Even to people who like to think of themselves as fitness nuts, how to effectively and progressively grow muscle for a firmer, more lean appearance can sometimes be a mystery. During my career as a Costa Mesa Personal Trainer I have seen more than one person tell me that they started taking every supplement that they could get their hands on after getting fed up with their progress.

That’s a shame, because despite what supplement companies might have you believe, real, sustained muscle growth doesn’t come in the form of a pill or a powder. It comes through patience

Protein- The most common mistake most people make while training to pack on muscle is not getting enough protein in their diet. Muscle simply cannot grow without it, so always make sure you include a lot of protein in every meal you eat.

But how much protein should you be eating?

That really depends upon your goal weight. You should be eating about one gram of protein per day for every pound that you would like to weigh. So for example, if you are 150 pounds but like to bulk up to a muscular 180 pounds, eat 180 grams of protein a day. If you one hundred ninety pounds, but would like to slim down to a toned 170, you should eat 170 grams of protein a day.

Compound Exercises- Make sure that you make compound weight training exercises, that is, exercises that activate as many joints and muscles as possible, the core of your workouts. The reason for this is many fold. Firstly, it will help you do more with less time. People who have a lot of time to spend in the gym might have no problem piling up their routine with isolation exercises, such as leg extensions to target their quadriceps, leg curls to target their calves, and stiff legged dead lifts to target their hamstrings. But people who want to have a life outside of the gym should stick to squats, which hit all of the muscles and more. Compound exercises also have the benefit of increasing production of hormones that encourage muscle building. So believe it or not, a compound leg exercises such as the deadlift or squat may be the thing you need to do to get firmer, tone arms.

Keep Weight Training Sessions Brief - If any given routine you do lasts longer than an hour, you are actually doing more harm than good. It might sound counter intuitive to think that you get more results by cutting back on work, but that is case with muscles. In fact, after the one-hour point, intense exercise causes muscles to start shrinking, rather than encouraging growth.

If you want to see this phenomenon in action, just take a look at the difference between the bodies of sprinters and marathon runners. Part of the reason that sprinters’ bodies are usually muscular is that their training sessions are intense but short, to mimic what their body goes through on the track. Marathon runners on the other hand are usually very slim because their extremely long training sessions metabolizes both fat and muscle.

Rest – Resting for muscle growth takes two forms: sleep and breaks from training. Remember, a muscle can’t be “tortured” into growing and getting harder. It first must be worked, then given plenty of time to recover so it can grow. A few times as a Costa Mesa Personal Trainer I have had someone come up to me asking why they haven’t made any progress in the gym, and I can tell them why as soon as I observe the dark bags under their eyes. If you want to see progress, you have to have eight hours of sleep a night, plus adequate time between training sessions so your muscles can recover.

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