Starting Body Building
The key to body building for beginners is to perform Compound Exercises with perfect form and get your diet right. I can’t stress this enough, and to work up in weight incrementally.
You can probably lift more than the weight you should begin with, but the key is to do the exercises consistently.
When starting out, beginners are dispirited because of the lack of immediate results, however note that to get improvement while starting out, you need to be patient and self-controlled.
Building and strengthening the muscles requires compound exercises, by the time you have a acquired the muscle power that you want, then you can start performing isolation exercises.
Compound exercises are ones in which at least two joints are used to do the exercise movement, so for chest & triceps, you’ll want to do DIPS or BENCH PRESS, for lats and biceps you’ll want to do PULLUPS or LAT BAR PULL DOWN, for legs… it’s SQUATS and then DEADLIFT (which also hits your lower back).
For your shoulder & triceps, you’ll wan to do MILITARY PRESS, CLEAN & JERKS or SQUAT PRESSES.
CALF WORK, because of the unique nature of that muscle group, requires the intensity of CALF RAISES & DONKEY PRESSES which only work one joint, so they tend to be an isolation exercise.
Once you have designed your exercise scheme, you need to figure out the reps and sets.
It’s suggested that beginning bodybuilders, for the first two weeks do light weights and high reps to get your muscles primed for the growth phase, so you want to start with 1 or 2 sets and work your way up to 4 or 5 sets of 12 to 15 reps (this includes your warm-up sets).
Then you’ll want to swap out exercises, so if you’ve been doing WEIGHTED DIPS it’s time for BENCH PRESS, and you’ll want to raise the weight maybe 15 or 20% and do less sets and less reps (say 2 or 3 sets of 6 to 8 reps), stay on this course for two weeks, then it’s it time to bring the weight back down and do 4 or 5 sets of 10 to 12 reps for one week, then you can jump up in weight from the heavy phase, but do less reps and sets.
The key element here is to a) switch up the routine so your body has to constantly adapt b) build strength and mass by alternating what intensity of weights you pump. Basically, this means that you should perform a heavy set once a week and keep the remaining ones light but with more repetitions to shed off more calories, develop strength and stamina.
Once you’ve been on the compound exercise cycle for about 6 weeks, you can start to slowly work in isolation exercises, these are exercises that use one joint to move the weight.
For example, do the barbell or PREACHER CURL, instead DUMBBELL CURLS. You want to do the FRENCH PRESS instead of ONE-ARM TRICEP PRESSES, LEG EXTENSIONS instead of LEG PRESSES, and so on. If you want to move on to more interesting workouts, then you can do so right after acquiring the physique you were aiming for. Although it’s nearly impossible to do “spot work,” you can eke out specific gains by alternating your routine and the reps/sets combinations.
For instance, when doing EZ-BAR BICEP CURLS, instead of doing 4 or 5 sets of 12 to 15 reps, do two sets of 21s; 21s for BICEP CURLS are when you do 7 reps of vertical to 90 degrees, then 7 reps of 90 degrees to the full contraction, and then finally 7 reps of the full motion… all without a break. That’s a burn that you won’t forget, and it’s a great way to shock you muscles if you’ve reach a plateau.
The discipline required to stay on the right course, even though it might not be “sexy” in the beginning is the key to making the progressive gains that you want.
Also, getting more than enough rest and eating right, actually eating more than ever have before.
Your diet is the most important thing whether you’re first starting out or a seasoned pro. Eating the right foods will help speed up the positive results the same way a wrong diet will only ruin the total effect of the program.
Let me leave you with one more thought. Top trainers strongly believe that bodyweight exercises are requirements before advancing to weigh lifting.
For that reason, you may want to start out doing bodyweight exercises.