Do Even Half of Those Muscle Building Programs Work?
Muscle building programs are mostly created by weight lifters who have discovered "their way" to building big muscles.
However, in some cases these muscle building programs don't work. Why?
These are 4 major reasons why some muscle building programs aren't working:
#1: Not Using Free Weights
By this, I mean you have to be working many muscles at one time. This will give your body benefits of having stability and coordination between muscles. However, muscle building programs like to incorporate machines into their workouts. Workout machines tend to focus on one muscle. This is bad because it will take forever to work many muscles, and you do not develop any real life application. Free weights can help you to work many muscles at once. Doing compound exercises like Squats and dead lifts can benefit you in saving time, working many muscles at once, and also gaining stability and coordination between muscles.
#2: Keep it short
You may have received your program from someone who was using the program daily, for hours on end, that may have lived in the gym daily. If you are looking for the short program, an hour or less for a few times a week, this program will take you that much longer in order to develop the goods. You need to find something that will be beneficial no matter how much time you have. This could be solved by using more weight with less reps and sets. This is much faster and more beneficial than those long, muscle straining programs out there that work your muscles to death and leave you in pain the for the next two days.
#3: You are Not Incorporating Enough Intensity
Like mentioned before, you need to be using heavy enough weights to work out with. This is the reason why many of the work outs out there don't work, because they are using 50% of your "1 Rep Max" (1RM). You should be using about 80-85% of your 1RM. Anything below and you are never going to see improvements as your body will eventually become use to the work out and somewhat immune to it. This also calls for adding weight every work out in order to keep improving when you are performing your muscle building programs.
#4: More Recuperation During and After Workouts
When you workout, remember to leave time between exercises to let your body settle and start to rebuild. Rushing to your next exercise will not benefit you, and ultimately might hurt you as it will strain the muscles.
When you are done with your workout, make some time to rest and take a nap. You just put your body through hard work and now it needs time to cool down and rebuild. At night, make sure you are achieving 8+ hours of sleep, if possible. Relax anytime during the day and make sure to keep a low stress environment, which is best for fast muscle growth.
You can check out more information on a good workout program by looking at my article: DoubleYourGains' 3-5 Beginners Strength Program.