The Strength Trainer's Guide To Success

Your body has about 650 muscles. No matter that you care about just four or five of them, all of which can be sculpted with maybe a half-dozen strength-training exercises. You still need all of them to perform the normal functions of everyday life; breathing, eating, walking, sucking in your stomach at the beach. Of course everyone wants to have the perfect body; however, few of us don't effectively know how to reach our body building goals. Since muscle growth is such a slow process, weight-lifting should be broken down into three muscle developing stages.

The first stage of muscle development is the process of preparing your muscles for growth. This is the stage all beginning weight-lifters should start from. A muscle will not grow until the muscle is at its' peak condition; this means your have to slowing condition your muscles in order to move to more powerful and intense exercises. In this stage, you want to do lots of different exercises and variations of exercises; use a high number of repetitions, at least 12. However, only do each exercise once during your workout. Most beginners have the mistake of trying to push themselves to hard at the start of their training and find themselves so sore they won't be able to train for a week or more. Soreness is the sign that your muscle are not at its peak condition. This is why advance lifters don't get muscle soreness nearly as bad as beginners, even when the advance lifter does much more intense workouts.

Try to do exercises that isolate a muscle or muscle group rather that multiple muscle exercises. An example would be doing a set dumbbell flies, instead of a set of barbell bench press, for your pectorals exercise. Try to train three times a week having at least a days rest between workouts. Set up your workouts so you are doing "push" exercises one day, such as presses and squats, and "pull" exercises on the next workout, such as pull-ups and hamstring curls. This is a good way to keep track of your training and it makes sure your muscles get enough rest in-between workouts. This stage of muscle growth takes around six months of training in order to move to stage two.

Stage two is the start of the actual muscle building process. After six months of training: you have largely improved your muscular strength; noticed your muscle soreness after workouts has decreased; noticed an increase in your muscle tone; and hopefully look like you are one step closer to reach your desired strength training goal. During this stage, you will notice a slowing down of the gain of muscle strength because the only gains of strength, from here on out, are due to gains in muscle mass. For lifters that have been lifting frequently for over a year, it is okay to start at this stage. Now is the time to start lifting more intensely, with more set, and less repetitions. Try to use as much weight as you can use to do seven to ten repetitions during each exercise. Your muscles have toughened up, but don't let that trick you; your body still isn't use to the hard, intense body builder's workout programs with the ten sets of bench presses. Therefore, only do about two to three sets per exercise and one set for an exercise variation. If it is a "push" day and you are working out your pectorals, either do three sets of flat bench press or one set of flat, one decline, and one incline. It is best to do lots of variations at this stage of muscular development to allow muscle growth from all parts of the muscle.

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