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The greater effort you put into something the better results you will have. For a long time this has been a universally accepted maxim that has applied to many varied parts of life and from a historical perspective has usually been regarded as the standard in muscle building exercise. The more time you spend fine-tuning yourself using muscle building exercise, the more athletic you will become. Therefore it only makes sense that the longer you spend in the gym with muscle building exercise, the stronger and more muscular your body will become. Contrary to what you might think, the answer with respect to muscle building exercise is a resounding no! It is in this area of bodybuilding that popular wisdom goes straight down the plughole.

When we look at the muscle building exercise from its roots, it is very clear why this is so.

All processes that occur within the human body are centered around keeping you alive and healthy and this applies doubly to muscle building exercise. Through thousands of years of evolution the human body has become a finely tuned organism that can adapt efficiently to virtually all conditions that are placed upon it. Our body sends signals when we are hungry or thirsty, we get suntanned when high volumes of Ultra Violet rays are present, we build calluses to stop our skin from wearing and so forth. So what happens when we break down the body's muscle tissue in the gym using muscle building exercise? To put it simply, the muscles get bigger and stronger. By battling against resistance over the muscle's existing capacity we have posed a threat to the musculature. The body sees this as potentially harmful therefore as a intuitive adaptive response the muscles will increase in size (hypertrophy) effectively protecting the body against this threat. As we constantly intensify the resistance from week to week using muscle building exercise the body will keep on growing and adapting.

It appears to be simple and ultimately it is. However, the crucial thing to appreciate in relation to all of this is that the muscles can only grow healthier and stronger if they are given proper time to recover between muscle building exercise. If not given proper time to recover, the process of muscle growth simply cannot occur.

Your target in the gym needs to be to use muscle building exercise with the minimum amount of volume needed to give an adaptive response. When you have pushed your muscles over their existing capacity and have started your thousand year old evolutionary alarm system, you have done your job. Any further pressure to the body with muscle building exercise will merely intensify your time to recover, degrade the immune system and force your body into catabolic overdrive.

Most people do muscle building exercise far too often and with far more sets than they need to. High intensity muscle building exercise is much more stressful to the body than many people think. Many people structure their muscle building exercise programs in a manner that actually counteracts their gains and stops them from making the progress that they need. There are some guidelines to help you to achieve maximum gains using muscle building exercise:

Do muscle building exercise no more than three days every week.

Do not let your muscle building exercise last for longer then 60 minutes.

Perform between 5-8 sets of muscle building exercise for large muscle groups (thighs, back, chest) and between 2-4 sets of muscle building exercise for smaller muscle groups (biceps, shoulders, calves, triceps, abs).

Push all sets to the brink of muscular failure and concentrate on moving forward in either weight or reps each seven days. If you really train hard and keep a consistent schedule, doing muscle building exercise more often or for a longer time than this will be counterproductive to your gains.

Muscle building exercise, like all good things in life, should be done in moderation!