Those of you out there who are relatively new to the whole muscle building thing, or who have trained for years but never really achieved any great results, the best piece of advice that I will give you is this… DON’T TRY TO COPY BODYBUILDERS!
People who want to put on some serious muscle often look to the people who seemingly have already achieved what you are aiming for, copying their routines and their diets, hoping to get the same results. What you need to know is that these huge bodybuilders are genetically gifted and the the majority of them are drug enhanced.
High volume workouts are popular with some bodybuilders, where they perform set after set of each exercise on each muscle group, causing large amounts of damage to your muscle fibres. The more damage you do, the longer it takes for your muscles to repair and recover. Bodybuilders who do this type of training do tend to train each muscle group only once a week, but even so without amazing genetics or help from drugs, this will more than likely be too much for a normal persons body. It will lead to over training, which will have negative results including possible muscle loss. Stay away from these high volume training routines, leave them to the drug enhanced bodybuilders!
Another technique that is used by bodybuilders for building muscle, is to split their year into a bulking phase and a cutting phase. During a bulking phase some bodybuilders will over eat massively, far more than they need to and keep it up for months at a time. They will put on muscle, but also by the end they will have ALOT of fat as well. Then during their cutting phase, because they have alot of fat to get rid of they have to restrict their calories massively for a long period. Now if me, you or any other person with an average physique and no help from drugs tried to do this, it would go as follows. We would first bulk up gaining a fair amount of muscle and also alot of fat over several months, then we would come to the cutting phase. Now we would restrict our calories and end up losing the fat that we had gained (if we were lucky!), but also the muscle that we had gained, bringing us back to where we started or worse! A good way to tackle this is to set yourself limits on your bodyfat. For example if you were currently 10% bodyfat, you would go on a bulking or muscle building phase until we reached our 12% bodyfat limit, then we would start a cutting or fat loss phase until we hit our lower limit, which could be your original 10% or even less. As we would have added much fat in the muscle building phase, we wouldn’t have to restrict our calories as much and therefore would be able to avoid eating away at our new muscle. You can keep running through this cycle until you have reached your goals. Try and limit each phase two twelve weeks, even if you don’t hit your limits. This will keep your body guessing, and prevent you from hitting a plateau.
So remember to ignore what the huge drug enhanced bodybuilders are doing, because it seems to work for them doesn’t mean it will work for you.
