pecs. Try benching 2 days in a row or just doing pushups.
If you're still not sore, kill your pecs with flys after benching (preferably machine flys). If THAT doesn't work the I dunno lol

I mean using them the next day. They would be lowkey sore but you wouldn't really notice if you're a white collar cuck.

>having DOMS is not mandatory

So you basically disagree with the anon saying it is mandatory and I should worry if it doesn't happen to me

I do feel muscle soreness in my lifts when I go to the gym after a week of holidays (for example), but then the second week after they are all gone

They'll get good at what they're doing. What they're doing is the next part. I know guys spamming lat pulldowns and dumbbells curls with no weight increase for years. There's no point fixing bad programming if they can't even do the crap they do with any effort.

Read what I said. Learning effort is the first, hardest part. It's not the only part but if you don't get effort right, forget the rest. There are people who get effort but do dumb things like chest only

Honestly, I sweat like crazy at the gym and lift until I'm nauseous or dizzy, and when I see people working out around me (they tend to lift with a group of friends btw) see a lot of laughter and very little sweating. When I see people training, I get the impression that it's very chill. But guess which one of them has a better physique? People sometimes ask me if I'm a beginner, even though I've been doing it for years!

I'm not saying I have more experience than the others, but if they're high-school students, chances are I've been training longer than them, especially as I can sometimes hear them talking (they're talking loudly) and they say they're beginners, or even that it's their first session

The sweet spot is the point where you set enough stimulus for hypetrophy and can still recover from it properly. That sometimes doesn't have to be a lot, especially if you are doing isolations.

Nope, I'm doing a pretty standard routine I guess, barely any cardio in it, applying progressive overload. But the reps I gain are very few (1 rep per session per exercise I would say) and my body is barely evolving

He could also just not be resting for enough time between sets. My biggest advice to that dude is going to be slow everything down. Milk out the full ramge of motion and control the weight as much as humanly possible, you'll feel the difference immediately, most likely you'll have to decrease your max weight to do it.

What are you actually doing? Like what is your progression scheme, usual lifts etc?
I can see you gassing out on lifts if you're doing something like 20 rep squats or a 12x2 deadlift EMOM but those sorts of routines aren't sustainable long term and you do them for like 6-8 weeks at a time.

Again I have no idea, I'd need to see in person.

Yes we both agree on that, but we are in a society based on the notion of "effort" per se, we should be more specific and say "well-calibrated effort". Now the question is: how to calibrate our effort optimally? How to find out how to do so?

The most insufferable person is the one who expresses the desire to self-improve but never takes the steps required to reach that goal. The fat person constantly whinging about not being able to lose weight, the person constantly crying about debt, the single mom that can't find a good man. They're all cut from the same cloth, they all deep down believe they are fine the way they are and don't need to self-critique.

So it's luck rather than efforts, I do not see any merit in that.

The still had to put the work in to get the results? I don't understand what you're attempting to justify to yourself here.

I started at 40kg, of course I won't have 335lbs with less than 2 years of practice

People keep saying that you can see huge changes within 6 months or less than a year of practice, which is not what I have experienced

Changes in your body that are noticeable by yourself in the mirror and by your relatives. People would notice that you go to the gym and posting your body on dating apps would now increase your chances.

I cannot quantify it, it's merely subjective. In terms of strength gains, it also depends on the exercise and one's standards. I would say that, if you start from the empty bar when you bench, you're expected to reach lifts around 60-70kg in 6 months. This would be considered a "good" progress. I reached those lifts in a year, and people were like "meh, not catastrophic, but pretty bad, are you sure you did everything perfectly?"

>So you're asking why you're not meeting subjective expectations in a period of time while saying of course you won't have a good squat because that same period of time is too short to expect that. Do I have that right?
I'm saying that some people can meet other's subjective expectations if they have good genetics or good starting strength, otherwise they will fail (= because I started my bench with low weights, I cannot make progress that would be subjectively considered as good in a specific period of time)

You have to use your brain to decide what is advice and what isn't. The vast majority of idiots posting "advice" on here either don't lift at all, have less than one year of experience or years of unsuccsessful "experience".
You haven't even told us what your stats are, yet youre worrying about "muscle mind connection".
People got strong thousands of years ago, its really not that complicated.

Sounds like relatively normal progress to me if your just kinda doing your thing instead of doing it "optimally". I had a feeling it was going to be like this by the way you worded your old posts.
You have an almost 1.5 BW squat, and are close to a 1 BW bench. Those numbers aren't record breaking but you aren't a total noob anymore, it is natural that you won't be progressing "fast" any more.
I'd also suggest you just ask someone who seems like they can deadlift a decent amount of weight to show you how to deadlift IN PERSON, because if you can do pullups there is no reason you shouldn't be able to hold on to a bar.
If you want to get big and strong you need to realize this is a process that will take YEARS, even if you are doing things right.

whats you're saying makes no sense if you can do that many pull ups then you can rep 40kgs.
And by the way if you put chalk on correctly tou cannot slip unless you literally rip the skin off your hands

No lol you pull more weight doing a pull up if you are 70+ kgs, what youre saying is just false
objectively false

wdym thats how i feel
are you a girl?

IDK bro youre wierd

If you always go by what others says you're never going to do anything, you should know this if you're past 20...

I bench with an arch and otherwise try to leverage max as much as I can for numbers, I will still get a massive chest pump if I do 5x10 and most likely the DOMS after. I don't even try any mind muscle connection memery on most lifts, I just do an efficient explosive concentric follow by some eccentric control. I don't understand how it's not possible to engage the primary mover of a lift.
If I am doing pull-ups I'm not worried about hitting my lats, I am thinking about pulling with my elbows and propelling myself upward to full contraction. It's not like my biceps and rear delts come anywhere close to being able to carry the lift, so of course my lats are working.
Did 4 x 10 pull-ups yesterday, nice sore lats today.

Can you get a pump from either? What about lat-pulldowns?

Then you know you're not going to failure lol
you're not doing it correctly

you got more in you son, you cant tell me that unless you have someone spotting you

>people try to pull with their arms in stead of their elbows
This is why I did a mind-muscle connection oriented routine from September to December 2023, before shifting to a more standard routine (see my message divided in three different posts where I describe everything that I've done so far in my lifting journey)

Plus, I've been training at the gym with many friends (more experienced in lifting than me, up to the point of being personal trainers for some of them) and they say that now I'm having good form on my exercises, so I should just keep being consistent at the gym without overthinking the process.

You see? It sounds strange for the majority of lifters

I tend to have more DOMS for legs than upper body, but not the point of "not being able to walk down the stairs"

I don't understand why because I go to failure everywhere

Well, this is a new thing you're mentioning now...

Yes, but don't they find naturally how to recruit the right muscles with experience and time? I've been training for a year and a half now...

Nope, that's the issue, read this

(OP here, first part of my answer)

I trained for a year (the whole of last school year, from September 2022 to August 2023) following just 2 different routines (1 at the end of 2022, 1 at the beginning of 2023). From the end of August onwards, I felt that something wasn't right with my training, because the weights were increasing slowly, I had the impression that I was sometimes cheating on the way I performed exercises, and aesthetically I always looked unathletic in the mirror. I said to myself that after a year, this wasn't normal, and the transition to a year of practice was like a kind of trigger. I spent a lot of time questioning and challenging myself beforehand, but there's also a whole movement among lifters that says "above all, the main beginner's mistake is to spread yourself too thin, you have to focus on a routine that you keep for several months, if you change your routine every five minutes you won't make any progress". That's really the mistake I didn't want to make.

In fact, along with that, I was also telling my fitness friends that I couldn't feel my muscles when I was training. A lot of them said "maybe that's normal at the beginning, but not after so much practice". So I got in touch with an online coach from the lifting board I used to frequent regularly, and he told me that my mind/muscle connection was probably not as good as the average exerciser's and that I'd have to do a routine focusing on proprioception to develop it. Firstly, a routine to "feel your muscles".

(OP here, second part of my answer)

then a classic hypertrophy routine. I followed this for 4 months (from September 2023 to December 2023), I understood certain things (in particular the recruitment of the pectorals in pectoral exercises, and the recruitment of the back in back exercises, which according to him and in all likelihood given my loads, are my weak points) and I improved my sensations. But progress was really slow, I no longer went to the gym with pleasure and enthusiasm, I thought "what's the point of going to the gym? anyway, what I'm doing isn't intense enough to trigger hypertrophy", because I was purposely doing very slow repetitions, where the phases of the movement were broken down into several seconds each, a lot of supersets in the hope of triggering sensations, a lot of very complex exercises that you'd never see in a gym (deadlifting with the low pulley, for example), to the point where people in the gym sometimes came to advise me as if I were a beginner who was just starting out in the gym and who was - like all beginners - doing shit. In short, my ego and self-confidence took a hit, I told myself that after more than a year of practice it wasn't normal for me to be taken for a beginner, my body or my confidence should by themselves indicate the opposite

So, when January 2024 came around, I thought to myself: "Okay, maybe I have crappy proprioception and, more broadly, crappy genetics, but I still need to enjoy my training otherwise it's just not going to work out." I also thought, "Okay, maybe my genetics are crap, but are they so crappy that I have to be the only yokel stuck with a boring proprioception routine while others have fun watching their weights go up and their physique improve? Do I really have to go through this?" Especially since I figured that when you search for "beginner proprioception muscle building routine," you find NOTHING.

(OP here, third and last part of my answer)

It's never a recommendation that's given outright. Beginners are advised to follow a standard routine, regardless of their genetics or sports background. So maybe there should be different routines for non-athletes and athletes, but that's not a methodological proposition I'm finding online. Anyway, I went back to a standard routine (the one I mentioned above) with another friend of mine who has a great physique (in terms of both looks and strength). He's seen me train over and over again, he's seen that indeed I struggled with the executions at the beginning, but he tells me I've made a lot of progress and that I JUST need to continue. It might take longer for me, but such is life.

I am making slow progress (gains of a few repetitions per session, sometimes it's just one repetition, like with the bench press), my physique is better than yesterday, but it's far from the "big progression" that is generally described for beginners.

>You have been lifting without effort and gave been lifting to get tired as a substitute
Could you specify the difference? If I put effort, at the end of the day I'll get tired