Before I get into details about eating and training, let's first discuss what bodybuilding is.
Contrary to popular belief, bodybuilding is not purely about being huge. Having big muscles is a component to bodybuilding, but it's not the be-all-end-all. There are three major components to a bodybuilding physique:
- Muscle mass
- Muscle definition
- Muscular symmetry
Muscle mass is obviously about the size of the muscles.
Muscle definition is about how visible the muscles are. You don't do "toning" exercises to get muscle definition. First you have to actually have the muscle, then you simply have to get rid of the fat over the top of it. When it comes to going on stage, pro bodybuilders will also get tanned, greased up, do a pre-show workout to get lots of fluid pumping through the muscles (making the muscles look bigger), and will get into various poses to heighten the expression of their muscle definition. But the bottom line is that muscle definition (or "tone" or whatever other buzzword you'd like to put here) is the product of having muscle to show, and showing it by getting rid of the fat over it.
Muscle symmetry is about having deltoids that match your chest, triceps that match your biceps, forearms that match your upper arms, lats that match your upper traps, erectors that match your abs, glutes that match your trunk, hamstrings that match your quadriceps, calves that match your thighs, etc. If all you do is bench press, bicep curls, crunches and leg extensions, you're not training like a bodybuilder. If you have a comprehensive upper body program but don't train legs, you're not training like a bodybuilder. Symmetry is an important component to bodybuilding, and besides that, it makes training a whole lot safer (if you train the muscles on one side of a joint but not the other, you'll likely get strength imbalances, which cause munted movement patterns, abnormal stresses on the bones, and eventually injuries).
Now, many of you reading this don't have any serious ambitions for bodybuilding. You don't want to go on stage, you don't want to be a 300lb "freak" like Ronnie Coleman or a 200lb woman who looks like a man. Some of you want exactly that, and if that's you, then you'll soon progress to a point beyond benefiting from my knowledge on the subject. But for those of you who aren't trying to be pro bodybuilders and just want to look good naked, I implore you to still consider the above 3 factors: muscle mass, muscle definition and muscle symmetry. You don't have to get huge to aesthetically benefit from having defined, balanced muscles, and of course for your muscle to be defined and balanced, they have to actually be there in the first place. This is true for women and for men.
On Training
At a beginner level, your primary focus should be learning how to lift safely and effectively, while covering the whole body. Too many beginners jump straight onto the 5-day splits that their bodybuilding heroes train on. These splits aren't bad, but as a beginner your technical skill in each lift is probably too low to get the full benefits of the lift when you do it only once a week. Likewise, as a beginner, your threshold for both intensity and volume is relatively low, so a large portion of your bodypart split after the first exercise is probably training at too low an intensity to be of much value, all the while increasing tomorrow's pain. You might feel like you're achieving something with 20 sets of chest exercises, but you probably stopped acheiving anything after the first couple sets. This should all be taken into account alongside the fact that beginners have an easy time progressing (for the same reason that it's relatively easy to learn the basic functions of a computer but much harder to learn how to program a computer) and can recover fairly quickly.
So, all that being said, at a beginner level I recommend doing a fullbody program, focusing on a relatively small number of exercises that have a lot of training value. Exercises such as squats, Romanian deadlifts, calf raises, bench press, overhead press, rows, and lat pull downs. With those 7 exercises alone, you'd be able to train the whole body quite comprehensively in as little as an hour. Do that 3 days a week, again remembering that your number one priority is learning technique on the lifts, and you'd be doing quite well.
I come from a background where the amount you can lift is more important than how you lift, so long as form is passable and you don't hurt yourself in the process. In pure strength training, you'll often use the stretch-strength reflex and explosive speed to get the weight up. This isn't bad, and you can build quite a bit of muscle doing so, but this training method isn't focused on muscular development.
One of the universal (albeit debatable) technique points I'd recommend for anyone whose priority is aesthetic developments rather than performance developments is to focus on the muscles being worked. On the eccentric (lowering) phase of a lift, lower the weight under muscular control. You should feel the target muscles stretching (and resisting stretching) in this part of the lift. In the concentirc (pushing, pulling, lifting) phase of the exercise, focus on using your target muscles to initiate the movement, to control the movement and to complete the movement.
Using the bench press as an example, when I perform a barbell bench press as a powerlifting move, I'm not going to be focusing much on which muscles are being used. I'm going to be focusing on keeping the bar balanced, accelerating the bar down to my chest (for the stretch strength reflex) along a specific bar path, stabilising the bar on my chest to get a signal to press, and then driving the bar up along a certain bar path as hard and fast as possible until my elbows lockout. However, when I perform the dumbbell bench press as a bodybuilding exercise, I don't try to get an optimal stretch strength reflex, and instead of powering the weight up, I make the conscious decision that the dumbbells don't start moving until my chest makes them move, and they only continue moving if my chest makes them keep on moving, and I don't lockout unless it's my chest pulling my arms together. The amount of activation I feel in my chest doing DBBP like this is huge, whereas when I do a powerlifting barbell bench press, 9 times out of 10 I can't even tell by feel if my pectorals have been activated (I know that they have, but there's no sensation of them having been put to the limit).
There are many other technique points we could discuss, including points that are relevant to almost all exercises you might do in bodybuilding, and technique points that are very exercise-specific. I won't go into such details here (I could literally write books on technique), but aim for technique that is safe first and foremost, and that is also effective at working the muscles you're supposed to be working.
All sorts of fun things that will slow down strength gains
As a rank novice, you can gain muscle mass while losing fat quite easily, while later on you'll have to go through "bulking" and "cutting" phases in order to get both big and lean. When you go through a bulking phase, you'll find it relatively easy to make progress in terms of strength. Adding an extra rep or another 5lb onto big cmpound exercises will happen quite frequently, whereas when you're cutting you'll gain strength very slowly. In fact, many bodybuilders are at their weakest when they go on stage to compete, and at their strongest in the off-season. Strength gains have an obvious correlation with muscle mass, however muscle mass is but one component to strength, so as a complete beginner you'll find yourself making rapid strength gains early on, without making much in the way of muscle mass gains.
As you get more advanced, you'll require more work in each session to stimulate growth -- often so much more work that it becomes impractical to train the full body in a single session. This is where splitting up your training becomes helpful. At an intermediate level, you might do an upper/lower split, and at an advanced level you might do a split focusing on specific muscle groups each day. Put differently, you might do a total of 20 work sets at beginner, intermediate and advanced level, however at the beginner level those 20 sets will be split up across the full body. At an intermediate level, those 20 sets might be for lower body only on one training day, and upper body only the next. At an advanced level, those 20 sets might be for chest and biceps one day, quadriceps and calves the next, posterior chain the next, and shoulders and triceps the next.
You don't become an intermediate or advanced trainee when you get bored of what you've been doing. Instead, you become an intermediate trainee when you can no longer make sustainable progress on a beginner program, and you become advanced when you can no longer make sustainable progress on an intermediate program.
Volume? Intensity? Frequency? Huh?
What should your training volume be? As much as you can productively do.
What should your training intensity be? As much as you can productively do.
What should your training frequency be? As much as you can productively do.
There's a whole lot of debate about whether you should train each muscle several times a week or just once (or even less often than that), how many sets and reps you should do for each muscle group, whether you should train to failure, whether you should do low reps or high reps, etc. As a beginner, I recommend a high training frequency (3 times a week or every other day if possible), moderate volume (say 20-30 total reps per exercise) and low-to-moderate intensity (60-80% 1RM, try not to go to failure). As you enter into the intermediate stages of lifting, your options on how to train productively open up a lot. As an intermediate, you have the skill and conditioning to be able to handle greater volume or greater intensity (but not necessarily both), and in fact the work load required to ellicit results generally demands that one of these two variables be built up. This also tends to require greater rest periods, so frequency tends to decrease. Notably, in pure strength training, frequency can be productively increased, generally (but not always) with decreases in volume. For evidence that this can be done, simply research the Bulgarian training method used by Bulgarians Olympic weightlifters. However, this is probably not the best way to go for bodybuilding.
In any case, there's almost always a trade-off between intensity, volume and frequency. As you get more experienced you'll be able to play around with this balance and find out what works for you.
What about isolation exercise?
I've already recommended a short list of good compound exercises that most bodybuilding programs should be built around. I believe that beginners have little use for isolation exercises, and are better off focusing on compound lifts. It's not that isolation exercises don't work, it's just that a squat does more than a leg extension. As you become more advanced, isolation exercises progressively become more useful, although the big compounds and variations of them should still be in advanced programs.
Contrary to popular belief, bodybuilding is not purely about being huge. Having big muscles is a component to bodybuilding, but it's not the be-all-end-all. There are three major components to a bodybuilding physique:
- Muscle mass
- Muscle definition
- Muscular symmetry
Muscle mass is obviously about the size of the muscles.
Muscle definition is about how visible the muscles are. You don't do "toning" exercises to get muscle definition. First you have to actually have the muscle, then you simply have to get rid of the fat over the top of it. When it comes to going on stage, pro bodybuilders will also get tanned, greased up, do a pre-show workout to get lots of fluid pumping through the muscles (making the muscles look bigger), and will get into various poses to heighten the expression of their muscle definition. But the bottom line is that muscle definition (or "tone" or whatever other buzzword you'd like to put here) is the product of having muscle to show, and showing it by getting rid of the fat over it.
Muscle symmetry is about having deltoids that match your chest, triceps that match your biceps, forearms that match your upper arms, lats that match your upper traps, erectors that match your abs, glutes that match your trunk, hamstrings that match your quadriceps, calves that match your thighs, etc. If all you do is bench press, bicep curls, crunches and leg extensions, you're not training like a bodybuilder. If you have a comprehensive upper body program but don't train legs, you're not training like a bodybuilder. Symmetry is an important component to bodybuilding, and besides that, it makes training a whole lot safer (if you train the muscles on one side of a joint but not the other, you'll likely get strength imbalances, which cause munted movement patterns, abnormal stresses on the bones, and eventually injuries).
Now, many of you reading this don't have any serious ambitions for bodybuilding. You don't want to go on stage, you don't want to be a 300lb "freak" like Ronnie Coleman or a 200lb woman who looks like a man. Some of you want exactly that, and if that's you, then you'll soon progress to a point beyond benefiting from my knowledge on the subject. But for those of you who aren't trying to be pro bodybuilders and just want to look good naked, I implore you to still consider the above 3 factors: muscle mass, muscle definition and muscle symmetry. You don't have to get huge to aesthetically benefit from having defined, balanced muscles, and of course for your muscle to be defined and balanced, they have to actually be there in the first place. This is true for women and for men.
On Training
At a beginner level, your primary focus should be learning how to lift safely and effectively, while covering the whole body. Too many beginners jump straight onto the 5-day splits that their bodybuilding heroes train on. These splits aren't bad, but as a beginner your technical skill in each lift is probably too low to get the full benefits of the lift when you do it only once a week. Likewise, as a beginner, your threshold for both intensity and volume is relatively low, so a large portion of your bodypart split after the first exercise is probably training at too low an intensity to be of much value, all the while increasing tomorrow's pain. You might feel like you're achieving something with 20 sets of chest exercises, but you probably stopped acheiving anything after the first couple sets. This should all be taken into account alongside the fact that beginners have an easy time progressing (for the same reason that it's relatively easy to learn the basic functions of a computer but much harder to learn how to program a computer) and can recover fairly quickly.
So, all that being said, at a beginner level I recommend doing a fullbody program, focusing on a relatively small number of exercises that have a lot of training value. Exercises such as squats, Romanian deadlifts, calf raises, bench press, overhead press, rows, and lat pull downs. With those 7 exercises alone, you'd be able to train the whole body quite comprehensively in as little as an hour. Do that 3 days a week, again remembering that your number one priority is learning technique on the lifts, and you'd be doing quite well.
I come from a background where the amount you can lift is more important than how you lift, so long as form is passable and you don't hurt yourself in the process. In pure strength training, you'll often use the stretch-strength reflex and explosive speed to get the weight up. This isn't bad, and you can build quite a bit of muscle doing so, but this training method isn't focused on muscular development.
One of the universal (albeit debatable) technique points I'd recommend for anyone whose priority is aesthetic developments rather than performance developments is to focus on the muscles being worked. On the eccentric (lowering) phase of a lift, lower the weight under muscular control. You should feel the target muscles stretching (and resisting stretching) in this part of the lift. In the concentirc (pushing, pulling, lifting) phase of the exercise, focus on using your target muscles to initiate the movement, to control the movement and to complete the movement.
Using the bench press as an example, when I perform a barbell bench press as a powerlifting move, I'm not going to be focusing much on which muscles are being used. I'm going to be focusing on keeping the bar balanced, accelerating the bar down to my chest (for the stretch strength reflex) along a specific bar path, stabilising the bar on my chest to get a signal to press, and then driving the bar up along a certain bar path as hard and fast as possible until my elbows lockout. However, when I perform the dumbbell bench press as a bodybuilding exercise, I don't try to get an optimal stretch strength reflex, and instead of powering the weight up, I make the conscious decision that the dumbbells don't start moving until my chest makes them move, and they only continue moving if my chest makes them keep on moving, and I don't lockout unless it's my chest pulling my arms together. The amount of activation I feel in my chest doing DBBP like this is huge, whereas when I do a powerlifting barbell bench press, 9 times out of 10 I can't even tell by feel if my pectorals have been activated (I know that they have, but there's no sensation of them having been put to the limit).
There are many other technique points we could discuss, including points that are relevant to almost all exercises you might do in bodybuilding, and technique points that are very exercise-specific. I won't go into such details here (I could literally write books on technique), but aim for technique that is safe first and foremost, and that is also effective at working the muscles you're supposed to be working.
All sorts of fun things that will slow down strength gains
As a rank novice, you can gain muscle mass while losing fat quite easily, while later on you'll have to go through "bulking" and "cutting" phases in order to get both big and lean. When you go through a bulking phase, you'll find it relatively easy to make progress in terms of strength. Adding an extra rep or another 5lb onto big cmpound exercises will happen quite frequently, whereas when you're cutting you'll gain strength very slowly. In fact, many bodybuilders are at their weakest when they go on stage to compete, and at their strongest in the off-season. Strength gains have an obvious correlation with muscle mass, however muscle mass is but one component to strength, so as a complete beginner you'll find yourself making rapid strength gains early on, without making much in the way of muscle mass gains.
As you get more advanced, you'll require more work in each session to stimulate growth -- often so much more work that it becomes impractical to train the full body in a single session. This is where splitting up your training becomes helpful. At an intermediate level, you might do an upper/lower split, and at an advanced level you might do a split focusing on specific muscle groups each day. Put differently, you might do a total of 20 work sets at beginner, intermediate and advanced level, however at the beginner level those 20 sets will be split up across the full body. At an intermediate level, those 20 sets might be for lower body only on one training day, and upper body only the next. At an advanced level, those 20 sets might be for chest and biceps one day, quadriceps and calves the next, posterior chain the next, and shoulders and triceps the next.
You don't become an intermediate or advanced trainee when you get bored of what you've been doing. Instead, you become an intermediate trainee when you can no longer make sustainable progress on a beginner program, and you become advanced when you can no longer make sustainable progress on an intermediate program.
Volume? Intensity? Frequency? Huh?
What should your training volume be? As much as you can productively do.
What should your training intensity be? As much as you can productively do.
What should your training frequency be? As much as you can productively do.
There's a whole lot of debate about whether you should train each muscle several times a week or just once (or even less often than that), how many sets and reps you should do for each muscle group, whether you should train to failure, whether you should do low reps or high reps, etc. As a beginner, I recommend a high training frequency (3 times a week or every other day if possible), moderate volume (say 20-30 total reps per exercise) and low-to-moderate intensity (60-80% 1RM, try not to go to failure). As you enter into the intermediate stages of lifting, your options on how to train productively open up a lot. As an intermediate, you have the skill and conditioning to be able to handle greater volume or greater intensity (but not necessarily both), and in fact the work load required to ellicit results generally demands that one of these two variables be built up. This also tends to require greater rest periods, so frequency tends to decrease. Notably, in pure strength training, frequency can be productively increased, generally (but not always) with decreases in volume. For evidence that this can be done, simply research the Bulgarian training method used by Bulgarians Olympic weightlifters. However, this is probably not the best way to go for bodybuilding.
In any case, there's almost always a trade-off between intensity, volume and frequency. As you get more experienced you'll be able to play around with this balance and find out what works for you.
What about isolation exercise?
I've already recommended a short list of good compound exercises that most bodybuilding programs should be built around. I believe that beginners have little use for isolation exercises, and are better off focusing on compound lifts. It's not that isolation exercises don't work, it's just that a squat does more than a leg extension. As you become more advanced, isolation exercises progressively become more useful, although the big compounds and variations of them should still be in advanced programs.