You know, I see you're from Asia and I guess I'm a 'mat sellah, 'farang' or 'orang putih', or whatever the local variation is, but you really don't need to keep saying sir, in fact it's embarrassing. Either that or you're a very cheeky scamp. Whichever - stoppit.
The book is the Biggly Body Plan but you don't need it and wouldn't like it; it's written for compete noobs and has no pretty pictures, so even noobs don't like it.
I guess monitoring myself would include measuring myself often to see if I am growing or not.But after the beginner's lucky spurt of gains, things start to slow down a bit right
The initial spurt is in strength rather than muscular mass. Your body just gets better at recruiting muscle fiber but yes that happens faster than the gains in size (in fact to some extent you get both).
So how much time period is one supposed to continue using the workout before you take it as an official 'no go' statement from the body? A month atleast, I would say, from what you posted-right
A month is long enough to see how your diet is going, and long enough to see if you can
maintain a new routine (say jumping from 2 to 3 workouts a week, or from 80 sec to 30 secs between sets etc). If it doesn't put you off or strike you as real silly then I'd say you need 2 months to judge a routine or workout plan.
Main thing is to get your diet sorted, KNOW what you require to grow, maintain or cut. Can you imagine how much easier it is if you KNOW this stuff?
Sure, we can say "+500 to grow, - 500 to shrink" but even that's not so simple. The body develops a 'set point' and will fight hard to stay there, even if you are say 400 calories under what you need to maintain comfortably. Then you slash 500 off and whoop, there went the last 6 months of work in 3 weeks. And if you weren't monitoring you wouldn't even notice at first. If you were monitoring every day you'd notice before the end of the first week.
No, you don't need to monitor
everything every day but if you're changing your diet for example, then yes, you should measure hips, waist and skinfolds every day. And weight.
This is another reason for changing only one thing at a time - your body is remarkably good at doing what it does and stubbornly refusing to change over the short term, longer term it's a different story.
A lot of people will change their tempo, then the reps, then the sets, then the workout frequency, then the rest periods, then the entire routine, then the muscle mag they read - and never actually gave their body a chance to tell them what was or wasn't working for them.
As I say it's not just your genetic makeup, it's your lifestyle, preferences etc. We all know a lot of people start the new year full of hope and promise, and quickly quit. It's not that they don't believe it's possible, though that happens too, but that they don't believe it's possible within the time/effort and hassle they're willing to commit. You'll get some guy making good progress on 2 all-over workouts a week that'll hear he "has" to do 3 workouts a week, he has to keep changing that workout and he can never eat another carb again after 6pm. Gee, what a twat for quitting eh?
Well wouldn't YOU? Poor bastid was just getting started and the mags dump that crap on him.
Had he stayed at it the following new year's resolution might be "bench 250" or "10% bf", instead of "go on a diet again".
Knowing for certain what you're doing is working for you is a great place to try changing a variable to see what happens. If you're not 100% confident in it you're more likely to quit than see an improvement when you change it a little.
You're No1 danger is not getting the number of reps wrong or dropping a weight on your head, it's giving up. Take the time to experiment but do so from a solid base of what works for you and that you're willing to do.
Then it's all cheese all the time.
B.