Forgive me for paraphrasing out of the bulking forum, but I thought this might make a great topic for both beginners and veterans.

What, in you amassed experience in working out/eating, do you wish you would've know when you started? Something that if you had known, could've saved you untold time, frustration, injury, etc?




Me? Hell I guess I 'started' when I was about 13. I wish I would have known then how important what you eat really is.

When I started they didn't have the Internet. If I'd had half the info available to me then that I do now I'd have been miles ahead.

And I agree with you...what to eat and when to eat it plus better availibilty of supplements would most likely have put me ahead.

I got some pretty good results in the early days on "beginner's luck".
But if I'd known what I know now I'd have got awesome results instead of just "good".

I'd say I most wish I knew how my body responds to salt! I mean, if I have food that has a lot of salt in it, I can expect that salt to cling to any little bit of moisture in my body, and stay there for a few days! So now, I stick to whole foods which I can control salt content.

Also, through trial and error I have found the macros that work best for me (about 45C, 35P, 25F...or thereabouts). When I was eating 40/40/20 I wasn't really losing much weight.

Anyway, hind sight is 20/20.

cheers,
MIKE

High reps with light loads are for cutting, i wish i knew that was total BS.

I wish I knew all along how important training the posterior chain is to overall development, rather than just worrying about my max bench press. The sad thing is, if I could go back and build a proper foundation from the beginning my bench would probably be double what it is now.

The importance of goal setting and tracking one's progress.

When I started years ago I trained rather aimlessly. When I implemented these tools around the beginning of 2004, my progress sky-rocketed.

Basically, I wish I knew, and I wish my mom had known, the importance of protein in your diet.

I'm not a low-carb/no-carber, but back in the day, entire days would go by when the only source of protein I'd have was milk. And milk isn't really a great source of protein, especially since it is such a big source of sugar.

I wish I knew that sausages, including many cold cuts, don't have much protein in them at all and shouldn't really count as "meat."

I wish I had known (and my parents had known) that you're not going to get proportionally good quantities of protein from cheese or peanut butter.

I wish I had known that cheese ravioli and marinara sauce is basically junk food, and not a nutritious dinner.

When I visit my mom's place and get hungry, I search her fridge and pantry for protein sources and find next to nothing. And my mother is very big into nutrition, too. All the bread is whole wheat, the cabinet is full of vitamins, and there are lots of veggies, but protein is very hard to come by.

It kind of makes sense now why I used to drink at least a half gallon of milk a day when I was living at home, and why I rarely felt like I had had enough to eat.