But this is a completely wrong notion. You must realize that if you continue with your daily gym schedule and rigorous workouts on all the 7 days of a week, your muscles can get over-strained and you could end up losing all the lean muscle mass that you have in your body.

Therefore, your body needs proper diet as well as sufficient rest in addition to rigorous workouts in order to repair, recover, replenish and grow the muscles that have been damaged during workouts.

For the ultimate increase in strength and size of your muscles, you must train one part of your body, just once per week and allow it to rest for the rest of the week. Cut out your gym visits to just 3 sessions per week and allow 2 days rest period between consecutive workouts. Overtraining or over-exerting your muscles way beyond their original capacity could also lead to injury.

You can either begin your workouts about one hour prior to your dinner, or during the late afternoon. However, most people prefer to begin their day with early morning workouts. You must avoid working out during very hot or humid weather, or within two hours after taking you meal. You must set your fitness goals and plan your workout schedule considering your age, health, and requirement.

You must prepare your muscles for a rigorous workout session ahead by performing warm-up exercises daily for 5 to 10 minutes. You can include exercises like walking, jogging, cycling or knee lifts, which facilitate movement and warming up of all body parts. You must follow this up with exercises for developing muscular strength and endurance. You can include strength training exercises of your major muscle groups for improving your muscular endurance.

This should be followed by exercises such as walking, jogging, swimming, or skipping to improve your cardio-respiratory endurance. Three sessions of cardio exercises per week, each of 20 minute duration, for improving the cardio-respiratory endurance should be sufficient.

Cardio exercises should be followed by 10 to 12 minutes of slow stretching exercises daily to improve flexibility of the body. Finally, to allow regularization of the heart beat and to allow the body to get restored back into a state of normalcy, you must practice 5 to 10 minutes of cooling-down exercises daily such as slow walking or 'Shavasana'.