Trying to copy the training methods of the professional bodybuilders is a complete waste of time for the majority of us. Those guys have spent years of training which enables them to do the trainiing that they do. They have the genetics that most of us can only dream about. Try to keep in mind that many of them get help by using certain..let's just say chemicals.

When it comes to building muscle, a lot of people will buy the latest training gear, spend a fortune on bodybuilding supplements, and go the expense of a gym membership. However the majority of these people end up getting very small results, if any.

If fast muscle gain is your goal then you will need to know a few things. The first step is to see what exercises you are doing at the moment. If your training consists of spending a couple of hours in a gym doing exercises that target small muscles, then you will never build any serious muscle.

If you find yourself working out 4-5 times a week, you will struggle to gain muscle

You may think that you eat a lot, but you’d be surprised how little you actually do eat. Put pen to paper and record your daily calorie intake. Take a look at your results after following the plan for seven days. Try to figure out what types of food your calories are coming from. You will probably need to up your calorie intake

If you want to build muscle fast you need to train big, eat big, and get more rest.

If the deadlift and squat were the only 2 exercises you did for a month or 2, you would not believe how much muscle you would gain. Your whole body will grow with these exercises. Have you ever seen anyone with big muscular legs, who has skinny arms and a scrawny chest? No as legs are the largest muscles in the body. When these are targeted, so is everything else.

Training like the guys in the magazines is not possible for us mortals. Our bodies don't have the ability to recover as quick from a training session. If you try to train every other day, your body doesn't have the time that it needs to recover. How can you build muscle when no recovery from the previous session has taken place? Try to limit your training to three sessions in a week, for a lot of us 2 sessions will be even more productive. Keep in mind that growth takes place while you are resting.

Follow the principles outlined here and you cannot fail to build muscle fast

I often hear that you should train each muscle group just once a week. Whilst this may be provide optimal progress for extremely hardgainers it is not true for the vast majority of people. Sure, you should avoid overtraining but like most things in life you won’t get good at something by practicing it just once a week, this is true to a certain extent in weight lifting also. You need to train each muscle more than once a week, probably twice per week being suitable for most bodybuilders. Ideally you should rotate your workouts through periods when you are near overtraining and periods where you near undertraining. This provides times when there is a lot of stress for the body to handle and other times when the body has more time to recover and build momentum for another push. Hitting training plateaus can be avoided by doing this.

Ensure that your training sessions don’t exceed 45 minutes. If you deem that time limit to short then possibly your workout is not short enough or you are not staying focussed and working out intensely. 45 minutes will be plenty if you really focus on intensity and avoid distractions. If your workouts last longer then this then testosterone levels drop dramatically due to the increased production of cortisol which actually causes the body to eat muscle tissue and store fat. completely the opposite to what we are after.

You ought to cycle your training. after a while your body adapts to a routine so that it no longer stimulates growth. You should change your routine before your gains diminish completely. You need to ensure that you don’t change your training sessions to frequently either. Doing this will confuse your body too much and prevent it from getting into a nice groove and feel like you are just simply spinning your wheels.

It is unlikely that you will make significant gains if you don’t perform the correct exercises. The right exercises are exercises that allow you to perform multi-joint movements and are know as compound exercises. The number one exercises being: bench presses, rows, squats, pull ups, shoulder presses plus any exercise that moves your entire body through air ie, not just moving individual limbs. If you use these exercises, with a few of their variations and correct muscle building nutrition then you can’t help but stimulate muscle mass growth. With those guidelines in mind, go pump some iron, eat correctly and get huge.

Compound Exercises – Your focus should be with compound exercises. These are exercises that hit more than one muscle group at a time. For example, the squat, dead lift, bench press are all compound lifts. These exercises give you the ability to lift the most weight and thereby stimulate more muscle fibers.

Track your Progress – Write everything down. You want to lift heavier weights as the weeks go by. You need to keep track of your progress and focus on increasing your strength. Sounds simple but not recording your workouts can cause you to forget from week to week how much you were lifting and how many reps you did.

Do not over train – Many people think that performing more reps and more sets is the way to go in their bodybuilding workouts. They believe that if they train more often and longer they will get better results. Your muscles do not grow while you are training them. They grow when they are resting. You need to allow the proper recovery for you body as a whole as well as the individual muscles.

Eat often – Professional body builders have been known to eat up to 10 times per day. They space out their meals, eat small amounts and eat often. You should shoot for 5-7 meals per day. You want to keep your muscles in an anabolic state and eating every 2-3 hours that you are awake will help you with this. When you do not eat often your body goes into a catabolic state and breaks down the muscles you have.

The first thing is that you need to stop reading all those bodybuilding magazines out there. These magazines are fll of beefed up bodies bulging with muscles. Following the training methods of the pro's will not give you the muscles that you want.

The genetics of professional bodybuilders are programmed so that muscle growth comes easy. I'm not saying that they don't have to train hard, but muscle gains do come quicker for them. Because of their abilities to recover quickly, the pro's can train a lot more during the week. Muscles only grow while you are resting. The training itself is just preperation for muscle growth.

If you find it difficult to grow muscle, you need to stop training like the pro's. You don't have the same recovery abilities or the genetic program of a pro. If you are presently doing more tthsn 3 workouts each week, you need to stop that. You need a different bodybuilding program.

If you are training more than 4 times a week, your body is never recovering or growing. This does not allow your muscles the recovery time that they need, making muscle gain impossible.

You should not be doing more than 2 workouts each week. I know the principle of the more you do of something the better you get at it. This doesn't apply when it comes to growing muscle. Keep in mind tthat you only grow during rest.

After a workout make sure that you 3 complete days away from the gym. Spend those 3 days eating well and getting plenty of rest. When you do your next workout your muscles should have recovered fully and be slightly bigger. Although you may not notice this yourself.

You will also need to look at what types of exercises you may be doing. When more muscles are used during training, your body will pull out all the stops to ensure growth. More workouts is not the answer. It means full body workouts. Don't train different body parts on different days. Try to hit as many muscles as you can in one single workout.

Again this does not mean doing lots of exercises and lots of sets. Don't spend more than an hour working out. Make sure that the hour you train is intense. Give it all you've got, after all you will have 3 days to rest. Don't waste your effort or time on exercises that only affect a small number of muscles. Do the big exercises that hit a multitude of muscles. An exercise that targets a lot of muscles, instead of 1 or 2 will produce more growth. You don't need to use any more than half a dozen of exercises.

Follow these methods for a couple of months and you won't believe the difference in your body. Don't be tempted to add more workout days. If you have been trying to build muscle for years without success, then surely you have to do things differently? Gaining muscle will become a whole lot easier if you train hard, eat lots, have less workouts and plenty of rest.

There is a history behind the natural bodybuilding nutritional supplement. It is not fully understood why there is so skepticism behind the protein bar where the body building nutritional supplement is concerned. However if you look at the general history of food and eating habits in the USA, you start to be able to piece together the reason why there is a misguided mistrust where the protein bars and the essential bodybuilding supplement products are concerned.

There was a revelation in the 1960′s and the 1970′s of processed food. This then proceeded to change the way we all ate and this was not a change for the better in any case. Every now and again a new amazing product would come on the shelves telling people it did something that it didn't, a product pretending to be something it certainly was not. One of these products that has helped the reputation of the protein bar was a drink called 'Tang'. This drink and the protein bars have been linked as similar products, which in fact they are not.

'Tang' was marketed as a very healthy, orange powdered drink and with celebrity endorsements such as the famous Buzz Aldrin, sales went literally through the roof. ‘Tang’ was actually used by the astronauts when they flew on space missions. This also helped the sales shoot up and keep going. However unfortunately for ‘Tang’, it was found to be a processed drink that was full of nothing but sugar and had no such nutritional value that it claimed it had. Sales started to plummet back to earth with a bump. Since this was classed as a nutritional supplement in sorts, then it gave the rest of the actual nutritional supplements a bad name and a bad reputation.

Remember though that there are some protein bars that are actually full of sugar, these must be avoided at all costs, unless you want to gain weight at a rapid rate. So take care when choosing a protein bar and a bodybuilding supplement and make sure your going for a low sugar variety.

Body building affects your body, depleting some nutrients as you work out.  Thus, you need to have natural bodybuilding supplements to replenish what your body has lost during your body building regimen.The supplements also nourish and strengthen your body.  One main hormone that is depleted during workouts is testosterone.  That is why it is necessary for you to take in testosterone supplements, just like the doctor ordered.

Having a low testosterone level can be marked by the following: a loss of energy and strength, as well as muscle mass.  Of course, this is not what you, as a body builder, would want to happen.  A low testosterone level also sometimes mean that you will find it hard to lose your body fat.  

Some men experience a deficiency in testosterone, some lose it even at the early age of 25.  Low testosterone levels also often means that the person is plagued by mood swings that leave one unhappy and depressed.

There are a variety of testosterone supplements available.  These are classified depending on the age ranges, as well as for the purpose of the supplement.  This means that you have to consult a nutritional specialist of a doctor before taking anything.  It is important that you first check your levels of testosterone before taking in supplements and afterwards, you should monitor the level of this hormone present in your body.

Some testosterone supplements you can choose from include Eurycome Longfolia, Viaroid, 6-OXO and 17-HD.  What is important is that you should ask a professional first.  It is dangerous to take in supplements without first knowing the right type and the right dose for you.

Remember, body building is a lifelong sport.  Even if you plan to retire from the sport or if you have accomplished your goals in body building, you will need to make use of essential bodybuilding supplements.  Combine this with training sessions and regular exercise, along with some exercise and a good, balanced and healthy diet.  The combination will prove to be very potent in keeping you fit for your entire lifetime, even when you have stopped doing your body building workouts.

The RAV works together with the visual componenet of our brain and diverts our attention to specific things that our sub conscious has programmed into it, to be important to achieve our goals. The day to day actions, sights, sounds, preferences and so on that we get daily are all because of our sub conscious thought process that is continually operating.

This has been now proven by neuroscientists and actually qualifies the approaches of positive thinking and the law of attraction. If you have never heard of the law of attraction before it is basically the asumption that ‘what you think about, you bring about’ or ‘thoughts become things’. Now in the past this was thought of as being a bit to new agey for the majority of people however there is an increasing acceptance of this mental approach worldwide.

Now it doesn’t really matter if you adopt the neuro-scientists point of view about it or the new age approach to this as it will still work. So by reprogramming the software of our mind like this it is then possible for us to identify an pick out more clearly the paththat we need to take to reach our goals faster. Some people will come across strange co-incidences that will help there progress which is not uncommon and often gives this ‘law of attraction’ an unearthly feel whereas the truth is those things were probably there waiting to be found all along!

So how can a bodybuilder make use of this? Well think now about your present ongoing thought patterns. Precisely what is it that you are running through your mind on a daily basis. Are they thoughts such as ‘losing weight is impossible for me’ or ‘My muscles won’t grow’ for if they are then that is precisely what your RAV system is selecting for you to notice and take action upon on a day to day basis. It is therefore your everyday sub conscious thought process that you need to alter to positive muscle building thought processes such as: ‘muscle mass come quickly and easily’ or ‘I am getting huge fast’ and so on.

How exactly can these thought patterns be replaced? Here are a couple of things to try:

1)       Visualisation: first you need to set aside 5 minutes or so each day to do this. Simply shut your eyes and visulaise in your minds eye precisely how you want your body to look. Huge guns, ripped 6 pack and so on, be as clear as possible and hold that vision with belief that you look like that already.’

2)       Speak out aloud clearly and confidently simple statements like: I am extremely fit and healthy, I am huge and muscular, I am growing more and more each day and so on.

Go through these everyday. It will take a minimum of 30 days to start over riding your old thought patterns and to imprint the new ones but it will happen. Following that, don’t stop doing them keep going to continually reaffirm your new thought patterns.

If you don’t believe that this stuff works then I suggest that you take a look at a few sportsmens autobiographies or sports studies books, I gaurantee that you will find these processes talked about in depth, particularly visualisation which is an amazingly productive technique that should get daily usage!

Ok with these positive thoughts and feelings in mind, go build muscle mass!