Muscle Building Exercise Program – How Quality Beats Quantity
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The usual muscle building exercise program prescribes multiple sets split routines, which means dividing the whole body workout into several sessions along the week, performing many sets to failure for each muscle group, then start again the next week. However, this is not the most effective way to build muscle for any regular guy, a hardgainer or a skinny guy.
In fact, it is the worst and many failures and stagnation testify for it. How many times did you see regular or skinny guys pumping to oblivion their single muscle groups each workout, every day of the week, only to look the same and lift the same poundage months or years down the line? Sadly, it is a quite common sight and maybe you could have experienced the same. There is no shame in that, as misleading bodybuilding literature promotes this kind of high volume weight training fit only for professional bodybuilder, possibly artificially assisted.
A realistic muscle building exercise program for most people, including women and ectomorphs (skinny guys), is the complete opposite of the usual marathon split workouts, it is way more effective and, to add the icing on the cake, time efficient. In short, it is based on few basic compound exercises performed for only few sets each and in a full body workout.
Compound movements implemented with free weights are the best and most effective weight training exercises because they require the action of several muscle groups together, allowing for the greatest lifts in bodybuilding. Because of this, they exert an enormous impact on the whole body and nervous system, triggering hormonal increase and muscle growth.
The idea behind a real life muscle building exercise program is to trigger muscle building all over by naturally increasing testosterone production, hence muscle mass. This is easily achievable by performing few sets only for each muscle group until the whole body has been covered. It is a matter of intensity and general impact versus endurance and local impact. In other words, it is quality versus quantity.
For a normal, natural guy, hammering to destruction a single body part per workout during the week and hope to grow will never work, because single muscles are not big enough to shock the whole body into changing hormonal output, hence grow. It is much more effective to cover the whole body in one workout, even if this means performing only few sets to failure for each muscle group.
Make no mistake tough, an exercise program so devised is not walk in the park. It is brutal and draining and will make look those 15 to 20 sets for the chest day as in the split routines like a joke. Instead of wasting your time hammering the same muscle over and over, try this. Perform, say, a total of 20 sets as you would in a chest day, but in a completely different way.
Do 4 sets of squats, 4 sets of dead lifts, 4 sets of bench presses, 4 sets of military presses and 4 sets of pull ups. Warm up before your working sets and build poundage gradually. If you have never done this before, you will need help to pick yourself up from the floor at the end of the workout. You will have covered the whole body, shocking it into hormonal increase and muscle growth. This is just a simple example and a general layout, there are many more sophisticated ways to go around this basic sample, but you get the picture. I hope you can start seeing the forest and forget about the tree now.
Such a simple but effective muscle building exercise program is also time efficient, as it will take 2 to 3 hours a week from your social or family life, making you wonder why wasting time on never ending split routines for no muscle to show for. As an added bonus, an increase in muscle mass will help you burn the fat because of the impact bigger muscles have on your basic metabolic rate. The more muscle you gain, the more fat you burn.
Finally, a real life muscle building exercise program should detail periodization plans to avoid stagnation, changing exercises (within the compound class) and repetition range. It should also give you detailed nutritional guidelines and play down the importance of supplements, as they are mostly ineffective except for few quality ones. A balanced, healthy diet is way more important.