Demon's Beginner Bodybuilding Guide

[Demon]

The purpose of this routine will be to put on large amounts of muscle mass by working out the largest muscles of the body. There are two muscles in particular that make up the bulk of your muscular weight. Your legs make up around 40% of your body's total weight; the largest muscles in your legs being your quadriceps. Your upper body takes up closer to 50% of your body's total weight; the latissimus dorsi is the largest muscle of the upper body. The rest of your musculature lies mainly between your shoulders, trapezius (upper-back), chest, calves, glutes, abdominals, and arms.

We want a routine that will give us the biggest bang for our buck - one that targets our biggest muscles in an efficient manner. This routine will only consist of three main exercises for these reasons.
The first of these exercises is the squat. The squat has been considered by many trainers to be the best muscle mass building exercise in existence. Although the primary muscle targeted in the squat are the quadriceps, many other muscles of the body are also engaged during this exercise.
The next exercise we will use is the pulldown. When executed properly, the pulldown will put tremendous strain on your lats. Large lats will be the biggest contributor to a bigger upper body.
The last exercise is the overhead press. Specifically we will use a variation called the military press, which means we will have strict form that puts as much strain as possible on the shoulders without being assisted by other body parts.

Here is the complete routine:

Squat 4x12
Pulldown 4x12
Press 4x12


This may not seem like a lot, but your muscles will be exhausted if you do these exercises properly. The goal for each set is TO REACH FAILURE FOR THE TARGET BODY-PART. If you fail before you reach 12 reps, YOU NEED TO REDUCE THE WEIGHT AND TRY AGAIN. Conversely, if you can do more than 12 reps you need to raise the weight. This means it is very possible that you will have to change the weight between sets.

Reps are a meaningless measurement for muscle gain. This will likely come as a surprise to you, but doing 12 reps on a given exercise does not guarantee that you will target your muscles effectively. The most important factor that determines how to strengthen your muscle is TIME UNDER TENSION. You already know what time is. The reason time is important for weightlifting is because rushing through a motion will not effectively target your muscles. You can easily push through 12 reps of a heavy weight by pushing as hard as you can, then letting gravity bring the weight down. This is a HUGE waste of your time if muscle gain is your goal. The purpose of these exercises is to make them AS DIFFICULT AS POSSIBLE in order to strain the muscle as much as possible. This means you will not be using the heaviest weight you can move, but rather a weight that can really punish your muscles for a certain period of time. We want to shoot for about 45 seconds of time under tension per set. This means you want to have a good TEMPO that makes your muscle burn as hard as possible. DO NOT RUSH THROUGH EACH EXERCISE. Rushing will make the exercise easier, sure you will be lifting more weight but this is a bodybuilding routine where our number one focus is muscle growth. Towards the end of your set, your muscles should be approaching failure. Again, the goal is for your final rep around ~45 seconds to put you at failure so that you couldn’t do another rep if you tried. And if you could do another rep, you need to increase the weight.

It will take a lot of dedication, focus, and grit to be able to do 3 exercises in a row with every set approaching muscle failure. It will be difficult to do, but that is only because it is effective. Adding more exercises will reduce the intensity of these important lifts and will hinder your progress. However, once you get used to this program and are able to give all these exercises 100% of your focus you may want to add in an accessory lift or two to target specific areas of your body. Some good accessory lifts include calf raises, lateral raises, shrugs, curls, tricep pulldown, crunches, hyperextensions, glute bridge, leg curls, and the chest flies.

Thanks for reading and stay focused!