Male Bodybuilder Workouts

Before there was Arnold Schwarzenegger or Charles Atlas there was Eugene Sandow who is credited with being the founding father of body building. Eugene Sandow strived to make his body perfectly sculpted; using the Greek statues of Gods as his model and in the process he introduced the art of body building to the world. Sandow combined the art of body building with the sport of wrestling long before the WWE and used the wrestling format to showcase the strength of the perfectly sculptured body. Today body builders continue to sculpt their bodies to resemble Greek God’s with the use of diet, exercise and tanning oils to showcase their muscles.

So how do you go from geek to Greek God? The answer is of course in the workout. Workouts should be limited to four times a week for one hour duration each session in order to reach your body building potential. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger who is still one of the best know body builders of his day understood the benefits of making his workouts efficient and not over working his muscles.

For the future Arnolds out there an hour a day may not seem like it will get you the ripped body you crave but body building has to be done correctly or instead of building muscle you will do the opposite with an over zealous workout and cause muscle atrophy.

Like any good goal body builders must have a clear plan or a set goal to work towards or their workouts will be all over the place and create muscle imbalance and possible future injuries. For example if a body builder only works the quadriceps (the muscle in front of the thigh) and neglects to workout the hamstring (the muscle in the back of the thigh) the stronger muscle will pull on the weaker muscle and in this instance the result will be a knee injury.

In order to avoid injuries it is best to understand that there are two categories of body building workouts that a body builder must integrate into his workout session. The first is isolation exercises followed by compound exercises that will utilize two or more muscles at the same time.

The first type of muscle work out involves working an isolated muscle and this is a good warm up for muscles to limber them up before you work on compound muscles which work on multiple muscles at once. Isolated muscle exercises will target one particular muscle group and use less weight constraints but more repetitions will be done. These work best for bicep curls, triceps’ extensions, and leg extensions.

Compound exercises involve using up to 75% of your maximum lift potential but only doing six to ten reps. This works great for exercises such as bench pressing, shoulders pressing, dead lifts and of course squats.

All that is needed to be successful as a body builder is free weights, a bench press and a good workout routine that touches on all areas of the body to create that Greek God look. Free weights can be used in a variety of ways adding or subtracting weights as needed depending on what area of the body you are working on. The bench press and free weights can be used to bench press, do flat bench flyes, incline bench press, leg press, leg extensions and leg curls. These exercises work the chest and legs. Other routine exercises such as squats, barbell lunges, wrist curls, reversed barbell curls, and wrist rollover machine work the legs and forearms.

Some body builders like to create a routine that works on several areas of the body on one day and moving on to other areas of the body the next workout day. For example on Mondays, the legs, calves, forearms, abs, chest and back would be concentrated on in an intensive workout. The other three days would be devoted to working on the biceps, shoulder, calves, triceps, forearms and abs.

There are lots of workout guides on the market so it’s not hard to find one that fits with your schedule and your goals to get the results you want, you just have to be willing to do the work and educate yourself about how to get there.