Guide to Muscle Building Workouts
One of the first
things you need to learn in order to build muscle is how to perform muscle
building workouts the right way.
To build muscle mass you need to shock your muscles into growth,
and by far the best way to do this is with weight training. But you need to know
what you're doing in order to make significant gains in muscle strength and
size.
The majority of people in the gym don't really know what they're
doing. They aim to gain muscle but they don't train properly at all and just
toss weights around hoping for the best. If you want great results, you need to
first learn how to perform effective muscle building workouts.
Some people train in such a way that they actually lose muscle.
You need to avoid that at all costs. The most common mistakes that lifters make
are:
- Choosing the wrong excercises
- Training on too many days
- Working each muscle group too frequently
- Training for too long in a single session
- Performing too many sets or reps
- Not training to their limit
So avoid mistakes like these and learn the proven, effective ways
of structuring muscle building workouts. The following guidelines should help
you on your way.
Use Heavy Weights And Low Reps
If you want to build as much
muscle as you can, you absolutely MUST use heavy weights. By heavy, I mean
weights that are challenging for you. Everyone is different, and a weight
that is challenging for you might be a walk in the palk for the guy next to you.
But don't let that discourage you at all.
Now, most guys in the gym you see will perform over 10 to 15 reps
on an exercise. For building muscle mass, this is not what you want to be doing.
You need to lift a weight that is heavy enough so that you can only perform a
low amount of reps (for example, 4-8 reps).
Using heavy weights with lower repititions causes much more stress
on your muscles and that's how they grow the fastest. You simply won't get the
same muscle building results by lifting lighter weights for more reps, that's a
fact.
Focus on Compound Lifts
To build muscle effectively, you need
to focus on the compound lifts. Compound lifts are the excersises that require a
lot of different individual muscles to complete the lift. These exercises are
the foundation of good muscle building workouts. Here are the basic compound
exercises:
- Squats (legs, lower back)
- Deadlifts (legs, back, shoulders)
- Bench Press (chest, shoulders, triceps)
- Overhead Presses (shoulders, triceps)
- Chin Ups/Rows (back, biceps)
- Dips (shoulders, chest, triceps)
Some of these compound lifts are very difficult to perform and you
might get discouraged by this. But whatever you do, don't wimp out and ignore
them! They are by far the best exercises for packing on significant muscle mass,
and you should take the time and effort to learn how to perform them correctly
and safely.
Free Weights are Best - Not Machines
Your muscle building
workouts should concentrate on free weights and not machines. Using free weights
will work your muscles more because you have to guide and balance the weight
yourself, and this means you will build more muscle than you could with
machines.
Machine exercises are handy for targeting specific muscle groups,
but only AFTER you have performed the main compound exercise work. They should
not form any basis for your workouts.
Train With 100% Intensity
You should treat going to the gym
like going to war. It's an intense battle against your muscles. The more muscle
tissue you break down during your workout, the more muscle your body will
develop. You need to train with 100% intensity on every set to get the
best results.
This means that for every set you perform on each excerise, you
need to get to the point of what is called muscular failure. Muscular
failure is reached when you simply can't move the weight any further, not even
an inch.
The truth is, most people don't train hard enough, and are missing
out on a lot of extra muscle they could gain if they put in that little more
each session.
Train With The Right Frequency
When trying to build muscle a
lot of mis-informed people believe that the more they train, the better. This is
certainly not true! Overtraining is a very common problem that sabotages
a lot of people from building muscle.
A proven way of structuring muscle building workouts is to work
each muscle group only once per week, that is all. If you train with full
intensity on every set, once a week for each muscle group is all you will need
to trigger maximum muscle growth.
How many times a week should you workout? A lot of the top experts
in the field of building muscle say that 3 times a week is a perfect balance.
This has been proven to work very effectively.
You should also aim to group muscles that normally work together
into the same workout session. For example, when you train your chest with the
bench press it involves your shoulders and triceps aswell, so it would be wise
to group those three muscle groups into the same workout session.
So a typical training schedule could look like this:
Session 1: Legs, Abs
Session 2: Chest, Shoulders,
Triceps
Session 3: Back, Biceps
Summing It Up
So there you have it, the basics to structuring
great muscle building workouts. These guidelines are not to be ignored if you
want the greatest muscle strength and size gains possible!
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