How to Lift Weights to Build Muscle

By Sam

It is important that you know how to lift weights to stimulate muscle growth otherwise all the work you do at the gym may go to waste.

Anyone can go lift whichever weights they want to do, but that won’t necessarily translate into muscle gains. In order to build muscle mass you need to lift weights in a certain way, this article is here to explain how.

What are reps?

Reps which is short for ‘repetitions’, is the number of complete movements of a motion. E.g. 2 push ups is equal to 2 reps.

What are sets?

Sets are groups of repetitions, so if you did 20 push ups in one go, that was 1 set. You can then follow it with another set of 20 push ups, giving you a total of 2 sets completed.

Length of workout

Your workout should be between 45-60 minutes and no longer. Many tend to believe that the longer they stay at the gym and the more pain they feel, the bigger they will get.

This is not how weight lifting works, it is a big mistake and overtraining will actually discourage your body from gaining muscle!

When you are weight training your body’s energy source is being depleted. Glycogen is the body’s immediate source of energy and using weights for over an hour can result in your body using up its fuel and needing an alternative way to provide energy.

What happens is that the hormone ‘cortisol’ increases in the blood stream, and this is a catabolic hormone which prevents tissue growth.

Weight lifting past the hour mark will cause an increase in cortisol and a drop in testosterone (the muscle building hormone that we want plenty of).

How many reps to build muscle?

It depends on whether your goal is to tone or to build muscle mass.

In order to build muscle mass the number of reps per set should be 6-10. This means that you should adjust the heaviness of the weights so that you can lift it 10 times at most.

If your goal is to tone muscle, you should be doing somewhere in the region of 12-30 reps for each set.

How many sets to build muscle?

There is not an exact number of sets you must do but as a general rule you should be doing:

3-4 sets of each exercise
5 different exercises
In total, this will mean you can get 15-20 sets done in a 45–60 minute workout.

Remember not to workout for over an hour!

If you haven’t finished all the sets you planned to do but it has reached an hour, just leave and go eat. It will encourage muscle growth more than if you try and finish off those extra sets.

How long should you rest between sets?

You should be looking to do intense workouts at the gym to maximise the number of sets you can squeeze into a 45-60 minute workout.

The rest between sets must not be excessively long that you don’t feel like you did the set before, and it must not be too short, leaving you struggling to lift the next set because you’re still recovering from the last.

The length of the rest can vary depending on the individual; for beginners it may be harder to have short gaps between your sets.

When you start to get into a routine with weight lifting, your body should feel ready to move onto the next set in about 1-2 minutes.

Should I workout the same muscles everyday?

No it wouldn’t give you results any quicker, in fact it would make gaining muscle harder. You need to be focusing certain muscle groups on different days.

A basic workout plan for a week could look something like this:

Mondays – Biceps, Back, Abs
Tuesday – Triceps, Chest, Shoulders
Wednesday – Break
Thursday – Quadriceps, Hamstring, Calves
Friday – Biceps, Back, Abs
Saturday – Triceps, Chest, Shoulders
Sunday – Break

In this example the muscles that are being trained in each workout all coincide with each other, i.e. if you do chest press exercises on tuesday, this will work your triceps, shoulders and chest. Doing shoulder press exercises will also train your shoulders and triceps.

If your workout mixes exercises training entirely different muscles, you are not pushing your muscle groups hard enough e.g. Chest press and lat pull down train opposite muscles and should be done in seperate workouts.

A whole day’s break is needed for the muscles that were targeted in your workout, i.e. if you trained your biceps on Monday the earliest you could train your biceps again would be Wednesday. This provides the body enough time to regenerate and strengthen its muscles.

Mix up your workouts

Make sure that you don’t always stay within the same region of reps, mixing it up sometimes will keep your body surprised and encourage it to build more muscle. This means that you should also try to change your exercises once you’ve been doing the same ones for the last 4-6 weeks.

As well as changing your exercises, you should also change your weight lifting techniques. You can read about the different ways to lift weights here: muscle building techniques

Always attempt to improve

Try and beat your personal bests, you need to focus on lifting more than you were able to than for example a month ago. Without attempting to do more reps, or increase the heaviness of the weights, your body will not need to build more muscle. You will instead maintain what you currently have.

What about food?

Your nutrition deserves as much effort if not more than regular weight lifting.

Check out the following articles which explain how to have a good muscle building diet:

Should I take supplements?

It is not a necessity to take supplements providing you get enough quality foods from your daily diet, however, protein shakes can be very useful if you struggle to eat the quantity of protein required each day.

Protein shakes can also be handy for instant protein and energy replenishment after a workout. There are also other supplements which help with muscle recovery and there are even pre-workout supplements.

Check out the following articles on popular bodybuilding supplements:

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