You want to build up your muscles quickly, eh? Most people feel the same way and, we’ll discuss a wonderful method for doing just that, but you need to keep in mind that the word “quick” in reference to bodybuilding isn’t quite as quick as it in other areas. Supersets will help you build muscles quicker than most other methods, but it’s still not going to happen immediately.

First, let’s talk about your diet. To build muscle, you need to eat more than you are right now. Eat 5 to 7 smaller meals a day, as opposed to 3 big ones, and make sure you’re getting a lot of protein. You’re going to be burning more calories because you’re going to be working out harder and, to gain muscle, you need to bring in more calories than you burn…We’re talking about a lot of calories. Take your current weight, multiply it by 18 and you’ll get the approximate number of healthy calories you need to take into your body to start really building muscle.

Now, onto the superset secret!

A superset is really just nothing but doing two different exercises, back to back, with no rest period in between. We’re going to build your muscles up fast using three types of supersets:

Pre-Exhaustion supersets work on one muscle group with two different exercises: an isolation exercise and a compound exercise. For example, you would do leg extensions for your thighs and then immediately follow up with squats. The point being that you work one muscle (your quadriceps in our example) to “exhaustion” but then continue working them with an exercise allowing other muscles to help (glutes, hamstrings, etc. in our example).

It is imperative that you keep in mind the fact that you cannot do the compound exercise at the same weight you normally would. You’ve exhausted the muscle you focused on during your isolation phase and it’s just not going to give you the same amount of strength you’re used to. In fact, it may give out on you all together. I say you need to keep this in mind because you don’t really want to have your muscle give out on you while doing a bench press, do you?

Post-Exhaustion supersets work on one muscle group, just like before, but they are the reverse of pre-exhaustion supersets. You’re going to work with more weight on the compound exercise, which is done first, and less weight on the isolation exercise, which is done second. This method is safer than the pre-exhaustion method, because the results of dropping the weight during an isolation exercise don’t tend to be as…well, potentially disfiguring.

Finally, antagonistic supersets are completely different than these previous two types. They utilize two opposing muscles groups, instead of focusing on one muscle group. Even though the opposing muscle groups aren’t directly related, the do come into play during each exercise. This allows both groups to receive more exercise than they would during a straight set. Examples of antagonistic supersets include pairing your chest and back, biceps and triceps or hamstrings and quadriceps.

Work supersets into your straight sets gradually, but as quickly as you are comfortable with. Hardcore iron-warriors will do nothing but supersets when they want to pump up very quickly, though they go back to a mixture of straight sets after a month or so.

Simply put, there is no real muscle building program that is going to be best for everyone. The nature of humanity is that everyone is a different person and, despite our similarities, we are all different. So, let’s examine the basic structure of a successful program for building up your muscles so that you’ll have a strong foundation to build your individual program from.

Develop a Plan

The old adage says that failing to plan is planning to fail and it’s very true. You need to know what goal you are pursuing, specifically. You need to know why you want to achieve this goal. You need to know what you need to do to achieve that goal, in terms of eating habits and specific exercises. Finally, you need to know when you are going to do each of these things.

Obviously, you can do these things however you want. The important thing is to ask and answer these questions. I have found that I have more success when my answers are extremely specific and when I write them down.

Use Your Brain As Much As Your Body

Working out consistently and intensely cannot be accomplished and sustained without mental focus. You’ve got to get your brain in the game! The first part of this is to keep your eye focused on why you’re doing this. This is why it’s so important that, as part of your planning, you figure out why you want to achieve your goal: that why will keep you going when you feel like you can’t.

The second part to this is to fix your self-talk. The way you talk to yourself, in your mind, has a profound impact on the way your body responds to and deals with life. If your brain is filled with negative self-talk, if you’re constantly putting yourself down and referring to yourself in negative ways, you’re not alone. Most people do. If you want your program to be as effective as possible, you need to eradicate this negative thinking as much as possible.

The third, and final, part of this is the use of creative visualization. The subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between an experience you are actually having and an experience that you are vividly imagining. Your body will respond to this as if you’re actually doing it as well. Many professional athletes attribute a lot of their success to imaginary practice. At least once a day, you should close your eyes and go through your workout as vividly as possible in your mind.

Focus on Nutrition With Equal Passion

So many people are incredibly passionate about working out and yet a surprisingly small percentage of them are as passionate about their diet. As I alluded to in the first step, you should plan the changes in your eating habits the same way you plan the changes in your exercise plan. If you want to build muscles, you need to take in more calories. You’re going to burn more of them and you’re going to need some leftover for your body to use in building your new muscles.

Incorporate Increasing Resistance Into Your Plan

While this seems obvious to many people, you’d be surprised how many folks stroll down to the gym every other day and do the exact same workout they did last time…last week…last month…last year. Obviously, if you workout with fifty pound weights every time you work out, and do the same number of reps every time you work out, you will see some benefit. However, that benefit will stall at a certain point and you won’t proceed past it.

You need to increase the amount of resistance in your workout, either by increasing the weight or by increasing the number of reps. Be realistic so that you don’t burn yourself out, but be certain you challenge yourself as well.

These are the first four principles that should form the foundation of your program. In the second part, I’ll round out your foundation with four more principles:

Utilize Free Weights and Focus on Compound Exercises;
Ensure That Your Workout Is Balanced;
Rotate Your Workout Regimen; and
Recuperate as Passionately as You Work Out.

Utilizing these principles, you can start with a foundation that will allow you to develop your own, personalized program for achieving your goals.

Part 2

There are eight principles upon which to build the foundation for your program to ensure you have the best chance of success. It part one we covered the first four:

Develop a Plan
Use Your Brain As Much As Your Body
Focus on Nutrition With Equal Passion; and
Incorporate Increasing Resistance Into Your Plan

Now, we’re going to cover the other four principles, so that you develop your program for building your muscular physique and have it optimized for success.

Utilize Free Weights and Focus on Compound Exercises

Since your intention is to build muscles, you should utilize free weights for either all or most of your workouts. While the exercise machines that have been created over the last 50 years have their use, building muscles is not their optimal use. One of the biggest reasons is most of them limit your ability to do compound exercises, or those exercises which utilize more than one muscle group at a time.

Focusing on compound exercises gives you the most “bang for your buck” and will help you get to your goals faster than doing machine based exercises that only utilize one muscle group at a time.

Ensure That Your Work Out Is Balanced

We all have some areas of our body we want to focus on more than others. We all have some exercises we enjoy more than others. However, for optimum health and the best overall physique, you should focus on your entire body. This means tackling your least favorite exercise with as much passion as you approach your favorite exercise.

Doing this goes back to step 2, utilizing your brain. Keep in mind that you are striving to be in the best shape possible, to be the healthiest person you can be. This will help you avoid injury and illness in your life as well as providing you with an optimal state of existence.

Rotate Your Workout Regimen

Because we all operate at a unique biorhythm, we are naturally inclined to workout in different ways on different days. Our maximum passion on Monday is not the same as our maximum passion on Wednesday. This is natural and sociological and, to a certain extent, beyond your control. Well, it’s not beyond your control, but it’s beyond the scope of this article.

So, let’s say you have exercise routines A, B and C – each with focuses on different muscle groups. You start by doing A on Monday, B on Wednesday and C on Friday. After four weeks, rotate so that you do C on Monday, A on Wednesday and B on Friday. Four weeks later, rotate so that you do B on Monday, C on Wednesday and A on Friday. Four weeks later, rotate back to the original schedule. Doing this will allow each group of muscles to benefit from your unique biorhythm.

Recuperate as Passionately as You Work Out

Your body needs time to recover from your workout. It’s during the recuperation period that your muscles actually increase in size and strength not during the actual work out. In step 7, my example included 3 days of working out, each day focused on a different muscle group. This means that out of 7 days, four days are total recuperation days and each muscle group has 6 days of recuperation between work outs.

In working out, as in so many other things, the law of diminishing returns applies at some point – more work start to actually equal less results. Don’t push yourself to that point by assuming that more is always better, because it’s not.

Take these eight guidelines and develop your muscle building program around them. You’ll find that by developing the program accordingly and sticking to it consistently, the body of your dreams isn’t as far away as you think it is.

It’s ironic that the icon for both the peak in muscle conditioning and the pit of laziness is a six-pack. For the former it’s on your stomach and for the latter it’s poured into your stomach. Of course, it’s a lot easier to pour it into your stomach which explains why many more people drink six-packs than develop them.

If you’re serious about getting your abdomen into six-pack condition, you need to know and keep in mind that there is no magic bullet and that it’s going to take a sincere commitment to succeed. Realistically, developing the muscles for the six-pack appearance isn’t actually the most difficult part of the process. Removing the layer of fat hiding your six-pack is the hard part.

This is the reason that you see guys doing crunches for what seems like eternity, doing it religiously every day and still not developing that six-pack they are so desperately chasing. For all they know, they have developed it, they just can’t see it!

So, the first key to developing six-pack abs is fat reduction. While it’s possible to focus on a specific muscle set and develop it without really developing the rest of your body, this simply isn’t possible when it comes to weight loss. You may see advertisements for products and pills promising “spot” weight loss (i.e., reducing just your tummy fat), but those advertisements are designed for the bottom line, not the waist line.

You’re going to need to alter your diet, pure and simple. I’m not saying this because I sneak into your house while you’re sleeping and look at your fridge, I’m saying it because it’s the safe bet: most people need to alter their diets if they want to lose weight and achieve optimum health.

Burning fat is really a simple concept in theory: you need to burn more calories than you put into your body. There are two ways of burning calories and, to effectively develop your health and especially your six-pack, you should master both of them. The first is through exercise, especially aerobic and cardiovascular exercise. Get sweating and get your heart beating faster and you’ll burn through calories. The second is through speeding up your metabolism.

Contrary to popular belief, metabolism is not automatically set by genetics. You can speed up your metabolism and, by doing so, you will burn more calories on constant basis. Steps to improving your metabolism include drinking lots of water, exercising and building your muscles, eating high nutrition foods frequently and not skipping meals.

Those last two steps need a bit of explaining for you to fully benefit from them. The classic three-times-a-day meal plan is not the optimum way to eat. For maximum efficiency, you should eat five to seven smaller nutritious meals a day. Doing this ensures that your body doesn’t have a lot of excess energy sitting around waiting to be used, because you’re taking in less at a time.

Skipping meals, the most common and least successful tactic for people trying to lose weight, can wreak havoc with your metabolism. Your body is a highly adaptable machine designed, at bare minimum, to survive. It adjusts to your eating habits and then, when suddenly you skip a meal, it slows down your metabolism to ensure that you have enough energy to get to your next meal. Eating regularly is necessary to keep your metabolism up.

With your nutrition under control, exercise portion comes into play. As I recommended above, regular cardiovascular exercise is necessary for losing the fat. You also need to do weight-training exercises to shape and tone the muscles in your body and abdomen. These two exercise types need to be balanced, because overdoing either one of them is highly counterproductive.

Once you get your body fat down to six-pack level, then you can slowly reduce the cardiovascular exercise and increase the weight training if you’re interested in developing your muscles further. If you do that, however; remember to adjust your daily calorie intake accordingly to compensate for the reduced cardio exercise.

Just so there are no misconceptions, there is nothing in this article that can be considered a “miracle breakthrough” for muscle building. Realistically, 99.9% of the “miracle breakthroughs” you hear about today are only interested in building one thing – the bank balance of the person peddling the product. We’re going to discuss a few general, realistic, and workable ways to build your muscles.

For that reason, none of them work overnight, none of them work while sitting on the couch watching television and none of them work by simply drinking some funky concoction. While muscle building supplements have their place, we’ll discuss those at another time.

We also won’t discuss overall nutrition and health but, suffice it to say, if you have an unhealthy lifestyle which makes you overweight and out of shape, you need to fix that immediately. Why waste time on these muscle building activities if you have set your life up as an oppositional force to your own success? Develop a healthy lifestyle and then begin to focus on building your muscles.

One piece of advice that applies to everything we’ll be discussing is to be realistic and don’t push too hard, too fast. The number one reason that people don’t stick with their workout plan is that they start off pushing too hard and get burnt out.

Finally, you need to decide what kind of muscle form you’re looking to achieve. Drawing on examples nearly everyone is familiar with, you need to decide if you want to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger (bigger bulk) or Bruce Lee (lean and toned). This decision will help you determine which kinds of exercises you do and how you do them.

Now, with all of that out of the way, let’s look at some things you can do to build your muscles!

If you don’t already, start getting your body used to working out. Start running every day, not jogging or walking, to help get your blood moving and your muscles primed for building. You’re not running a race so you don’t need to be a speed demon. Instead, maintain a comfortable and steady pace, taking long and powerful strides.

If you want to have the lean, Bruce Lee appearance, you need to work with lighter weights and have a higher number of repetitions in each set. By doing this, you are toning and shaping your muscles into longer and thinner forms. If you want the Arnold look, you need to work heavier weights and do fewer repetitions. By doing this, you are toning and shaping your muscles into short and thicker forms.

Ensure that you have a regular plan, focusing on specific muscle groups, and stick to it. Don’t try to work every muscle in your body every day of the week. At best, this will lead to burnout and at worst it will lead to injury. Your muscles will be getting worked hard, so they need to have time to recuperate.

However, you should rotate your plan every month. For example, let’s say that you are working on your chest, shoulders and biceps on Monday; your abdomen, forearms and upper back on Wednesday; and your lower back and legs on Friday. Every four weeks, rotate one day so that you’ll be working on your lower back and legs on Monday; your chest, shoulders and biceps on Wednesday; and your abdomen, forearms and upper back on Friday. The following month, rotate one more day.

This will allow each of your muscles groups to take advantage of the fact that you probably workout differently on each of those days. If you simply stick with the exact same schedule forever, then you’ll find yourself quickly running into what are known as “plateaus,” where you just can’t seem to build that muscle group past a certain point. With a rotation schedule, you will avoid this problem by giving each muscle group the benefit of your natural changing body rhythm.

If you keep these general guidelines in mind and consistently work at your plan with passion and intensity, your body will be more toned and shaped than you ever imaged it could be. While it won’t happen overnight, it probably won’t take as long as you’re afraid it will.