As an example, few beginners enjoy leg day, and the one exercise they steer clear of the most is the squat. Leg extensions, on the other hand, well, they aren't so bad. But which one delivers more bang for your buck? That's easy: multijoint, free-weight exercises like the squat have been proven to be superior to single-joint moves and machine work. Multijoint moves have been linked to a greater release of muscle-building hormones like testosterone and growth hormone. Moreover, if you've avoided them until now, your muscles are likely to respond to a growth spurt.
In terms of actual gains, depending on the factors listed above, maybe 12-15 lbs. of muscle, 15 lbs. being on the high end. This assumes you are natural, by the way. Drugs are a personal choice, but my experience is as a natural bodybuilder, so I'm not going to pretend to know a lot about how steroids affect your gains. Having said that, it makes sense to at least be aware of what they are and what they do, purely from a knowledge standpoint. There are enough knowledge resources available on line that you can learn about them if you choose to pursue that option.


This period also saw the rise of anabolic steroids in bodybuilding and many other sports. In bodybuilding lore, this is partly attributed to the rise of "mass monsters", beginning with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sergio Oliva, and Lou Ferrigno in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and continuing through the 1980s with Lee Haney, the 1990s with Dorian Yates, Ronnie Coleman, and Markus Rühl, and up to the present day. Bodybuilders such as Greg Kovacs attained mass and size never seen previously but were not successful at the pro level. Others were renowned for their spectacular development of a particular body part, like Tom Platz or Paul Demayo for their leg muscles. At the time of shooting Pumping Iron, Schwarzenegger (while never admitting to steroid use until long after his retirement) said that "you have to do anything you can to get the advantage in competition".[citation needed] He would later say that he does not regret using anything.[8]
Including a small amount of higher sugar and/or higher fat food here and there (I usually try to refrain from using the term “cheat meals” as it wrongly implies that you’re doing something outside the rules) is not going to negatively affect your muscle building or fat burning progress, and it will make your overall eating plan much more enjoyable while still delivering the same results.
Other bodybuilders, such as Casey Viator and Mike Mentzer, used less sets in order to get more recuperation. They would limit the number of sets per exercise to only 3 and would also do less exercises to train each muscle group. This would bring their total number of sets down to 10-12, about half of what the high volume trainers would use. Mentzer was often quoted as only doing a total of 5 sets per muscle group.
Many aspiring bodybuilders devote all their time and energy to the gym, assuming that the key to strengthening and enlarging muscles is rigorous strength training. Although exercise constitutes a part of the equation, don’t forget about your diet. Without the right fuel, your body can’t turn into the muscle-building machine you’ve been dreaming of. So instead of spending all your time in the gym, head to the grocery store. Then, use our diet tips for bodybuilding to start crafting your meals.
Think of your muscles as a piece of gum, if you try to stretch a cold piece of gum it will break, similar to your muscles, but if you warm up prior to stretch its like stretching a piece of chewed gum. You should also be stretching before and after cardio, as stated above it enables blood to flood your worked muscles to improve healing and the most important reason is to
Perform three weight-training sessions per week, hitting your whole body each time. Base your routine on compound exercises such as squats, lunges and deadlifts. These burn the most calories, hit more muscles and give the best bang for your buck, claims Rachel Cosgrove, strength coach and co-founder of Results Fitness in California. If you're not sure of any exercise techniques, ask a trainer at your gym for assistance.
Keep your arms almost straight and elbows not quite locked. Raise the handles straight out to the sides and upward to only a couple of degrees above shoulder level without rotating your hands (do not pronate or supinate). Palms should face downward throughout the move. Leading with your elbows, lift only with your deltoid muscles, not with your traps or upper back. Resist during the descent to the starting position. Make sure that the movement is controlled and consistent from the beginning to the end of the set.
Terry follows the old-school bodybuilding mentality of isolating each muscle group (back, shoulders, chest, legs and arms) on a five-day cycle. If he’s trying to grow a certain muscle group, he’ll introduce a second workout on the sixth day. Each of Terry’s workouts lasts between 60 and 90 minutes – “any longer and you're either not pushing yourself hard enough or you're talking too much” – and he makes the most of each session by targeting different parts of each muscle.

Let’s just call this the accelerated beginner’s guide to bodybuilding. In this plan, your first month of training will be demanding, but not so demanding as to cause injury (or worse yet, burnout), and progressive in the sense that each week you’ll graduate to different exercises, higher volume, more intensity or all of the above. After four weeks you’ll not only be ready for the next challenge but you’ll have built a significant amount of quality muscle. In other words, one month from now you’ll look significantly better with your shirt off than you look now. (How’s that for results?)

Familiarize yourself with important muscle groups and basic anatomy. Bodybuilders are part athletes and part artists. Like a sculptor uses clay or marble, a bodybuilder uses sweat and determination to train the muscles and sculpt the body into a particular physique. Planning what you want to get out of bodybuilding, how you want to shape your body, is a big part of the process. Get the following textbooks to do your research on the body:
I've been training for 20 years and to commemorate that long training slog, I sat down and compiled my 10 best training tips. After I wrote them down, though, I realized that while they'd no doubt be valuable to the novice trainee, they're probably things that the advanced trainee already knows. So I also compiled a second list to augment the first. The second list gives my best advanced tips. The end result is, I hope, something that's valuable to both levels of trainees.
If a bodybuilder needed more recuperation time and could not recover adequately in order to train six days in a row, they could train more muscle groups in one workout. This would allow for more rest days so the body could recuperate better. For example, bodybuilders could train the chest, shoulders, triceps and calves on Monday and Thursday and their legs, back and biceps on Tuesday and Friday. By training all their muscle groups in a two day split instead of three, this would allow them three days of rest each week.
The Russian twist is a type of exercise that is used to work the abdomen muscles by performing a twisting motion on the abdomen. This exercise is performed sitting on the floor with knees bent like in a "sit-up" position with the back typically kept off the floor at an angle of 45°. In this position, the extended arms are swung from one side to another in a twisting motion with or without weight.
They simply pushed my limits. When you see someone do something better than you, it naturally pushes you to do better. Even today, I hate to see anyone lift more than me. I always want to beat them! Healthy competition is good, so surround yourself with successful people in your sport or profession and it'll force you to excel. There's always something new to learn and some new way to improve, so find someone and make him your training partner.

The low volume bodybuilders would increase the intensity of their workouts by using heavier resistance and pushing a set past the normal limit of failure. Training techniques such as forced reps, rest pause, drop sets and forced negatives would push the muscles to failure and beyond. Because of the extreme high intensity, bodybuilders using these techniques would typically perform half as many sets as the high volume trainers.
The first way is to do two exercises for the same muscle group at once (like in the Pre-Exhaustion technique). The drawback to this technique is that you will not be as strong as you usually are on the second exercise. The second and best way to superset is by pairing exercises of opposing muscle groups, antagonist groups, such as Chest & Back, Thighs & Hamstrings, Biceps & Triceps, Front Delts & Rear Delts, Upper Abs and Lower Abs. When pairing antagonistic exercises, there is no drop in strength whatsoever. As a matter of fact, sometimes our strength goes up due to the fact that the blood in the opposite muscle group helps you perform the other. For instance, if you superset dumbbell curls with triceps extensions, the blood in the biceps help you to do more weight in the triceps extensions.
Arnold included basic multijoint movements in his routine that hit the pecs from a variety of angles. "I knew the routine had to be basic and very heavy," he wrote. Basic, for Arnold, meant sticking to flat, incline, and decline benches while occasionally training like a powerlifter rather than trying a multitude of machines or using trendy techniques. Arnold saved pumping sets for the end of his workout.
Some male weight trainers shovel in the protein in the form of shakes, supplements, and the occasional whole turkey without figuring out how much is useful or even how much they are ingesting. The American College of Sports Medicine estimates the requirements for strength trainers at 1.6 to 1.7 grams per kilogram body weight per day (about 0.8 grams per pound).
Usually, people associate the word diet with days of starvation and pain. However, that is not the correct definition of a diet. The word diet refers to the food choices that we make on a daily basis. Even if you don’t think you that you are on a diet, guess what?! You already are following a diet. Whether you eat candy all day every day or oatmeal, that is your diet.
Another important part of form is using a full range of motion while doing the exercise, meaning you do not stop your bench press half way down. If you cannot complete the full range of motion you are probably using too heavy of a weight. Your motion should also be slow and controlled, avoiding jerking the weights, swinging the weights to get momentum, or bouncing the weights.
Although this might seem callous, similarly take stock of people who could make your transformation more difficult. You need to surround yourself with people who will be supportive, not emotional anchors who drag you down. Especially during the beginning stages of your transformation, you need Adrians, not Paulies. You don't have to break up with anyone; just perform an honest assessment, and then make the most of the people who help you be at your best.

Without any goals why would you even bother going to the gym? You need something to motivate you, something to aim for, otherwise you may spend a lot of time and effort in the gym for nothing. Having goals can determine what kind of routine you choose, what type of diet you follow, and ultimately is a great way to keep yourself focused. Many common goals include fat loss, weight loss, increase of size, increase of strength, etc.
Training intensely is the key to stimulating muscle growth but don’t mistake volume for intensity. All too often, people trying to achieve a higher level of intensity in their training make the mistake of assuming that increasing volume and duration are effective methods of boosting training intensity. Let me make this perfectly clear. Volume and frequency have absolutely nothing to do with intensity! High volume training sessions can actually be counter-productive. So how do you effectively increase intensity? A. By progressively increasing the amount of weight that you use. B. By progressively decreasing the amount of time it takes you to perform a particular amount of work. (For example, I have made some of my best muscle gains from workouts that lasted no longer than 30 minutes.) C. By working your muscles at the capacity of nothing less than 100% on every set.

Here's one for those of you who still compete. One of the most important things about professional bodybuilding is the way you present all that hard work and sacrifice when you get on stage. You want to pose in a way that hides your flaws and accentuates your strengths. If you want to see those flaws and strengths clearly, take pictures of your poses and when you look at them, cover your face. Sounds silly but it allows you to be more objective. Now, you may want to enlist the help of a credible posing coach to hone in your routine.

Transformations have both physique and performance dimensions, so it's OK to have goals in both areas. Losing weight, gaining muscle, and looking good in the mirror are examples of the former; squatting 10 more pounds, running a mile in under 10 miles, or finally getting your toes up to that bar are examples of the latter. Having both types of goals will help keep you motivated even if one goal starts to slow in progress.
You know the deep burn you feel in your muscles after sprinting up several flights of stairs or pounding out 12 to 15 reps on your last set of heavy squats? That’s the result of metabolic stress, which is the accumulation of waste products from anaerobic energy production, and research shoes that it can be a powerful stimulus for adaptation (i.e., muscle growth). Want to maximize metabolic stress? Do moderate-duration, high-intensity activities that causes burning in the muscles; think 45 seconds of max-effort bodyweight squat-to-presses or lunge-to-curls, or 30 seconds of max-effort sprinting.
Of course, no one was born pressing 500 pounds or squatting 700 pounds – it takes time to build this kind of strength. Assuming your form/technique is in place, you'll want to incorporate some low reps and heavy weights into your program. For example, do 10 sets of squats for 3-4 reps each, or 8 sets of 5. In other words, in order to build strength, keep your weight heavy and use low reps for a high number of sets. Squatting your bodyweight is a bare-minimum requirement for a beginner (or twice your bodyweight for an intermediate-level lifter).

Arnold wasn't just concerned with feeling the weight; he wanted to make sure the load induced muscle failure at a target range: "I make a point of never doing fewer than six repetitions per set with most movements," he notes," and nothing higher than 12. The rule applies to most body parts, including calves." Make sure to choose the right weight to fail within that rep range.