Imagine this. You do the same workout as your friend for months. After a while, they lose a significant amount of body fat, they start to look amazing in tight clothes, and they don’t have any trouble lifting their suitcase. You, on the other hand, still look the same, you actually sized up in clothes, and you still can’t get your luggage into the overhead bin… And you are plenty tall.
It might be all in HOW you do your workout. If your diet isn’t disgustingly terrible, you might not be focusing ENOUGH in your exercises. Hear me out:
Your friend and you decide to one leg deadlift. Your friend decides to grab a moderately heavy weight and during the deadlift, drags his for until it can’t drag anymore, contacts his abs so his hip doesn’t shift out, points his toes in, pulls his shoulders down and back and squeezes his glute at the end range of the movement.
You decide to grab a heavier weight because you are stronger than him. You take your weight, and don’t focus on any of the things your friend did, but you go up and down the same amount of times.
You lose this battle. When you aren’t focusing on how well you do the exercise, a lot of things happen that aren’t awesome. You decide to sometimes subconsciously figure out a way to get to both points in the movement. Problem with that is usually that involves changing the little things in the movement that actually help you build muscle. No more contraction of the abs, no more pointing that toe in, and the shoulders are rounded. You’ve made a great exercise pretty ineffective… Congratulations!
Paying attention to the “how” of things can give you the results you need. It doesn’t have to involve more weight with wise form 😉