Your aim is to improve your physique and so you have taken up muscle building.  So you now are getting set up with a good and healthy diet with a mixture of carbohydrates and proteins in the form of your everyday food intake with or without supplements. You’ve either purchased a gym membership or else you’re doing the hard work at home.  If you’ve got the gym membership then you would have someone to hand guiding you on what is best for you and how to get the results in the best time frame possible.  However, if you are going this route alone then one thing you must understand is what you’re body is going through and what measures you must take to ensure you are not doing untold damage.

One area of muscle building that you have probably totally overlooked is the area of rest.  This is so important – as important as the actual exercises you are doing.  Maybe it’s easier to see how important rest is if you can see what you’re doing to your muscles while building them up.  With your diet, you’ll be increasing the food that brings energy to the muscles and with the exercises you are working fibres that need to be treated with care.  Acids in the muscles are being produced and there is only a certain amount of these that are good for muscles.  In any aspect of life if we are looking to improve something we must take care about it – neglect does not equal good results. 

Rest is in many forms.  It has been scientifically proven that the average Joe requires 8 hours uninterrupted sleep a night.  We’ve had nights out and had to work the next day and survived on less than the 8 hours but have probably not performed at our best the next day.  So it’s easy to see that the nights sleep is as important when we are building up our muscles. 

Now the one we really want to know about it the rest that is required when doing actual exercises for muscle building.  You know how when you begin your exercises you go at a great pace and then with the next set of repetitions you really aren’t as fantastic and eventually you are painfully slow.  So what you need to do is be clever and read your body.  Take rests between the repetitions, short rests between repetitions and then a little bit more of a rest between different types of exercises.  Try to be as good on the other repetitions as you were when you began.

So you are being sensible the days that you are muscle building but you also need to give your body a day off from your intense training.  During the time off you can do other exercises – swimming, biking, jogging, and so on.  You’ll be secretly working other areas that you may have missed during your time at the gym.  Your body is a temple, treat it with respect and give it the time off it needs, you’ll be pleasantly rewarded.