Any journey to fitness is hinged on a foundation; the first building block in that foundation is your personal fitness goals, which, in this case, is building muscle. How much fat do you want to burn away, or how much real mass do you want to gain? Your priorities will determine the design of your workout schedule so that you may apportion your energy accordingly.
If you have only a small amount of body fat, then you don’t have to do a lot of cardio; but if fat loss is part of your goal, then you can add in some cardio exercises, doing about two sessions per week for about 30 minutes each. Remember, though—this isn’t to say strength training can’t help you out with fat burning as well. It can; it just does so while building muscles.
Creating Your Strength Training Workout
Any program to build muscle centers on a properly designed resistance training exercise. You will be working with weights two to three times a week and should spend no more than about an hour in the gym. This would seem a little short, but it matters less how long you stay at the gym compared to how well you work out. Rather, heavier weights with fewer repetitions will be better. This method works better, if building muscular mass is your aim and objective, rather than light weights with high repetitions.
Weight training is also to be done with focus on form. You need to exhaust the muscles by the end of one or two sets of repetitions so that you can proceed with working on other groups of muscles. Also, try choosing compound exercises in which you work on more than one muscle at a time. The movements of squats, deadlifts, push-ups, and pull-ups all involve many muscles, hence making your workout much more interactive and productive. This approach is also widely adopted because it reduces time consumption and will optimize the result of each session one spends.
Keep Track of Results
Successful results from your workout are not only about going to the gym but about keeping track of your progress as well. Before you engage in your workout, weigh your body and take the size of your arms, your legs, your waist, chest, and any other part of your body that you want to see growth. This should be done once a week. The frequent measurements are proof of your progress and will keep you moved along the route of body muscle building.
Developing a keen sense of awareness in terms of your changes-either in strength or in the appearance of your body-will keep you engaged and determined. In fact, remember that progress is often never linear, and sometimes our bodies take a while to catch up. As such, you may be hitting a bit of a plateau.
Keeping Your Routine Fresh
To avoid any stagnation and ensure progressive development, it is important to cycle out the routine of exercises quite frequently. Every four weeks, change one or two exercises in your routine to give your body something new to work against. Since your muscles are getting used to the current workouts you have, this is when you want to make these changes to keep growing and seeing progress. You will be pushing your body out of its comfort zone, which means fresh muscle engagement and continued results.
Designing an exercise plan to build muscles isn’t the most daunting task in existence: one needs to explain quite clearly what he or she hopes to achieve and have a good routine that will suit those goals, not forgetting to keep track of the progress throughout it all.
More importantly, the commitment and adaptive approach needed to grapple with this will add bulk to your body, but it will also help you gain more knowledge about the potential of your body and the changes that are taking place inside it. Ready for heavier lifts and tracking your evolution? Your journey to building a stronger body is just beginning!
