Stronger + Leaner

Your guide to a stronger, leaner physique

The #1 Workout Mistake To Avoid At All Costs

 

You’re about to discover a serious workout mistake to avoid at all costs.

And this workout mistake is a bad one for 3 reasons:

  1. It’s super common (lots of people do it)
  2. It has serious repurcussions (it makes your workouts far less effective)
  3. It’s not well known (nobody’s talking about it)

Are you making this workout mistake? Here’s an easy way to find out…

Just ask yourself this question:

In the past year of training, have you made any serious progress? In other words, do you look any better (stronger, leaner, more ripped) now than you did a year ago?

Be honest. (You’d only be lying to yourself.)

If the answer is “not really,” then there’s a good chance you’re making this one crucial workout mistake.

And that mistake is… Doing the wrong workout.

More specifically: Doing the wrong workout for your fitness level.

Here’s what you need to understand.

Workout Mistake: Doing This
Another workout mistake: doing this.

If you’re a beginner (just starting to work out/train, or haven’t been training long), you will need to train differently from someone who is super advanced (longtime lifter, low bodyfat, exceptional strength relative to their weight).

That’s because the workouts that work best for beginners become less effective once you become more advanced. Similarly, the things that work for advanced trainers flat out don’t work very well for beginners. And if you’re more of an intermediate athlete/lifter? Then you need to find something in the middle.

So the first question to ask yourself is:

 

How Advanced Are You?

Most guys overestimate this.

(Most guys who call themselves advanced are really intermediate at best.)

Don’t think about this in terms of how long you’ve been training. After all, you could spend years working out and still be a beginner if you’ve been following really ineffective workouts (avoid squats & deadlifts, not progressively increasing the weight, etc.).

Instead, I would think about this in terms of relative strength.

Here’s what I mean:

Workout mistake to avoid: not doing squats
Not doing squats is another big workout mistake. You can’t skip the hard exercises and expect to grow, gentlemen.

Beginner Level

  • You’re a beginner level lifter until you meet at least 3/4 of the “Intermediate” benchmarks

Intermediate Level

  • You can bench press 1.2 times your bodyweight
  • You can do chin-ups or pull-ups with 1.2 times your bodyweight
  • You can squat 1.6 times your bodyweight
  • You can deadlift 2 times your bodyweight

Advanced Level

  • You can bench press 1.5 times your bodyweight
  • You can do chin-ups or pull-ups with 1.5 times your bodyweight
  • You can squat 2 times your bodyweight
  • You can deadlift 2.5 times your bodyweight

Highly Advanced Level

  • You can bench press 1.5-1.8 times your bodyweight
  • You can do chin-ups or pull-ups with 1.5-1.8 times your bodyweight
  • You can squat 2-2.4 times your bodyweight
  • You can deadlift 2.5-3 times your bodyweight

These numbers all come from this post on LeanGains, and they are all referring to 1-rep max with no straps, belts, or wraps. This gives us an objective way to measure your relative strength. The stronger you are (always relative to your bodyweight), the more advanced you are. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been working out every day for 5 years, or if you just started 5 weeks ago.

You don’t have to meet every single benchmark to qualify for that level. If you’re “Advanced” in bench press, chin-ups, and deadlifts, but not squat, then you should still consider yourself “Advanced.” (That just means squat is an exercise you may need to focus on for a while.)

So now that you know how advanced you are, what’s next?

 

Choose A Workout Program That Matches Your Fitness Level

Workout mistake to avoid: Training like a bodybuilder
If you want to look like this guy, don’t train the way he trains now. Train the way he trained when he was at YOUR level. That’s the kind of training that got him here.

If you’re a beginning lifter…pick a workout program that works well for beginning lifters.

Ditto for intermediate and advanced.

Many guys don’t realize this. They don’t try to customize their workout to their fitness level. Instead, they follow a program that “sounds good” to them (never a good way to choose a workout).

Take The Rock’s Hercules workout plan & diet for example. It’s not that it’s a bad program…but it was made for a guy who is already HUGE. Many guys try to follow this same routine, thinking that it will make them look like The Rock.

It won’t.

Think of it this way: if your goal is to look like The Rock, you should NOT try to do the same workouts The Rock does today. Instead, do the workouts The Rock did when he was at your level.

Make sense?

 

The Only Physique Program That Guides You From Beginner To Advanced

At this point you should have a better conceptual idea of what to do. But you still might not know exactly which program to follow.

As I mentioned, this is a big…big…big problem for many guys.

Because if your goal is to go all the way from beginner to highly advanced, then there aren’t any good roadmaps out there. You have to figure it out for yourself–which is a slow, inefficient, time-consuming process.

That’s why I created The Stronger+Leaner Guide to Getting Ripped.

I’ve bought, downloaded, read, and tried every single workout/fitness/physique manual I could find. And let me tell you:

You can’t find this information ANYWHERE else.

All the other programs you find out there are suited for one specific fitness level. But 99% of the time, they don’t tell you which fitness level their program is appropriate for.

(Probably because they don’t know.)

The S+L Guide to Getting Ripped is the only complete physique transformation guide that takes you through all the fitness levels. It takes you by the hand and shows you exactly what kind of workout you should do if you’re a beginner, intermediate, or advanced lifter.

If your goal is to build the best body you can, then this information is absolutely priceless.

The guide is almost complete and will be available within the next week or two. If you’re interested in getting a copy of the guide, then click here to learn more & get updates about The S+L Guide to Getting Ripped.