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?

Discuss about your fitness and bodybuilding goals with your personal trainer at the gym or a fitness expert and ask them to help you design a customized muscle building program for yourself, taking into consideration your age, health condition and your fitness requirements.

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.

Apart from the dedication and motivation required for the muscle building program, there are 3 essential and crucial steps to a muscle building program. These steps involve strength training and weightlifting, eating the right amount of the recommended diet and allowing ample rest periods between subsequent workouts.

Step 1 - Strength Training: Weight training to build muscles must be done correctly to avoid serious injuries to your muscles. You can work out more than one muscle at a time by using compound movement exercises such as bench press, squats, deadlifts, or military press for successful body building.

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 - Ample Rest periods: Although you need to be consistent and regular with your workouts, you should also take the much needed rest to allow sufficient time for repair and recovery of the strained muscles. Ideally, you must allow two days of rest period between subsequent workouts.