Consistency is the Trump Card

I was recently asked what one piece of advice I would give to a new aspiring bodybuilder. My immediate response was that consistency trumps all other factors.

You can talk about optimal set and rep schemes, debate body part splits, and discuss ad nauseum the importance of nutrient timing, but if you aren't getting to the gym day after day, week after week, and year after year, none of those other things make a bit of difference.
For unlike constructing a building or a wall, the improvements you make to your body are fleeting. They simply won't last unless you continue to build.

Many of the folks I work out with are gung ho for a week or a month and then they miss a week or two. They come back for two months, hitting the weights with a vengeance then miss a month. They continue this hit and miss pattern, literally for years, and then can't understand why they don't make progress.

To understand this lack of progress and how to overcome it, it is useful to think of bodybuilding as a construction process. Just like a construction job, you have to plan, you have to build a strong foundation before worrying about the frills and embellishments, the materials must be high quality to get the result you're aiming for, etc. But, unlike a real building, the bricks you put in place through bodybuilding will disappear if you don't continuously add to them day after day. You may add a brick or two with each quality workout, but almost immediately, within a day or two at most, someone begins to steal those bricks away, one or two at a time.

Unfortunately for the aspiring bodybuilder, that's just the way your body works. It's seeking to return to the status quo. It doesn't want to hold onto extra muscle, and there's nothing you can do to change that unalterable fact.

So if you've spent a month adding 15 or 20 high quality bricks to your wall, and you then take a week or two off, those relentless construction thieves will have stopped by in the dead of night and stolen 5 or 10 of those hard earned bricks. If you take three weeks off, you'll have lost all of them and maybe more. How quickly you can add bricks and how quickly they get stolen is a matter of genetics, how hard and smart you work, the quality of your nutrition, and how much rest you're getting. Rest assured though, if you're not continuously building, if you're not applying consistency, the thieves are there and, given time, they will steal it all.

If, however, you get to the gym every time you're scheduled to be there. If you can string together a series of days, then a series of weeks, then months. If you can do this for a period of years, if you can be consistent, you will be able to defeat those insidious construction thieves, adding bricks faster than they can take them away. If you can be consistent, you absolutely can build the body of your dreams.