Muscle Building Program Guidelines, Part One

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.


Muscle Building Program Guidelines, Part Two

Simply put, there is no real muscle building program that is going to be best for everyone. We're all different and so the specific program will vary. However, 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.