As you go about your workout program to build muscle, there are some important things to know. This is how to get fit for beginners.
Failing to do these could mean risking your long-term progress, possibly even causing you to fall off the protocol plan altogether.
Fortunately, if you plan ahead and make sure the following are covered, you don’t have to worry about this being an issue for you.
Let’s go over five things that you must be doing if you are currently trying a beginner workout and are aiming more muscle building.
Get Fit For Beginners Workout Tips
#1 Always Warm Up Your Joints
The very first must-do is to always make sure that you warm-up your joints. One of the most common reasons that many bodybuilders have to take time off – not by choice – is because of joint pain.
As you get stronger and stronger, you’ll be lifting heavier and heavier weight, which means your joints are going to have that much more stress being placed upon them.
Over time, this adds up. Shoulder problems are extremely likely among those who are doing bodybuilding workout programs, so shoulder mobility is extremely important.
Do not rush the warm-up. So many people nearly skip over it because they want to be in and out of the gym in record time and think that warm-up is not going to be helping them progress onward.
While it may not be helping you build muscle itself, indirectly it is because it’ll keep you in the gym and with a proper warm-up, don’t be surprised if you lift heavier as well.
Take five to ten minutes at the start of every upper body workout and make sure you take care of this.
#2 Taking Time Off From Working Out
Next, you also need to consider taking one week off every six months of your bodybuilding program. This is another overlooked thing that needs to get done if you hope to come back year after year feeling your best.
You might feel fine on a day to day basis like you’re recovering well with no problem, but, you don’t know the full story. Your body will still be suffering residual tears and trauma with ongoing consistent workouts.
An extended period of time off and away from the gym – at least a week or longer – helps to fully repair trauma, preventing injuries down the road.
Some people will use a deloading week where they lighten the weight and reduce the volume to help kick-start repair, but this isn’t always enough.
Twice a week, take one full week off. Time it so it happens while you’re on holidays and relax and give your body that time you need.
Not only is it really going to help you physically, but you’ll find that you are mentally much stronger and more resilient when you come back.
#3 Learn About Your Body
One of the greatest challenges that you must take on when you start off mass building workout is to learn your body.
You think that building muscle is a basic science. Do A and then B and you will get C.
Sadly, it rarely works this way. Some protocols may produce unstoppable gains for your body, helping you build muscle faster than you ever have before.
With others, that isn’t the case. You can hit the gym for weeks without seeing progress. It’s all about how your body responds and the individual body type you have.
By taking the time to learn this – to really come to better understand how your body functions and responds to the physical training you dish out, you can tailor make your beginners workout plan to see faster results.
One of the biggest regrets many older bodybuilders have is spending their early years doing things and only spinning their wheels.
While you can’t expect to determine if a protocol is going to give you results in a week, if you’ve been on it for a month and not much seems to be changing, this is a good sign something isn’t working and needs to be altered.
Keep alerting until you see progress.
#4 Workout Cycles Every 5-6 Months
Speaking of your workout program, this brings us to the next must-do tip for anyone on a bodybuilding program. Make sure that you are changing your entire workout program every 3-4 months.
5-6 months is quite a lengthy period of time to make some significant progress and once this time is up, you should try and do something completely new and different.
If you were doing a split body program, try and upper/lower set-up or a full body. Add some new exercises in. Adjust your rep range.
While you should be making some smaller scale changes to your workout on a week to week basis to keep yourself from hitting that dreaded progress plateau, every half a year, really change it up and do something entirely different.
This will keep your body responding and continually changing – which is precisely what you want here.
#5 Add Flexibility Workout
Finally, the last must-do for anyone who wants to see long-term success with their quest to build muscle mass is to make sure that you are also adding flexibility work.
Along with the warm-up issue, many people don’t add flexibility work to their routine either. They figure it’s useless and just a waste of time. They either don’t get sore or can deal with it.
But, flexibility work does more than that. It’s going to keep your tendons and ligaments functioning optimally, through the full range of motion that you want to move in each and every exercise you do.
Likewise, it’ll also help to keep your muscles more limber as well, which further helps you see increased strength gains as you can work through a larger range of motion in the gym.
Finally, it simply adds more functionality to your body overall. As you age, you are going to get more and more tight in all areas of your body unless you are taking the time to stretch daily.
Once you start getting so tight that everyday tasks become a greater challenge, this will really influence your overall quality of life.
Just be sure as you perform your stretches, you also do a good warm-up beforehand to reduce the risk of straining or pulling any ligaments, tendons, or muscles. Never bounce into your stretches, but rather, do them in a controlled manner.
Conclusion
So there you have the five most important things that you must be doing if you are going to go on and see excellent progress for years to come. It’s time to take responsibility for all of these things – don’t just think you can hit the gym, pick up a few weights and wait for results.
Bodybuilding and adding pounds of new lean muscle mass to your frame is just as much a mental activity as it is a physical one, so you need to treat it as such.
Train hard, but train smart and you will see far superior results.
-Terry Asher
Terry
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