Muscle Building Workout Plan

A good muscle training plan is an essential requirement if you want to build muscle effectively. To do this, it is important that you find the right plan for you, one that also suits you, your life and your goals.

In this article, I want to convey to you what is important when choosing a plan that is good and suitable for you, and what factors you should consider. You will eventually be able to use this information to find the right plan for you, find it, or perhaps create one yourself.

Basic rules for a good muscle training plan

If you really want to build muscle effectively, there are a few basics that make up a sensible workout plan. These are factors that should always be considered when training muscles.

I want to briefly explain to you what the rules are, before we move on to the factors that are critical to your personal plan. If needed, you can find more information on the individual factors in other articles here on the blog, or structure and condense in my book The Basics of Building Muscle.

These are the most important ground rules for a long term effective muscle training plan:

You must always keep these factors in mind if you want to build muscle effectively and in the long term.

In addition, the following primarily applies:

The plan should fit you, not your life, plan

I keep seeing people asking others about their learning plan or looking for the PERFECT learning plan on the Facebook group. But just because a plan appears to be optimal for someone else, or because someone achieves impressive results with it, is by no means the right plan for you. Moreover, there is no perfect plan that works for everyone. That is why I decided to write this article.

The ideal muscle building workout plan for you is the one that fits into your life and that you stick to. You can pull consistently over a longer period of time. Because building muscle is a plan that will lead to success in years, not weeks. The duration of muscle building is often underestimated.

Basically, the ability to stay informed is much more important than investing in a highly motivated manner. You achieve much more with two training units per week for six months than with seven training units per week, which you give up after a month because you cannot integrate them into your life.

This does not mean that standardized plans are bad in themselves. There are good reasons why so many contributors use certain plans successfully. However, the plan you choose should suit you. Together we will analyze how you can best make this choice and what is important.

What’s the right workout plan for building muscle?

I think you now realize that you don’t have to just pick the next best curriculum for your role model or well-built friend and then practice. But now how do you know how to tailor your workout plan to suit you?

Basically, the best plan is the one you make. You can stick to an effective plan. It is on this basic rule that we want to concentrate when making a choice.

There are several factors that will determine which plan is right for you. Now I want to take a look at them with you and introduce you to the questions you must ask yourself and answer in order to find the right plan.

How much time do you have for training?

Time is an absolute scarce commodity in modern society. For this reason, I also created Fitvolution, a fitness blog for busy people, to save time and energy. How much time you have, how much you can and want to spend on training is an important question you should ask yourself.

How many hours per week are you willing to invest in your training in the long term? Be honest with yourself here.

I know people who spend twelve hours or more a week in the gym. I myself train about six hours a week and currently run about two hours a week. But even with three or four hours a week, you can achieve a lot in a few months.

When do you have time?

This mainly concerns the days of the week on which you want to spread your workouts, and what time of day you can find time for your workouts and best motivate yourself to train. Ultimately, if you want to train sooner or later, it is not critical to your success. You can do both, but it may affect your plan.

When exercising in the morning, for example, different exercise choices and order may be more sensible to enable your body to wake up and thereby minimize the risk of injury.

Think carefully ahead of time what can fit into your daily life. Ideally, you should agree on the same training time as possible. If you do not, you will have to expect difficult to predict performance fluctuations between your devices. This is fine, but you should be prepared for it.

Often and short or seldom and long?

This preference can also be an important decision factor. Some people prefer the whole body workout to be done longer in fewer days, while others prefer to split the workout as a split workout. Maybe you should try this first. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.

It is important that you always reach the minimum total volume and stick to your regeneration times (which, of course, applies to every muscle).

Where do you want or will you train according to your muscle building workout plan?

If you’re looking to build muscle, it’s a good idea to work out in the gym. However, this should not be the case. Perhaps you also have a home gym or work out at home or on the road with only your own weight and maybe a singing trainer and several Thera bands.

I’ve actually been doing the latter for quite some time, so I can tell you that you can also build some muscle with this workout. It is not easy and effective, but not impossible. Be absolutely honest with yourself here. It is important to know what tools are available to you if you want to have an effective learning plan.

I recommend anyone interested in building muscle to train as efficiently as possible in a well-equipped gym. There is a lot to be said for a workout in the gym. However, if that doesn’t work for you, or if you just don’t want to and you know you’ll always have to torture yourself, there are other options.

My buddy Pat once introduced basic bodyweight workout exercises in a guest article and wrote a pretty cool book on bodybuilding *. I can only recommend this if you want to take a closer look at the topic.

How long have you trained?

I’m asking you this because I have seen too many times how highly motivated people who have never done strength training try to do strength training every day. Besides the fact that in the vast majority of cases it is pointless, none of them managed to last long.

Therefore, I advise you to start with small steps. If you trained once a week, try creating a second and possibly third training unit per week first. The secret to resilience is to gradually build good habits. You don’t have to crush your inner bastard.

From a physical point of view, small changes tend to be healthier. For example, do not underestimate the time to correct your musculoskeletal system. For this reason, beginners are advised to train in strength endurance before risking heavy weight injuries.

If you still have little experience, I can only recommend that you find a good trainer for the exercise and read carefully what to look for. After all, you want to (among other things) do squats correctly, master a stable deadlift technique, and bench press so you don’t get hurt and make your progress safely and efficiently.

Even I, with many years of training experience, still regularly attend seminars and let my technicians train my technique. Otherwise, errors will appear over time.

What is a good beginner muscle training plan?

I am often asked what a good muscle training plan is especially suitable for beginners. Basically, my answer is no different from what I give an experienced athlete. A good plan should follow the basic rules of muscle training, be simply structured, compact, and above all, one that fits with your life as an athlete.

After a phase of three to six months where the body begins to train with heavy weights, everyone can and should actually train according to the same muscle training rules. In my opinion, there is also no reason why a beginner’s training plan should differ significantly from a more advanced one.

If the muscle building workout plan was very suitable for you in the beginning, it can last for several years. However, it might make sense to start with the absolute beginner’s basics and only then set additional priorities.

This does not mean, however, that in the beginning you should do completely different exercises on completely different devices. If you find it difficult to do basic exercises in the beginning, a good trainer can give you exercises that teach you how to do targeted exercises correctly and safely in the future.

In my book The Basics of Building Muscle, the basic package includes two training plans that are very suitable for both beginners and advanced users.

Conclusion. How to find the right muscle workout plan

After reading this article, you will surely understand why not every plan is suitable for every trainee who wants to build muscle mass. Therefore, you should make sure that your plan suits your personal requirements well. In addition, of course, he must adhere to the basic rules for an effective muscle training plan.

Be honest with yourself when considering which plan is right for you. If you are unsure or feel you can take on something, then do something less first. You can still improve and train more often and / or longer.

Before doing this, understand the realistic duration of muscle fatigue. Building muscle is a marathon, not a sprint. If you have realistic expectations, the risk of disappointment will decrease because you think you are going too slowly.

I also want to reiterate that you should not forget about nutrition. You can train with the perfect muscle training plan, if your mass phase diet isn’t working you won’t get (good) results.

If you don’t want to waste time and get started, I can give you my book Basics of Building Muscle to Heart. This gives you a quick overview of everything that really matters if you want to build muscle. This is the first true “Don’t bullshit” guide to effective muscle building. Depending on the package, there are also several tried and tested muscle building workout plans from which you can choose the right one.

Regards

And don’t forget: your health is your health!