Building muscle is a great way to get fit, healthy and look amazing. It is important to know what you are doing to maximize your efforts and avoid painful injuries. The following article contains a number of tips and tricks to help you get the most from your muscle building efforts.

Turn your attention to the bench press, squat and deadlift. These three exercises make up the core of a solid bodybuilding routine for good reason. They are the exercises that will improve your strength and muscle mass. These exercises should always be included in some form or another.

If you have been weight training for a period of time and want to see results a bit more quickly, work on your large groups of muscles, such as those in your legs, back and chest. Some great exercises for those groups are deadlifts, squats, bench presses, dips and military presses.

Stay active on your rest days. Being active increases your blood flow, and will help you to recover more quickly. The activity can be as simple as going for a walk. You can also go swimming, biking, or even get a massage. Engaging in these kinds of activities is significantly more effective than simply lying in bed all day.

Make time to workout at least three times weekly. If you are just starting out, you should limit yourself to three times, but as your muscles become more conditioned, you should try to get to the gym more often than that. As you become more experienced, you can increase your workouts to be more than once daily, several times a week.

Squats are perhaps the most important exercise for building muscle mass. Beyond building the leg muscles, squats are an excellent whole-body workout. They work out the arms, chest, abdominal muscles and even the back. Using a proper technique is essential with squats. For a proper squat, the hips should come lower than the knees and the body should remain balanced.

It is important to stay hydrated when building muscle. Not being hydrated means that you could end up hurting yourself. Furthermore, staying hydrated makes it much easier to build and maintain your muscle mass.

Try out some plyometric exercises. These particular exercises let your body develop the fast-twitching muscle fibers that encourage growth of muscle mass. Plyometrics are like ballistic moves in that they require some acceleration. For example, plyometric push-ups require you to propel your hands off the floor, pushing your body into the air.

Try to do bench presses and squats in the same manner that you do deadlifts, which is from a complete stop. Utilize bench and squat movements in the power rack, and allow the safety bars to be set at a certain point where this bar is at the bottom of these moves. You need to let the bar settle on this point. This helps you to remove any elastic tension, which assists you in increasing your strength.

You can always cheat a bit as you lift weights. Using the leverage of your body weight to squeeze out a few more reps is an easy way to increase your workout results. Just be careful that you don’t cheat too often. Make sure that your rep speed is controlled. Never compromise your form.

To increase muscle mass, you must keep an eye on your calorie input. You can eat either good calories or bad calories, and therefore, it is necessary to educate yourself about what foods are good for muscle building. A bad diet makes you fat – not muscular.

Tailor your intake of food to your efforts. You should eat more on the days you are planning on working out, especially just before, and after you exercise. On the days, you are not working out, choose lighter meals and cut back on the proteins. Make sure you choose healthy foods on the days you have to eat more.

Find a good workout partner. Ideally, you should find a partner that is as motivated as you are, or even more so. You can motivate each other. It is also advisable to pick a partner with roughly the same strength as you. If you pick stronger or more experienced than you are, you may find yourself getting frustrated.

Take the time to stretch for ten minutes prior to starting your muscle building exercises. When you warm up your muscles, you are reducing your chances of injuring yourself when later lifting heavy loads. Also, regularly stretching helps prevent injuries, which will keep you consistently building muscle and staying healthy.

Don’t get mixed up with anabolic steroids. These sorts of chemicals will interfere with your natural hormone production. Steroids cause damage to your liver, as well as lowering “good” cholesterol, and often causes men to develop some breast tissue. Steroids can cause negative mood swings, or ‘roid rage’, and may also contribute to acne. This isn’t a very attractive picture is it?

Try consuming most of your calories early during the day. Doing this will increase your metabolism throughout the day. In addition, it helps you make sure that excess calories aren’t being stored as fat. Gradually decrease the amount of calories you consume later during the day when you aren’t using as much energy.

Done properly and with diligence, a good muscle building routine will have you in great shape in no time. Before you know it, you will look strong and feel fabulous! Apply the advice in this article to your fitness routine to build your muscles and build a lifelong commitment to your health and well being.