Building solid and strong muscle mass takes time and persistence, but may not take as long as many people fear. Muscle building takes more than just exercise, though. It’s about learning how bodybuilding works so that you can choose effective methods that will get you the results you want in the least amount of time. Keep reading for some sound advice you can apply towards your muscle building regimen.
Always include the “big three” exercises in your training schedule. These mass-building exercises include dead lifts, squats and bench presses. These exercises make you bulkier as well as helping to condition your body and increase strength. Every weight training workout should include some combination of these three exercises.
Making goals for the short-term, and giving yourself rewards when you reach those goals, is a great way to motivate yourself. Motivation is key to getting muscles, since it can be a long process. Setting rewards can also help you stay with your muscle development goals. For instance, reward yourself with a massage, it can improve blood flow and help your recovery.
Eat well on the days you workout your muscles. An hour or so before your workout, eat more calories than you would on a typical day. That doesn’t mean you can overeat when you are scheduled for a workout, but just be sure to eat a bit more on those days and less on the days you aren’t going to be weight training.
Compound exercises are an excellent way to build muscles to their fullest extent. These exercises use various muscles at once. One popular example of a compound exercise is bench pressing. This exercise works three muscle groups at once: the triceps, shoulders, and chest.
Try to make sure you stretch out your muscles while you work out. People under the age of 40 should hold stretches for a minimum of 30 seconds. Older people–those over the age of 40–should hold each stretch for a minute or longer. Following these guidelines will help prevent injuries after muscle-building exercises.
Imagine that you are larger than you really are. Focus on your upper chest, back and shoulders and train them specifically. Doing so will often create the illusion that your waist is smaller then it really is, giving you an appearance of greater upper body girth.
Staying hydrated is important to proper muscle development. Failing to maintain proper hydration leaves you susceptible to injury. Furthermore, hydration is vital to the process of building and keeping muscle mass, and therefore plays multiple roles.
Try learning your limits, but don’t stop exercising until you use everything at your disposal. When completing a set of exercises, keep pushing yourself until you cannot complete another push-up or lift the bar one more time. You can shorten your sets when you start to get tired, but do not stop until you have no energy left to continue.
Creating a schedule for your program can allow you to maximize your weight training potential and prevent injury. Bodybuilding newbies should exercise no more than twice a week. Veterans can usually up their workout frequency to three times per week without problems.
A frustrating part of muscle development is that some muscle groups show immediate results, while others take longer to develop. Doing a “fill set” can help to avoid this problem. A fill set is a short set focusing on your weak groups of muscles you can do a few days after working hard on this same group.
You can tell your muscle development routine is effective if you are becoming stronger from week to week. In practice, this translates to being able to handle heavier weights over the course of time. When you first embrace weight training, you should expect your lifting capacity to increase by roughly five percent after two workout sessions. Carefully analyze what you might be doing wrong if you are not seeing this type of progress. If you sense you have not gained strength since your last workout, you may not have allowed yourself sufficient recovery time.
If you read this article, you were already interested in building your muscles. Now you hopefully have a better idea of what to do so that you can build muscles as quickly and efficiently as possible. Apply the tips in this article to assist you in reaching the goals you have for muscle building.