Bodybuilding is a popular method for sculpting a great physique and staying healthy.
Unlike other forms of exercise, bodybuilding is about putting on mass and maintaining a low body-fat percentage so that you can look your absolute best. In many ways, the journey is about maximizing your body’s potential.
If you’re new to the sport, it can be a bit overwhelming. Bodybuilding for beginners covers many different topics, and you might get lost if you try to incorporate everything at once.
That’s why we’ve broken it down to the basic things you need to focus on. Here are 10 bodybuilding tips you can adopt to make your fitness routine awesome.
1. Eat Enough Protein
You hear that protein is important for exercise all the time. It is, and especially so if you want to know how to put on mass.
Dietary protein serves many important functions in the body. It regenerates body tissues and repairs organs, helps us grow our hair and fingernails, and even makes up our cardiovascular system.
But it also rebuilds and repairs muscle tissue after strenuous exercise sessions. Protein breaks down into amino acids that are then used to repair damaged tissue and build it back even stronger. So if you aren’t eating enough protein, you’ll likely struggle to put on mass and recover from your workouts.
Current protein guidelines say that someone who doesn’t lift weights should eat between .4 and .55g/kg of bodyweight. But that’s pretty low for someone trying to build muscle like a bodybuilder.
Instead, it’s advisable to start with more protein. Many bodybuilders swear by eating 1 gram of lean protein per pound of body weight per day. But so long as you’re getting about .6g per pound of body weight, you should be okay.
*Also, be sure to consult a physician before applying any of the tips in this article. High protein diets and the like are pretty well studied, but individual health always should come first. Your doctor can answer any specific questions you have.
2. Stay Consistent With Your Workouts
It’s easy when you’re new to bodybuilding to go in search of the perfect program. But looking for the perfect bodybuilding routine for beginners is a fool’s errand. You’ll only wind up spending money and wasting time you could otherwise devote to your training.
Above all, consistency matters more than anything in a fitness routine. When you’re consistent, you’re more likely to develop a habit out of working out and stick to your program. Because it takes a long time to see actual results from your program, this is absolutely key.
The best advice we can give to start bodybuilding is to pick a program you like and stick with it. If you find that it isn’t your jam after a few months, go ahead and find something new. But constantly shifting programs in search of the “perfect” template will only end in mediocre results.
Good bodybuilding programs usually emphasize:
- Body-part-specific days (leg day, arm day, etc.)
- 4 to 6 days per week of training
- Compound weighted movements, like squats and bench presses
- Proper form
- Light jumps in weight (see #7)
For what it’s worth, you also likely don’t have to pay hundreds of dollars for a good program. There are hundreds of free bodybuilding tips and routines online.
3. Eat Plenty of Carbs
Protein is king, but carbs are a close second when adding lean muscle and growing in size.
Carbohydrates break down to glucose that your muscles use for energy. If you’re training hard at least 4 days per week, you need this energy so that you can push yourself hard during workouts. Without enough fuel, you will have trouble doing the necessary work to get results.
Everyone is different in terms of how many they need. Use a macronutrient calculator online to determine the right number for you. If you’re feeling sluggish, add 20 to 50 more grams until you find a good number.
Consuming carbs within an hour of exercising has also been shown to promote faster recovery from workouts.
Stick to “clean” carbs, such as brown rice, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, and other whole grains. Also, be sure to eat plenty of vegetables (these are carbs, too) so that you get enough micronutrients like vitamins, minerals, and fiber.
4. Get Enough Rest
Training is important, but so is recovering from your training. And one of the best things you can do as a beginning bodybuilder is to get plenty of rest.
Science shows that getting adequate sleep promotes athletic performance. Sleep gives your body time to repair muscle tissue and restore hormone levels—two essential things you need to train and feel your best throughout the day.
Rest is also important for restoring cognitive function and other health-related markers too. Suffice it to say, not getting enough rest will only delay your performance and bodybuilding gains.
It can be more difficult to get to sleep if you exercise right before bed. Try doing your bodybuilding workouts throughout the day. Then, if you can, enlist a rest-promoting nighttime routine to help you get to sleep.
(Stretching helps!)
As an adult, you should aim for 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night.
5. Supplement Correctly
Bodybuilding tips all over the internet will tell you to take supplements. This is good advice. They can help—but you should be wary of taking too many.
The truth is that supplements are often just a lot of marketing hype. The common ones you probably should take include:
- Protein (whey, soy, or hemp are all good examples)
- Creatine monohydrate
- Branch chain amino acids
- Melatonin (to promote more restful sleep)
Do your research before taking other types.
And if you’re looking for true muscle-building supplements, here’s where you can buy SARMS.
6. Take at Least One Rest Day
Like sleep, rest days are important for overall health and recovery. If you want to know how to build muscle, remember that it happens after you exercise, not during.
The stimulus created during exercise prompts your brain to build back muscle stronger and bigger. But unless you give your body enough time and nutrients to repair itself, that won’t happen.
If you can’t stand the thought of taking a full day off, go for a walk or spend some time stretching. But aim for at least one, if not two, rest days from lifting weights.
Ideally, your rest day will fall after a tough session or string of days of working out. If your exercise week starts on Monday, Thursdays and Sundays are good ones to take off.
7. Make Small Jumps in Weight
Building strong muscles doesn’t happen in a month or two. You could apply all the bodybuilding tips in the world, and it would still take at least a year for you to get the results you’re after. That’s why making small jumps with weights is important.
It’s not as exciting to make a 5lb jump to make a 20lb leap on a lift like a bench press. But the benefit of making small jumps is real. You give your body more opportunities to get strong by making incremental progress and significantly decrease the risk of injury.
On big compound lifts like squats and bench presses, aim to increase weight by 5lbs per week. On smaller exercises like curls, go for 2.5lb jumps. Stick to the process, and you will see results.
This follows a bodybuilding principle known as progressive overload. So long as you make small advancements in your workouts, you will get results. You simply don’t need to make giant jumps every week to get bigger and stronger.
8. Let Injuries Heal
In the event that you do get injured, take time off so your body can heal.
Muscle injuries are no joke. These sorts of setbacks tend to linger when not given time to mend. So if you push through a little tweak, you might find that it becomes a bigger problem.
In fact, light tweaks are probably the thing you should be most cautious of. If your joint feels like it’s tweaked, you may have injured the tendon or ligament. Since these areas of the body get less blood flow than muscles do, they can take even longer to heal.
Be smart and take time off if you need to. If you can’t stand the thought of taking days off, simply avoid the area you’ve injured. You can also use this time to dial in your nutrition and do some cardio to burn off excess fat.
*In the event that you have any preexisting injuries, be sure to see a doctor before you start bodybuilding.
9. Eat at a Slight Caloric Surplus
Bodybuilders have to eat at a caloric surplus in order to gain muscle. This isn’t gym “science,” either. It’s a simple fact based on physics—energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed.
If you don’t give your body the right amount of energy, it will stay the same size. If you give it too much energy, you’ll likely store the extra that can’t be used to build muscle as body fat. So there’s a balancing act here.
Most bodybuilders say that 250 calories of excess is enough for them to feel recovered and not gain any weight. As you get more muscular, you might need to up it to 300 or 400 extra calories per day to account for your new size.
An easy way to find out how many calories you need is to use a TDEE calculator. TDEE stands for Total Daily Energy Expenditure. Not only does it take into account your height, weight, and age, but also how much physical activity you’re doing when you lift weights.
If you’ve never counted calories before, a simple counting app can make it easy. You don’t have to follow it or log your food forever, but it’s a good way to know how many nutrients you need on a given day.
10. Be Patient
It’s harder than ever to not feel tempted to change what you’re doing in your workouts. Instagram fitness models and weightlifters make it seem like you should be following their routine to look and perform like them.
All that said, it’s just as important to be patient with your bodybuilding journey.
You’re not going to get massive in one month of training. You’re not going to lose fifteen pounds of fat, either. Embracing this and gearing up for the long haul is the best thing you can do for your goals.
Instead of leaning on unrealistic outcomes, try chunking your goals into one or three-month intervals. Determine where you want to be in a year, then set up milestones in these increments to measure progress.
You can also set goals around the process of your bodybuilding routine. Record the number of workouts per week you do, the number of clean meals you eat, and the number of days in a row you go without deviating from your routine.
Bodybuilding Tips for Your Routine
There are really only a handful of bodybuilding tips you need to follow to get started with bodybuilding, and most of them are simple in practice.
Eating enough protein and carbs should form the foundation of your bodybuilding nutrition. Getting enough sleep and taking a day off each week will help you recover so your body looks and performs well.
If you work hard every time you exercise and take care of the little details, you can make progress in a relatively short period of time.
For more fitness tips, check out our blog!
