The needs and requirements of a person can greatly dictate the fitness goals of an individual and accordingly alter his body building program. Therefore, consider what you want to achieve from your body building program - whether you want to become bulky and huge, or a successful professional weight-lifter or did you want to tone up your unattractive, sagging body to make it appear well-toned and attractive?

Sit back for sometime and reflect on your goals before you enroll for a muscle building program. Think about why exactly you want to join a muscle building program - whether you want to build muscles for a toned and muscular body, or you want to build your body to become huge and to gain some extra muscle mass or do you want to become a professional weight lifter.

Both men and women love to have a well toned body with shapely hands, legs, shoulders, and a flat abdomen. If this is the case with you, then you must choose such a weight lifting routine, which involves the use of lighter weights with more number of repetitions. However, for biceps, chest, back or shoulder workout, you would need to scale-up the weights used.

However, in case you aspire to grow huge, and add thick layers of muscular mass to your body, then you must adopt such a weight lifting routine, which involves the use of high intensity techniques. Additionally, you will also need to take lot of rest. This will stimulate the muscles in your body to respond, repair, recover and grow into strong, healthy muscles.

Muscle building is a very strenuous task and to hope that you can give your 100 percent in each and every workout session is a very unrealistic expectation. However, the real challenge lies in staying upbeat and motivated through all your workout sessions no-matter how painful it is. Remember the 3 crucial steps to a muscle building program - strength training and weightlifting, eating right and allowing ample rest between successive workouts.

Step 1 - Strength Training and Weightlifting: Your workout routine must compulsorily include 4 compound movement exercises (those exercises that involve the use of more than one muscle) for effective muscle building - Bench Press (chest workout), Squats (leg workout), Dead lifts (back workout), and the Military Press (shoulder workout).

Step 2 - Eating a nutritious diet: For effective muscles building, you must take a high calorie diet and you need to increase your protein intake drastically (at least to 2 gm/kg of your body weight), irrespective of whether you have done a workout on that day or not. Your diet must be full of minerals, vitamins, and carbohydrates for a ready supply of energy to fuel your workouts.

Step 3 - Sufficient Rest: Muscles will grow faster if you take sufficient rest between 2 successive workouts because rest period allows your muscles to recover from the stress and exertion of the workouts. Ideally, you must workout for 3 days in a week and allow two days of rest between successive workouts.