Your muscles grow and develop in response to stress. Exercising provides this stress to varying degrees, depending on how you work out. Strength training is widely regarded as the most effective approach to building muscle mass. Of the possible strength-training routines, lifting provides the greatest degree of stress to the muscles. Many bodybuilders lift weights religiously in an effort to maximize their muscle gain and development. You can do this, too, although you must also focus on your diet and rest periods to aid in muscle gain.
Step 1
Develop a workout routine that features a wide array of lifts to exercise muscles throughout the body. You can do this in two ways. One option is to perform all your desired lifts on a single day and take the next day off to rest. An alternative is to lift every day and rotate between upper-body lifts one day and lower body lifts the next. The important thing is to give your muscles a day of rest in between lifting.
Step 2
Eat a well-balanced diet that features all the food groups. Don't replace fruits and vegetables with other foods. Eat large amounts of protein and increase your daily calorie consumption. IronMagazine.com recommends taking in 1 g of protein per pound of weight per day along with 18 to 20 times your weight in calories. But all food groups are important to your body's health and feature vitamins and minerals that are hard to get through other food sources.
Step 3
Drink plenty of water throughout the day, including while exercising. Not only does this prevent dehydration while exercising, it allows your body to excrete urea, a waste by-product of protein digestion.
Step 4
Get enough rest. In addition to resting your muscles the day after a lifting session, you need to get ample amounts of sleep at night. Sleep is the time where the muscles regenerate new muscle fibers and actually grow, so if you deprive yourself of sleep, you will find it harder to build muscle effectively.
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