Muscle Building Workouts For Men

An effective muscle building workout for men should challenge their muscles with powerful, yet simple training techniques and the heaviest weights that they can safely control. Often trainees make the mistake of training muscle groups from every different angle, amounting to far too much volume for proper recovery and muscle growth. Simplify your training and build your program around your personal preferences and goals. Beginners and experienced trainees alike can build new muscle with these simple powerful workouts.

Pyramid Workouts

The pyramid technique of weightlifting involved changing the amount of weight being used over three to five successive sets of an exercise. You can pyramid up by doing lighter weights first with higher repetitions and then increasing weight and decreasing reps. Or you can use a reverse pyramid, doing a heavy weight for five or six reps and then decreasing the weights and increasing the repetitions. Use a five-day split to focus on each muscle group on a separate day: shoulders Monday, arms Tuesday, legs Wednesday, chest Thursday and back on Friday. For each workout, choose one or two compound movements and pyramid the weight up or down over three to five sets. Compound movements are multi-joint exercises, such as the bench press, squats or barbell curls. For arms for example, you might do decline close-grip bench presses, pyramiding the weight up over three sets for 12, 10 and eight reps respectively. Follow this with one or two sets of an isolation exercise like triceps rope push-downs. For the biceps you would pyramid the weights up on barbell curls in the same fashion and then follow that with one or two sets of concentration curls. Take every set to muscular failure, stopping only when you can no longer complete another rep under control. Progressively increase the weight, five to 10 lbs. at a time as you get stronger. After four continuous weeks of one pyramid style or the other, switch and try the opposite protocol for four to six weeks.

Basic Positions of Flexion

Positions of flexion is a very simplified way of training, hitting each muscle with a compound movement, a stretch overload exercise and then an isolation exercise, in that order. Use a weekly training split that fits your schedule, for example, doing arms and shoulders on Monday, legs on Wednesday and back and chest on Friday. At each workout you choose one or two compound movements for each muscle group. Smaller muscles like arms and shoulders respond well to one, but legs, chest and back may require two. An example is training the chest with both flat and incline bench presses. After one or two light warm-up sets, you will do one to two sets of your compound movement, going to failure. Then do one or two sets of a stretch overload exercise, examples include chest flyes, incline dumbbell biceps curls, overhead triceps extensions and dumbbell pull-overs for back. Finally, you do one or two sets of an isolation exercise that allows the muscle to fully contract at the top of the range of motion. Examples of these exercises include cable crossovers for chest, leg extensions for quadriceps and standing calf raises for the calf muscles. Remember to take each set to failure, aiming for eight to 12 repetitions, also known as the hypertrophy or muscle growth repetition range.

Timed Volume Training

This simple form of training can be a powerful muscle building stimulus, even with modest equipment or body weight exercises. Rather than focusing on reps and sets, you do blocks of a given exercise with very little rest between each of your mini-sets. For example, if you are working pull-ups, you would do three-rep sets for 15 minutes, resting only 10 seconds between each. Inevitably you will start to fatigue and your muscles will require longer rest. When this happens you increase the rest time to 20 seconds between sets and 30 seconds and so on until the time elapses. On the first day you do 15 minutes of a chest exercise, such as push-ups, which work great with this program. Continue with 15 minutes of pull-ups for back, 10 minutes of calves and abs, alternating between the two, then finish with 10 minutes of biceps work. On the second day you will do 15 minutes of quadriceps, doing squats for example. Next do 10 minutes of hamstrings, 10 minutes of shoulders and 10 minutes of triceps. You should complete these workouts in 45 minutes or less. Try the workout two days per week, then increase to three and add a fourth workout when you get the hang of it. Alternate between these two workouts, taking a day off after each cycle.