20.Balance, exercise and banishing harmful habits 3 – Bodybuilding

Stick to these limits, and the risk of getting into a situation where you amplify cortisol production is very limited.

There must be times when you get away from all forms of training and exercise to make an effort to relax. But when you do so, try not to succumb to bad practices that might actually damage your bodybuilding efforts.

For example, while having the occasional beer is not going to damage the chances of your being a successful bodybuilder very much, smoking 20 cigarettes a day is certainly going to make it an awful lot harder to achieve the physique that you want to achieve.

Filling your lungs with tar and nicotine filled smoke every day is likely to reduce your ability to recover from serious training sessions, meaning that you will automatically be able to train less frequently and probably with less intensity as well. Your progress to bodybuilding success will naturally be slowed if you are a heavy smoker.

One of the greatest personal characteristics that you will learn or have enhanced by becoming a natural bodybuilder is that of personal discipline, which is a prerequisite for taking a life changing decision like quitting the evil weed!

Remember to apply determination and discipline to everything in your life, and set goals in everything you do as a way of achieving and then maintaining the balance that you must have to be successful.

Getting the body that you want is going to take a lot of hard work and effort, so only a naïve fool would believe that it’s going to be easy to achieve your goals.

However, once you do get to where you want to be in bodybuilding terms, you can live what you might call the ‘bodybuilder lifestyle’ in the same way as thousands of other successful bodybuilders.

Nevertheless, do not ever allow yourself to lose sight of the fact that the lifestyle is not your whole life. You need balance, you need outside interests away from the gym, and above all else, you have to adapt an all-round lifestyle that is conducive to achieving bodybuilding success.