Bernice Eker asked:


When preparing a complete body building workout plan, it is essential that you workout your upper body and legs. In the legs there are three main muscles groups you need to focus on; the quadriceps, hamstrings and calves. By working out all these muscles, you will build strong and durable legs.

Fortunately, most leg exercise regimes will workout each of the three muscles. For building strength and power in the legs squats are great. The exercise involves placing weight on a barbell and squatting down resting the weight on the neck. For safety, and the best results, good technique is essential. The exercise range for your quadriceps includes dumbbell squats, dumbbell lunges, leg extensions and leg press.

Turning to the hamstrings, there are three great body building workouts that should be used. The first is using a leg curl machine whilst laying face down and lift weights up. Dumbbell stiff legged dead lifts and stiff legged dead lifts are the two other exercises.

The remaining muscle group in the legs to add in with the body building workout is the calves. There are a number of exercises that can be used to develop the calves which will build muscle for leaping abilities. The best known exercises are the leg press calf extension, standing one legged calf raise, standing calf raise and the seated calf raise. All these calf raise exercises consist of just standing with straight legs and then repeatedly raising up onto the toes by using the calf muscles.

When preparing a complete body building workout plan it is essential to include a comprehensive workout plan for the legs. Strong and powerful legs will compliment and support the development of the upper body. Many bodybuilders, without a thorough workout regime, focus solely on their upper-body.

To build and develop strong legs take these exercise tips and include them in your workout regimen. Work the quadriceps into your shoulder, triceps and bicep workout day and include the hamstrings and calves with the chest and back workout day. This exercise range makes for a complete body building workout schedule.

One of the most important tips for building muscle in your legs is not to overdo your training. Whilst training must be regular you must also remember to rest. Your muscles need the time to recover and grow stronger before your next workout – this is the key to developing big muscles.



Muscle Gain

The bodybuilding debates will never end. The endless arguments over how an effective muscle-building program should be structured will most likely continue until the end of time. Just scour the Internet message boards, flip through any muscle magazine or talk to the sales rep at your local supplement store. No matter who you talk to or what you read, it seems that everyone is an expert these days.

If everyone is an expert, confident in their own ideas and beliefs, how can the average beginner possibly know who to listen to? He or she is instantly confronted with endless questions that seem to have no clear-cut answer.

How many days should I train per week? How many sets should I perform for each muscle group? What type of rep range should I be using? What are the most effective exercises for stimulating muscle growth? How long should my workouts last?

These questions go on and on until he or she is eventually led to believe that building muscle is an infinitely complex process involving rocket-science precision and an intimate understanding of human physiology. I mean, that’s what takes to build muscle, right? Wrong! Believe me, there are answers to these important questions, and if you are willing to put in the time and effort you will most definitely find them. But that’s not what this article is about.

You see, amidst all of the confusion and endless debating, the majority of lifters end up losing sight of the big picture. Beyond all of the specific workout principles, such as rep range and exercise selection, remains one crucial principle, a principle that lies at the very heart of the muscle growth process. If this principle is not given full attention, or even worse, completely ignored, building muscle becomes next to impossible.

The bottom line is that muscles grow as they adapt to stress. When you go to the gym and lift weights, you create “micro-tears” within the muscle tissue. Your body perceives this as a potential threat to its survival and reacts accordingly by increasing the size and strength of the muscle fibers in order to protect against a possible future “attack”. Therefore, in order to continually increase the size and strength of the muscles, you must focus on progressing each week by either lifting slightly more weight or performing an extra rep or two. In doing this, your body will continue to adapt and grow to the ever-increasing stress.

Building muscle is all about building strength!

So what is the most powerful muscle-building tool available? Quite simply, it is a pen and a piece of paper!

Every time you go to the gym you must write down exactly what you accomplished and then strive to improve upon it the following week. If you aren’t always getting better, then you’re either staying the same or getting worse. Every week you should have an exact plan of attack ready to be executed. You absolutely cannot afford to start throwing weights around aimlessly without a clear-cut goal in mind.

The specifics of building muscle are important to understand and implement, but regardless of what style of training you’re currently using the ultimate deciding factor between success and failure is progression. You can sit around all day obsessing over specific principles, but the bottom line is that if you aren’t getting stronger every week, you absolutely will not be getting any bigger. Examine your training approach closely. If you haven’t been paying laser-like attention to the amount of weight you’ve been using, the number of reps you’ve been performing, and then striving with every ounce of your energy to improve upon those numbers each week, you are completely ignoring the very foundation of the muscle growth process. If you want to see the best gains in muscle mass and strength that you possibly can, a pen and a piece of paper is the most important tool you could possibly have in your arsenal.

Muscle Building