There are a lot of different reasons, why people do bodybuilding or fitness training. Many people just want to look and therefore feel better. Others do it as a health related, less intense training. Some individuals see it as some kind of balance from their work or everyday life. A lot of athletes do it to improve their performance.
Whatever reasons it might be, it´s always, more or less, about one thing: building muscles. But not everyone has the same potential. Every individual has a different body type and metabolism, recuperation time and weak points. It take some time and experience to find the training that fits your needs. Therefore especially beginners should choose a gym or other training facility where you can consult trainers and other experts to support you.

The only way to improve your physical fitness is to use your body on a regular basis at an unusual level. Beginners should first try to increase their training frequency, like working out 3 times per week instead of one or two. Next step should be a slighty longer training time. After accomplishig that, increasy the training intensity, the resistance.

The only limitating factors here are frequency and volume. As you will learn in the next chapters, a good workout doesn´t take longer than 60-90 minutes, better 60 than 90. The training frequency is limited by your level of experience and available time. Having a muscular workout for 3-5 times per week is absolutely enough. So the intensity becomes the point to concentrate on. The keyword here is overload. Your muscles do only respond to that, then adapt and eventually be prepared to do better next time.

What´s meant by that? Simply to train until you´re unable to do one more repetition without stopping to rest or be supported by a training partner. To reach this point, several procedures need to take place in your muscles. That´s:

I´m not talking about overtraining. Here you need to do numerous sets far beyond the point of fatigue.

A set is a complete number of continious reps. The number of sets you do depends very much on your training experience, time, goal and constitution. As a very beginner you will seldom do more than two sets of each exercise. Even professional bodybuilders usually train with 3-5 sets. The resting time between single sets depends on the number of repetitions you do.

Your workout should be done continuesly, without longer breaks . You can talk after training :-) But don´t train too fast, because a low condition could end your training before your muscles have worked enough. Also your training technique could suffer from an inappropriate hurry.
Taking a too long resting time isn´t good either. After about five minutes your heart rate, metabolism, body temperature and your whole pump are down.

Repetations in principle define your whole workout. A complete cycle of motion during an exercise is such a rep. Several reps make out a set. During a rep your muscle contracts and extends one time. The number of reps you do in your set determines the following basic training layouts:

Of course, these numbers are only approximations. But they represent science and experience and can be taken as a good overwiev.

The movement of a rep should always be done with modest speed, rather slow. In principle you should be able to stop immediately throughout the whole range of motion. The range itself is also a critical point. Asking a bodybuilder, you´ll almost always hear that you need to perform the full range of motion, from total contraction to total extension. But the extreme positions are points, where either your joints or tendons or even both have to deal with unusual high forces.
While doing the bench press for example, don´t lower the bar completely down to your chest. To protect your shoulder tendons, it´s absolutely fine to stop and return when elbows reach shoulder or max. bench height. And while pushing bar up, keep your arms slightly flexed at the end to have a permanent muscular tension without overloading your elbow joints.
But as you can guess, there are also exclusions from this law. I´m just thinking of many isolation exercises. Check our training guides for details.

don´t forget to breathe. I know people, who hold their breathe almost throughout the whole set. The result can be a higher blood pressure wich makes it harder for your heart to pump the blood. Remember, you need a lot of oxygen to train. After all it´s very simple. Inhale proir to movement and exhale whenever you work against the resistance. Don´t breathe too deeply, just natural with a little more force.

As the name says it, after warm up you should be warmed up. Do you also sometimes "forget" to warm up? It is very crucial for your following training performance. A good warm up helps to:

There are many different possibilities to warm up. First you should have an overall cardiovascular warmup on machines like treadmill, crosstrainer, ergometer, running and so on. Secondly do a local warmup, working certain muscles with light weights. Both should be done intense enough to meet the points mentioned above, but not enough to decimate your bodys energy.
To complete your warm up have a short stretching at least for the muscles you´re about train.

After each workout have a short cool down to:

Stretching as an important part of every workout. Unfortunately most people don´t pay enough attention to it. Muscles that work against resistance have the tendency to shorten with the effort. It´s recommended to have a short stretching before and a more intense stretching after training. It provides you with a lot of benefits such as:

If you feel like already having a decreased flexibility, have a daily stretching of about 20 minutes. Otherwise 5-10 minutes before and 10-15 minutes after weight training are enough. Optionally attand a special stretching class or a yoga lesson in your gym.