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 lift 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 even train in such a way that they actually lose muscle! 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
- Training with incorrect or poor form
- Not training hard enough
So avoid mistakes like these and learn the proven, effective ways of structuring muscle building workouts. The following guidelines below will 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. To learn more about why lower reps are most effective, check out our article How Many Reps to Build Muscle.
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 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.Whether or not you choose to train to muscular failure, you should perform every set you do with 100% intensity. For those who don't know, training to muscular failure means that you keep doing reps until it's physically impossible for your muscles to move the weight any further. This type of training is preached by some, yet others believe its unnecessary.
But one way or the other, 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.The information here is only an overview of what goes into a muscle building workout, but if you are interested in learning the exact steps to take in building muscle fast you should check out Sean Nalewanyj's #1 rated online muscle building program at http://www.nalewanyjfitness.com/go.php?offer=julz888&pid=1.
It covers everything from what exercises to perform, how many sets and reps to do, how to train and rest for maximum gains, proper nutrition advice, and a LOT more. With his program you simply cannot fail, and you will be on your way to the muscular body you've always dreamed of in a few short months if you stick with it.
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