If you're frustrated with your muscle gain or fat loss goals, I sympathize with you completely, and understand exactly what you are going through. I worked out for years before finally figuring out the correct ways to build muscle and lose fat.

I finally figured ou that the routines and body building tips touted by professional bodybuilders and the muscle magazines just aren't going to work for most people. But take heart, you can reach your muscle mass and fat burning goals.

Putting together a program that incorporates the following body building tips will point you in the right direction and get you making gains you hadn't thought were possible.

Tried and True Body Building Tips

Train Intensely - You must work each set until you can't do another repetition in good form. There is no point in stopping at a set number of reps (such as 8), if you are capable of doing 12. Your body needs to be challenged or it will not adapt by building new muscle or burning off body fat.

Cycle Your Intensity - In order to prevent burnout and overtraining from training intensely, it's important to take a week off from training every 8 - 12 weeks. If, like me, you can't stay out of the gym that long, you should train for a week at a very low intensity level.

Train Briefly - Your workouts need to be short. This is a very important weight lifting tip. You should never need to do a weight lifting routine that takes over an hour. If you are in the gym that long, you aren't working intensely enough. You can workout hard or long, but you can not do both. And to succeed in building muscle, you need to workout hard.

Train Infrequently - Your body needs time to recover from your weight training routine, so that in can adapt and grow. If you train with weights before your body is completey recovered, you won't add new muscle and will eventually over train, a big no no.

These are extremely important body building tips. It seems that your body's potential for strength increases far outweighs your body's ability to recover. What this means is that as you grow stronger, your body needs more time between weight training sessions in order to recover.

Bench pressing 300 pounds is a far greater stress on your body than bench pressing 50 pounds, even if both were maximum attempts at the time.

Train Progressively - You need to constantly challenge what your body can do by continuing to add more weight and/or repetitions to your previous best effort as often as possible.

Following is a sample weight training routine that incorporates the above weight lifting tips. If you put the other pieces in place, such as your nutrition plan and supplementation plan, you'll be well on your way to great gains and transforming your physique.

1 - Squats

2 - Deadlifts

3 - Chin Ups

4 - Dips

5 - Bench Press

6 - Military Press

Here's another weight lifting tip - break in to this routine. For the first few weeks, try working out 3 times per week on nonconsecutive days, performing 2 working sets of each exercise, doing 12 - 15 reps per set.

Don't train to failure.

After about a month, you can lower the reps on everthing but Squats and Deadlifts, to the 8 - 10 rep range. Start training to failure on some sets.

After another month, begin training to failure on all working sets and consider only weight training two times per week to accomodate the higher level of intensity and strengh that you've developed.

Gregg Gillies is the founder of http://www.buildleanmuscle.com His articles have appeared in Ironman Magazine. He has written two books and is a regular contributor to Body Talk Magazine. He publishes a free fitness newsletter available at his site that includes lots of weight training tips, fat loss, nutrition and exercise program information to help you build your best body as quickly as possible. check it out at Build Muscle and see how you can get a customized muscle building nutrition plan at http://www.mynutritionjournal.com

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