Effective weight training takes a lot more than hitting the gym a few times a week. Many factors go into how lifting weights affects the size of your muscles. The information below can help you obtain optimal results while building your muscles.

Focus on the squat, the deadlift, and the bench press. Those three make up the foundation of any good exercise routine. Each will build your strength, and therefore your muscle mass, while also improving muscle condition. Try to work these crucial exercises into your workout routine.

It is important to warm up your muscles with stretching exercises to avoid injuries. As you strengthen your muscles, you also place a heap of additional stress upon them that may increase the likelihood of injuries. You can prevent hurting yourself by warming up and cooling down. Prior to lifting, exercise lightly for about 10 minutes, and follow it up with about 4 light warm-up sets.

Meat is very helpful for building up your muscles. For every pound that you weigh, you need to consume approximately 1 gram of meat. Having the protein your body needs will help you get the muscles you desire.

In order to ensure that you achieve the best muscle growth possible, it is very important that you do compound exercises. These exercises use various muscles at once. A great example of a compound exercise is bench pressing. This exercise works your triceps, chest and shoulders all at the same time.

Don’t bother lifting for more than an hour at a time. After an hour of working out, the body will produce cortisol at an increased rate. This cortisol will block testosterone – wasting all the work you are putting into your weight training. An excellent method of ensuring you maximize your workouts is to keep workouts at less than an hour long.

Repair and build your muscles by making sure to stretch post-workout. Someone under the age of forty should stretch for at least 30 seconds. People who are over the age of 40 should hold stretches for a minimum of 60 seconds. This will help prevent injuries.

Eat plenty of protein when trying to add muscle to your frame. Protein is essential to the maintenance and growth of muscle; working out without eating protein can result in loss of muscle. Depending on your body weight, each day you may require 1 gram of protein.

As you can see from the above article, you now know that a lot of things go into successfully building muscle, some which you can simply include in your everyday routine. Now is the time to put this advice into action and create your muscle-building routine! Do it today and you will be one step closer to seeing the results that you want to see.