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Essential Growth

1) Set short- and long-term goals.
You don't set out on a journey without a map and a plan. You need to know in which direction to step, but you have to know your ultimate goal as well.

When it comes to training, you should have some idea of what you ultimately hope to achieve. While dreaming about having 19-inch arms or standing on a pro bodybuilding stage is fine, you need to set interim, shorter-term goals as well: your strategy for the next month, the next six months, the next year or two years. This is the best way to make progress and to monitor your progress as you go.

2) Learn what equipment to use. Bodybuilding is about training and developing all the muscles of the body. Working the bigger muscle groups is mostly a matter of doing the basic exercises primarily with free weights. But complete development requires hitting the muscles more specifically and with greater isolation. To accomplish this, you need to understand how to use a wide variety of exercise equipment, including machines and cables. Just be sure to use equipment that's appropriate to your goals. It's difficult to develop the kind of total quality that characterizes an excellent physique using only free weights, and it's almost impossible to achieve your maximum potential for mass and strength without them.

 

3) Master proper technique. In the earliest stages of training, what creates the most progress is hard, consistent work. Your body is a sponge ready to soak up whatever effort you put forth. But as you make further progress, you begin to run into diminishing returns. It takes more and more effort to achieve fewer and fewer results. If that weren't true, the top pros would all weigh 500 pounds and boast 30-inch arms! But much of your effort can be wasted if you train incorrectly and inefficiently by not using proper technique. You need to hit each muscle through the proper range of motion, at the right angles, using the best type of equipment and with the necessary amount of resistance. If your technique isn't correct, a lot of your efforts may go to waste.

4) Use progressive resistance training. How much weight to use when bodybuilding is no mystery. Just use enough to do the appropriate number of reps and sets that your training program requires - not more and not less. But the point of progressive resistance training is to increase your weights as you grow stronger to continue to stimulate development of muscle mass and strength. Of course, it isn't a good idea to work with weights that are too heavy: You end up sacrificing technique, slowing your progress and risking injury. But you should find yourself adding resistance to your workouts over time. If you instead stick to the same weights, your body stays at the same level of development.

 

Essential Growth5) Cycle your training. No athlete in any sport attempts to sustain maximum training effort all the time. Weightlifters cycle their training from light to heavy to achieve their heaviest lifts in competition. Bodybuilders work for mass off-season and cycle toward quality, isolation exercises as a contest approaches. One common way to cycle bodybuilding training is to alternate between heavy and light workouts for a specific bodypart. This doesn't necessarily mean doing the same exercises with heavier and lighter weights; usually the cycle is between exercises that use the biggest, strongest muscles - the primary mass-building movements - and those that focus more on quality and isolation. Training big muscles with appropriate poundage’s creates a lot of systemic fatigue, which requires extra time to rest and recuperate. Cycling between that and exercises that involve smaller muscles and lighter weights allows you to continue to make progress while avoiding the possibility of overtraining.

6) Vary your workouts. When you get too accustomed to doing the same workout for a bodypart day in and day out, your body begins to operate out of habit. Intensity and focus often decrease, as do your gains. Along with cycling your training, consider changing your workouts on a regular basis to include different exercises, different equipment or altering the order in which you do your exercises. Certain basics you should never do without. For example, you won't maximize chest development without barbell and dumbbell presses or build great legs without squats. But you don't have to perform those movements in every workout, and you can introduce many other variables into your training to keep your body and mind stimulated.

 

7) Make use of intensity training principles. As you train with heavier weights, master technique and learn to vary and cycle your workouts, you'll more often encounter the obstacle of diminishing returns. One way to jump this hurdle is to increase intensity - that is, get more results from the same effort. Joe Weider has published a number of these intensity techniques - including supersets, rest-pause, partial reps, instinctive training, descending sets and staggered sets - as The Weider Intensity Training Principles. They allow you to increase intensity of effect rather than just intensity of effort. After all, if you're already training as hard as you can, how can you train any harder? The benefits of using these principles are very real, especially for those whose progress has reached a plateau and who are looking for ways to push past sticking points and create additional gains.

8) Eat to grow. The hard part of a bodybuilding diet involves losing fat to get ripped for a contest while not sacrificing any more muscle mass than necessary. Eating to grow is a lot easier.

Food provides a bodybuilder with two basic things: energy to train and raw materials to build mass. To develop muscle, you need both. To build muscle, you need protein; one rule of thumb is about 1 gram per pound of lean bodyweight. Eating less, risks not having the amino acids in your body necessary to synthesize maximum muscle tissue. As for the rest of your diet, you need to eat enough and nutritiously, and avoid doing things to your body that have a catabolic effect - such as smoking, excessive drinking and using drugs. Include a variety of vitamin and mineral supplements in your overall program.

9) Rest and recuperate. Back in the 1970s, it was common for bodybuilders to train six days a week, sometimes twice a day. Today's bodybuilders generally keep their training sessions short and intense, and schedule rest days more often. Time and experience have shown that probably the best formula for maximum progress is 1) short, very intense and demanding training sessions and 2) sufficient time and rest to allow for total recuperation. Those who find themselves stuck on a plateau often react by training more often or doing more sets and reps. This can make the problem worse. A better solution might be more rest, a few days off from the gym, or allowing more days between workout sessions, training a bodypart only once a week or even once every 10 days. This is not a recipe for laziness. It's a strategy for those who already train as hard as they can, who are potentially overtraining, whose fatigue has risen to the point where it interferes with their ability to make further gains.

10) Keep yourself motivated. Intense training has a very important mental component as well as a physical one. You can just go through the motions and achieve some results, but that isn't a strategy for making continued progress and maximum gains. How do you keep the mind motivated? Seeing your body in the mirror as it changes and develops is motivating all on its own. And getting enough rest and recuperation makes you eager to get to the gym for your next workout.

Finding a good training partner can also be a big help. Training with someone who's really motivated and can push you in your workouts pumps energy into your efforts. Reading physique magazines is another great motivator. Aside from the valuable information you'll find, you'll see photos of physiques you admire and want to emulate. If your aspirations lean toward competition, go to contests and you'll see bodybuilders who have already developed to levels you aspire to. Sports psychologists talk a lot about visualization, which in bodybuilding means to see in your mind's eye the kind of physique you hope to develop. Use all the techniques of imagination you can - visualize yourself with a first-rate, muscular physique; fantasies that your biceps are mountains; or imagine that you're a comic-book superhero as you move from exercise to exercise. Whatever you can do to motivate yourself beyond previous limits will help you continue to make progress.