Muscle building programs are mostly created by weight lifters who have discovered “their way” to building big muscles.

Some of you may have tried several programs and found then to not work.

These are 4 major reasons why some muscle building programs aren’t working:

#1: Your Program Isn’t Working Every Muscle

By this, I mean you have to be working many muscles at one time. This will give your body benefits of having stability and coordination between muscles. However, muscle building programs like to incorporate machines into their workouts. Workout machines tend to focus on one muscle. This is bad because it will take forever to work many muscles, and you do not develop any real life application. Free weights can help you to work many muscles at once. Doing compound exercises like Squats and dead lifts can benefit you in saving time, working many muscles at once, and also gaining stability and coordination between muscles.

#2: The Workout Time is Not Spent Effectively

A program developed by the usual gym rat you would see at the gym working out every time you went there would not be a good fit for someone only having an hour to workout. Your workout does not need to be long and strenuous; rather it should be short and sweet. Using fewer reps and sets with a larger amount of weight can give you the best benefits in a short amount of time.

#3: You are Not Incorporating Enough Intensity

Like mentioned before, you need to be using heavy enough weights to work out with. This is the reason why many of the work outs out there don’t work, because they are using 50% of your “1 Rep Max” (1RM). You should be using about 80-85% of your 1RM. Anything below and you are never going to see improvements as your body will eventually become use to the work out and somewhat immune to it. This also calls for adding weight every work out in order to keep improving when you are performing your muscle building programs.

#4: Get Enough Rest

Your workout should give you a short time between exercises to refresh and cool yourself down. It should not be going rapidly from one exercise to the next, and it also should not be too long, more than 5 minutes.

After your work out, leave some time in your busy schedule to take a nap. This will give your body time to attend to your muscles. This could make or break your workouts’ results. Also, at night, get as much sleep as you can, around 8 hours or more if possible. Make sure to relax during your day. Less stress will result in more muscle and better performance.

If you want to hear more tips to having a good muscle building program, check out: DoubleYourGains’ 3-5 Beginners Strength Program.