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New To Weight Lifting? Learn Patience!
Many of those who are new to body building or figure competitions expect too much too soon and if you want to continue with this, you will need to learn patience. Most people will know that it’s pretty easy to put on 5 pounds of fat – a summer holiday or a week of non-stop Christmas food and drink will do that for a lot of people – but adding 5 pounds of lean muscle is another story. It also needs a sensible diet that will help your body recover and grow between workouts.
Your training program must increase in intensity as your body starts to fill out. The body needs new challenges regularly, when you are doing good exercise, otherwise it gets lazy and coasts along. Many people seem to think a bodybuilder is all brawn and no brain but the opposite is more often true. Most successful body builders have a strong mind-body connection. Discipline is a part of that, as well as patience and you also need persistence – the ability to continue lifting and dieting until you reach your goals.
But you also need to be able to focus on controlling specific muscle groups during a workout routine.
A good weightlifting routine to increase muscle mass includes exercises such as squats and bench presses: known as “multi-joint” exercises. Some people refer to them as compound movements. This is where the largest muscle groups perform most of the work. But when you shift to muscle building for definition then your routines should include curls and rear dumbbell laterals and also aerobic exercise routines too.
Increase Your Reps
Training for muscle gain involves progressively increasing your repetitions in a good weightlifting routine. You should make every effort to increase repetitions beyond twelve. Once you can hit more than 12 repetitions, then you need to periodically increase your weight at least five percent.
In order to continually be able to achieve muscle gains you need to increase the number of repetitions or increase the weight you are using. For example, if on Monday you were able to do 12 repetitions of squats using 215 pounds during your leg workout, then on Wednesday, increase your weight by 5% to 225 pounds and try to complete six repetitions of squats.
Starting Out
When you start out, creating your own weightlifting routine may be confusing. Hire a professional trainer or minimally, invest in some good bodybuilding videos and books. These should have training routines that you can copy and use for your own workouts.
Early on, your routines will take you through your entire body every four days or so. This offers the least amount of recuperation time for your body. Later, you’ll proceed to a 12 day cycle that triples the recovery time between muscle sets. Eventually you’ll be able to achieve sustainable growth with a training frequency of five to eight days for completing all body parts.
Rewards
You are a bodybuilder, so you’ll start to think of your workout as your reward time. Develop a good weightlifting routine that allows you to achieve the greatest results for a full body workout. That hour you spend at the gym everyday is your quality time. Make the best of it.