Body building workouts offer and deliver benefits that even go beyond looking fantastic. By adding these muscle building workouts into your fitness routine, you can be healthier overall, bounce back from illness more quickly, and can be less prone to injury as you age. For those who do experience an injury, recovery time is typically shorter for someone who performs body building exercises on a regular basis than someone who doesn’t. Let’s face it, having the option to look great and be healthier at the same time sounds like a pretty sweet deal doesn’t it?
Benefits of Body Building Workouts
1. Mental and physical discipline – as you commit to and stick with a body building fitness regimen, you’ll develop both mental and physical discipline. These skills are vital not only to your overall health and muscular development, but will carry over to every other area of your every day life.
2. Strong bones – weight bearing activities; i.e.: body building exercises; naturally make your bones stronger. And can help protect your bones from breakage and osteoporosis, which means you may be walking tall even in your golden years.
3. Heart health – Bodybuilding naturally invokes your heart muscle and makes it work harder during workouts. The stronger your heart is, the less likely you’ll be a victim of a heart attack or other cardiac disease, which means you could be around longer for your loved ones.
4. Lower cholesterol – your HDL, LDL and triglyceride levels will be in better balance if you’re performing exercises regularly. Lower cholesterol also means less chance of heart attack and other diseases.
5. Confidence – nothing builds self-confidence like bodybuilding. The entire process of making the decision to incorporate these intense exercises into your fitness plan and then seeing the fantastic, and very real results, of your efforts gives your self-belief a huge boost! Imagine taking that assurance in your ability to succeed in the area of your health and transferring it to your job performance and your relationships – what an amazing change you’ll see!
6. Stronger, beautiful, and toned muscles – well, that benefit speaks for itself.
Setbacks Don’t Have to Deter You Forever
Life “gets in the way” of anything we try to do sometimes. Whether we are pursuing a career, a passion, or working out regularly, there will be events that happen that will put you behind the eight ball so to speak. Travel, vacations, illness, and family emergencies can throw us off of our workout schedule and affect our strength and muscle mass.
However, you can get back to it and make significant strides toward regaining that muscle and building more on top of it if you keep your focus and don’t allow obstacles in your life to inhibit your progress.
Beginning Your Body Building Workouts Regimen
What sort of workouts should a beginner be performing? For those new to the world of basic weight training, a 3-day a week full body split routine is best. You can gradually split your program up over 3-4 days into various muscle groups as you progress into a beginners bodybuilding workout. Don’t worry, you’ll get there, but to begin, here is a sample workout that will ensure that you have the foundation for muscle growth and strength.
Sample Body Building Workouts for a Beginner
Take it slow for the first two to three months so you can get a good idea of how each exercise should be performed and to make sure you’re increasing your weights each time you exercise each set of muscles.
Monday: Legs and Abs
Tuesday: Upper Body
Wednesday: Rest Day
Thursday: Legs and Abs
Friday: Upper Body
Saturday: Rest
Sunday: Rest
Notice how the muscle areas are repeated? This is a good schedule for a beginning body builder. You’ll successfully build muscle mass and gain definition at the same time by performing isolation exercises and compound exercises.
Sample Exercises…
Upper Body
• Flat Bench Press
• Dumbbell Chest Flyes
• Incline Dumbbell Press
• Weighted Dips
• Skullcrusher
• Lat Pull-Down
• High Row
• Low Row
• Barbell Curls
• Hammer Curls
• Barbell Military Presses
• Barbell Shrugs
• Dumbbell Lateral Raises
Abs, Thighs and Calves
• Barbell / Smith Machine Squats
• Heavy Squats – leg press machine
• Hamstring Curls
• Leg Extensions
• Standing Calf Raises
• Crunches
• Planks
Tips and Hints for Effective Body Building Workouts
Make sure that you don’t over train. This may sound contrary to the mindset of working harder and longer, but rest periods are crucial for muscle growth. Be consistent, but allow your muscles time to rest in between intense workouts.
Eat clean food! Whole grains, lean proteins, and healthy fats are the keys to a rounded, balanced nutritional plan for body building.
Work smart! Yes, be intense during your workouts and strive to do better each time, but work smart and be precise in doing so. Don’t waste time by getting distracted. Stay focused, work smart, and get out.
Do you want muscle? Do you want to turn heads in your favorite jeans? Do you want to fill out that muscle shirt? How about feeling great when you walk down the street knowing you’re causing your friends jaws to drop in envy? Does the idea of staving off disease and possible injury as you age sound attractive? Imagine being healthy, fit now and throughout your life? Body building exercises have long reaching benefits, no matter when you start, so get started on a new lifestyle today!
Yours in fun, health and fitness
© Mandy Gibbons
Virtual Fitness Trainer
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