How To Build 2

(1) 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.

(2) 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.

(3) 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. Read on…

(4) 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.

(5) 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.

(6) 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. Go here to see how many calories you need to build muscle.

(7) 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