If you’re simply trying to get stronger muscles, almost any method of workout will work. But if your goal is to gain strength to enhance your performance in a certain sport, your workout should be specific to the muscle building goals you have. The muscles in our bodies consist of fibers (constructed of many cells) and can be broken down into three basic types or classes of muscles.

Cardiac muscles are the muscles that comprise the heart, which pumps in the center of your body. These muscles are called involuntary muscles because they cannot be consciously controlled. (Good thing, or some people would get so busy they’d forget to keep it beating). Smooth muscles are not created of outright fibers as many of the other muscles in our body are. These muscles are generally found in the various organs that we have in our body and control the way our body functions and lives. When your stomach growls, that’s some of these muscles working overtime. These involuntary muscles also control bowel and kidney movements. Skeletal muscles are the muscles we’re most concerned with here. They are the muscle fibers that are attached to many of the bones in our bodies that control every movement of the skeletal structure of our bodies. These muscles are all completely voluntary, for the most part and that’s why we’re so concerned with them when we’re trying to develop our bodies. By exercising the skeletal muscles throughout our bodies, we make our bodies stronger and healthier. Adding Some Serious Mass All right. Now that we know a bit more about the various types of muscles, let’s just focus on building up the skeletal muscles (these are the only ones that anyone sees anyway). To do a good job of building up your muscles you need to have three golden rules in place. First off, you need to have a well-balanced weight training program set up and in place. This workout should target the muscle groups that you most want to improve without excluding any other groups of muscles completely. It’s important that your whole body get a workout when you exercise. Secondly, you’ll need to have a nutritious and quality diet to feed those working muscles. Otherwise, the muscles will simply not have the fuel to build on and will always be sore for want of nutritional building blocks. The third rule is one that many people simply don’t think about or slide to the bottom of the list of important things. With all this exercising going on, your body needs a lot of quality rest to allow the muscles to relax, heal and grow. This can’t be overstated enough. All three of these rules must be followed. If only two are in place, the chance of your muscles growing is greatly reduced. The rules must be in balance and they need to be adhered to everyday of your workout routine period.