Lift Weights – no doubt about it. Weight-training beats everything else for building muscle. Body-weight exercises (calisthenics), gymnastics, cardiovascular work, all may build some muscle for total beginners but only a little – then it stops. Why? Because you can’t add ever-increasing resistance with these other forms of exercise.
Force Your Body To Adapt! Continuing from point one, your muscles will have no reason to grow if you don’t place them under ever-increasing demand. What this means is that the weight you can lift on any given exercise should increase over time. No increase = no growth. This is the concept of Progressive Overload.
Train For Hypertrophy. Hypertrophy means muscle growth. You want to specifically target this, as opposed to strength-training which has its focus primarily on strength gains with building muscle as a happy side-effect. Training for strength usually means a low rep range and compound-only workouts. While compound exercises are vital to a good workout, no-one is building bulging biceps with military presses and squats.
Use Compound And Isolation Exercises. Compound exercises are crucial, they involve many muscle groups simultaneously and induce the release of growth hormone in the body. They can be defined as exercises that involve rotary motion around more than one joint. Key compound examples are squats and deadlifts.
Isolation movements have got a bum rap in recent years. These are exercises that involve rotary movement around one joint e.g. dumbbell bicep curls. While the ‘compound-only’ enthusiasts talk of hitting multiple body parts in one exercise, it must be understood that this is NOT to say that each individual muscle group hit is worked with sufficient intensity to stimulate growth. You may be involving the triceps with deadlifts, for example, but you will not recruitment enough muscle fibers in the triceps, nor bring them to a point of failure with this movement. This is why isolation exercises are a key component of any good muscle-building program.
Therefore, the training program I devised (called THT training) is made up of both compound and isolation exercises to stimulate growth in the WHOLE body.
Train To Muscular Failure. The necessary recruitment and fatiguing of maximum numbers of muscle fibers comes in that last, almost-impossible, rep of a set. Stopping short of this point ensures that you don’t ‘switch on’ the growth mechanism for everyone but the beginner. Always remember that building muscle is a defense mechanism by the body. Basically this means that if there is not a good enough reason provided (i.e. sufficient intensity), you will NOT grow.
Eat – Get enough calories. No matter what bodybuilding diet you are on, you need to eat enough to supply your body with what it needs to grow.
Get Enough Protein – No you don’t need astronomical amounts of protein to build muscle, but you do need more than the average guy. Use the following calculation:
Lean Mass Weight (Kg) x 2.75 = Daily Protein Requirement
Keep Your Workouts Short. Steroid users can train for hours, natural bodybuilders can’t. Catabolic hormones are released in the body which actually keep the body in ‘muscle break-down’ mode. To minimize this, try to keep all weight-training sessions to a maximum of 45 minutes.
Rest Between Workouts. If your priority is building muscle, what good could cardio do? I understand that you want to stay lean while you build muscle but this is best accomplished with a SENSIBLE bodybuilding diet and my ‘mini-cutting‘ method. Leave cardio alone until you want to prioritize fat-loss.
Drink Water. To build muscle at the maximum rate you need to drink enough water. Use this general rule:
Body weight (lbs) X 0.6 = Water Intake in ounces.
Remember strength can decrease by up to 15% with a drop in hydration levels of only 3%!
Definition of Bodybuilding Terms
Sets – A number of consecutive reps without rest
Hypertrophy – Muscle Growth
Compound – An exercise that moves the body through more than one joint movement
Isolation – An exercise that moves the body through a single-joint movement
Concentric – The part of the rep where the muscle contracts and shortens
Eccentric – The part of the rep where the muscle lengthens
Failure – The point at which you cannot possibly perform another rep
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