You’re feeling ready to start your body transformation. You know it’ll be difficult and you’re prepared to commit. But you aren’t quite sure how to start or what you’re committing to.
No, it doesn’t just mean incredibly buff guys showing off borderline-unnatural physiques and tanning their bodies for shows. Bodybuilding refers to any exercise you do to build your body, regardless of the primary end goal. Working out for muscle mass, a lean build, fitness, or overall health are all considered forms of bodybuilding.
Fortunately, the basics you’ll start with are the same for every end goal.
Table of Contents
Eat For Bodybuilding
Often, beginners underestimate how crucial it is to control their diet if they want to body build effectively. When it comes to bodybuilding, diet and exercise go together. You can’t neglect one and expect to have success with the other.
Your exact diet comes down to nutrition, calories, and your goals. Luckily, there are many easily-available resources to help structure a diet to work toward your goal.
For example, eat more calories than you burn to gain muscle or less than you burn to lose fat. Find the right balance between proteins, carbs, and fats. As you progress, you might start looking into nutritional supplements or taking liquid SARMS.
Decide What You’re Working Towards
No matter your reason for working out, know there’s no fast route to seeing results. It’ll take a few months before you start noticing a visible change and even longer before you get the body you want. That said, results tend to come quicker when you know what you want and tailor your diet and exercise plan appropriately.
Are you simply trying to improve overall health? Do you want to be able to deadlift as much weight as possible? Maybe you want to grow your muscles big and develop a buff build? Perhaps you’re aiming for a lean, athletic build focused on strength instead of size?
Once you’ve decided, it’s easier to get an idea of what sorts of workout to do and diet to eat. There’s no shortage of online resources to help you. Starting on the right path will help you reach your goals sooner.
Understand That Results Take Time
It doesn’t matter where you work out. It could be in a gym or you could set up some home gym equipment. You might even do some workouts at home and some in a gym. What’s important is that you form a workout schedule, stick to it, and build consistency.
One of the biggest obstacles to bodybuilding is that people stop before they start seeing results. It could be a failure to make time to exercise or feeling demotivated when they don’t see immediate results.
When it comes to bodybuilding, the importance of consistency is up there with diet and exercise. You can’t just eat well and work out. You must make a point of doing it consistently, even on days you don’t feel like it if you want to see results.
Learn Proper Technique
Improper workout techniques can potentially do more harm than good and set you back. Using proper technique means that when you exercise, you do it in a way that gets the most out of the movement, targets the correct muscle, and doesn’t damage your body.
Proper technique combines taking your time, using good form, spacing your sets, and ensuring you engage the muscle you’re trying to work. For example, if you’re doing crunches, you can consciously engage your abs instead of doing the motion and hoping your body automatically does it.
Find The Best Exercises
There’s no rule that one exercise is inherently better than another. However, you might prefer one exercise over another. Luckily, there are usually multiple ways to train a specific muscle. If you don’t enjoy one thing, try another. For example, if you don’t enjoy training your chest with bench presses, maybe you’ll prefer dumbbell flyes.
Similarly, you’ll probably discover you prefer specific exercises because of the muscles they activate and the results you see rather than whether you enjoy them. Some are good at putting the most focus on a single muscle. Others activate a large muscle group, letting you work them all at once—it’s all about preference.
Don’t Neglect Any Muscle Groups
Finally, avoid making the mistake of only training a few muscle groups and neglecting the rest. To build your body proportionately and improve your health, you must work your entire body. How you achieve it is up to you. You could do full-body workouts or certain muscle groups at a time. Remember to give each muscle group an appropriate amount of recovery time before working it again.
Conclusion
Bodybuilding takes time, patience, commitment, structure, and consistency. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when figuring out how to get started. Fortunately, information regarding nutrition, exercise, and putting them together is widely available and can make the start of your journey significantly smoother. If that doesn’t work for you, you always have the option of finding a trainer to walk you through everything.