5 Tips for Building Muscle Now

By: Gregg Gillies

If you're frustrated with your muscle gain or fat loss goals, I
sympathize with you completely, and understand exactly what you
are going through. I worked out for years before finally
figuring out the correct ways to build muscle and lose fat.

I finally figured ou that the routines and body building tips
touted by professional bodybuilders and the muscle magazines
just aren't going to work for most people. But take heart, you
can reach your muscle mass and fat burning goals.

Putting together a program that incorporates the following body
building tips will point you in the right direction and get you
making gains you hadn't thought were possible.

Tried and True Body Building Tips

Train Intensely - You must work each set until you can't do
another repetition in good form. There is no point in stopping
at a set number of reps (such as 8), if you are capable of doing
12. Your body needs to be challenged or it will not adapt by
building new muscle or burning off body fat.

Cycle Your Intensity - In order to prevent burnout and
overtraining from training intensely, it's important to take a
week off from training every 8 - 12 weeks. If, like me, you
can't stay out of the gym that long, you should train for a week
at a very low intensity level.

Train Briefly - Your workouts need to be short. This is a very
important weight lifting tip. You should never need to do a
weight lifting routine that takes over an hour. If you are in
the gym that long, you aren't working intensely enough. You can
workout hard or long, but you can not do both. And to succeed in
building muscle, you need to workout hard.

Train Infrequently - Your body needs time to recover from your
weight training routine, so that in can adapt and grow. If you
train with weights before your body is completey recovered, you
won't add new muscle and will eventually over train, a big no no.

These are extremely important body building tips. It seems that
your body's potential for strength increases far outweighs your
body's ability to recover. What this means is that as you grow
stronger, your body needs more time between weight training
sessions in order to recover.

Bench pressing 300 pounds is a far greater stress on your body
than bench pressing 50 pounds, even if both were maximum
attempts at the time.

Train Progressively - You need to constantly challenge what
your body can do by continuing to add more weight and/or
repetitions to your previous best effort as often as possible.

Following is a sample weight training routine that incorporates
the above weight lifting tips. If you put the other pieces in
place, such as your nutrition plan and supplementation plan,
you'll be well on your way to great gains and transforming your
physique.

1 - Squats

2 - Deadlifts

3 - Chin Ups

4 - Dips

5 - Bench Press

6 - Military Press

Here's another weight lifting tip - break in to this routine.
For the first few weeks, try working out 3 times per week on
nonconsecutive days, performing 2 working sets of each exercise,
doing 12 - 15 reps per set.

Don't train to failure.

After about a month, you can lower the reps on everthing but
Squats and Deadlifts, to the 8 - 10 rep range. Start training to
failure on some sets.

After another month, begin training to failure on all working
sets and consider only weight training two times per week to
accomodate the higher level of intensity and strengh that you've
developed.

About the author:
Gregg Gillies is the founder of http://www.buildleanmuscle.com
His articles have appeared in Ironman Magazine. He has written
two books and writes for Body Talk Magazine. He publishes a free
newsletter available at his site Build
Muscle and see how you can get a customized muscle building
nutrition plan at http://www.mynutritionjournal.com