Discover How To Create A Productive Routine So You Can Build Muscle Faster, Without Overtraining

Tip! For best results with building muscle and losing fat, 5 days a week, 30 minutes a day is most beneficial. More than 5 days and you risk overtraining.

If you're like most bodybuilders and weight lifters, you train most of the time on some sort of split routine. Take a look around your gym.

Nowadays you see very few people performing full body workouts. This is because so many weightlifting tips involve using a split routine.

This has caused two problems that are holding you back from massive muscle gains and faster fat loss results.

First of all, full body weightlifting routines are extremely effective. With a proper full body workout regimen, you'll build muscle at a very fast rate.

The second (and bigger) problem is that most people using these weightlifting tips on split routines falsely believe that their split routine will keep them from overtraining.

Unfortunately, they run into a couple of problems and they don't realize what the problems are so they can't fix them.

They end up banging their proverbial heads against the wall without making any progress, wondering why all these weightlifting tips aren't working for them.

Tip! Increase resistance - increasing the weight lifted in meaningful increments ensures the muscle is pushed beyond its previous point of failure thus maintaining the muscle building process. Aim to increase the weight when you reach six to eight reps and failure does not occur.

The first problem with going to a split routine is that most weight lifters end up doing too much work for each body part. Since they've split their weightlifting routine into multiple workouts, they end up training just as long, but on fewer body parts. So instead of 3 sets on the bench press in a full body routine (or maybe a two way split), they end up training chest by itself and performing 15 sets.

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The second big problem with most split routines in these weightlifting tips is the unintended consequence of overlap. Very few splits eliminate overlap. Let me give you a couple of examples of problem splits that I've seen in magazines or books.

Monday - Chest & Shoulders Tuesday - Legs Thursday - Arms (Biceps, Triceps and Forearms) Friday - Back

Looks pretty good, right? So what's the problem with this split? How about training arms and back on consecutive days? When you train your back, you train your biceps pretty darn hard.

This causes two problems. First, you're going to overtrain your biceps. Second, with back being trained the day after arms, your back, a very large and important muscle for promoting muscle growth, will suffer in it's training. Your biceps are a limiting factor in back training and you just trained your biceps the day before.

If you understand what I'm conveying in these weightlifting tips, you'll be able to construct much better routines and make better muscle building progress.

A very popular weight training split is to workout five days a week, take the weekends off and hit each body part once in that period. Here's an example:

Again, you hit the biceps twice in a row. You also hit the shoulders pretty hard on three different days - chest day, back day and shoulder day with back and shoulder day coming back to back. However you divide up this split, you'll run into trouble.

A lot of body parts overlap so you need to really think through how you are going to construct a split routine. It's a lot more than just dividing up your body parts and plugging them into a standard split.

Most back exercises will hit the biceps hard, while also affecting the shoulders.

Most chest exercises will hit the triceps hard while also affecting the shoulders.

Leg and back exercises can overlap, as exercises like squats hit the lower back very hard, as do stiff legged deadlifts, and regular deadlifts.

Keep some of these weightlifting tips in mind while putting together a split routine to make sure you give each body part enough rest without overtraining.

Tip! Exercise Routine: Once the tight restrictive muscles have been lengthened from the stretches, it is time to exercise the opposing muscle group, the one that is weak and underdeveloped, in order to shorten and strengthen the muscles in order to reduce the tensile stresses imposed on them from the opposing tight muscle group. Exercising and strengthening the weak underdeveloped muscles not only forces the opposing muscle group to relax and lengthen further, but it also helps to maintain the length created in those muscles from the previous stretches.

Gregg Gillies is the founder of Build Lean Muscle.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.

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Discover How To Create A Productive Routine So You Can Build Muscle Faster, Without Overtraining

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