If you are trying to build muscle, there are exercises that can help you get the most out of your workouts. Some moves are definitely more effective than others in helping you achieve your goal.

What are the keys to building muscle and keeping it on?

1. Supersets work complementary muscles one right after the other.

To get the best results from your workout, make them short and difficult. Building muscle is not about marathon-length exercise sessions but about challenging your muscles.

Supersetting is the best way to exercise for muscle building. When you superset, you do two exercises consecutively and skip the rest periods.

Supersetting involves working two different muscle groups. In between sets, there is a very short rest period. The benefits are that you work more muscle in less time and reduce your risk of injury because the strain any given muscle or tendon is less intense.

An example of a superset is pairing bicep curls with tricep kickbacks. You can also work back and chest muscles together or quads and hamstrings. You will see results more quickly and make your workouts much more efficient and safe.

2. Increase workout intensity with compound exercises.

Building muscle fast requires very intense, very difficult exercises for the body. The good news is that your workouts are shorter ? only about 35-40 minutes.

A great way to both increase your intensity and see results is to use compound exercises, in which more than one muscle is required to do the move. Some examples are:

* Walking lunge with overhead press

* Completing a pushup with side planks

* Pairing squats with overhead presses

* Doing lunges with bicep curls

* Executing pushups with one armed rows

Compound exercises help you improve balance and coordination and functional fitness, as well as reduce your risk of injury. Your workouts will be much more efficient, which means you will see results sooner.

3. Rest to allow muscles time to rebuild.

It is important to build rest into your workout routines. Your muscles develop when you are resting, not when you are working them.

Daily workouts or working the same muscles in consecutive workouts causes your muscle building efforts to stagnate. You are not giving your muscles the chance to grow.

Try this routine for effective muscle building:

* Exercise only three days per week.

* Assign each part of the body one day (shoulders, triceps, and shoulders on day one, back and biceps on day two, and legs on day three).

* Build in rest periods.

* Start over again!

Working out according to a schedule like this can help you build muscle more effectively and keep your body injury-free.

When you add supersets, compound moves, and rest into your workout, you will be able to build muscle fast. These are the most effective means of increasing your workouts’ potency.

One of the biggest difficulties facing bodybuilders is how can they be sure that all muscle fibers have been recruited and exhausted during a given exercise and it is only by achieving this that muscle gains can be maximised.

Here are a couple of tips to get you going in the right direction:

1. Increase the resistance of the weight you are using – Meaningful increments in the weights slowly pushes your body a little bit over the point of failure each time. Aim to reach 6 to 8 reps of an increased weight without failing.

2. Vary exercises – change up the exercises you do so that you aren’t always using the exact some muscles. Varying the angle of the exercise like incline press helps as well.

3. Take shorter rests – taking shorter rests between exercises makes your muscles work much more intensely as it has had less time to recover.

4. Pre exhaustion – The weakest muscle in an exercise involving two or more muscles will always fail first. This means it will fail before you have the chance to exercise the main muscle to exchaustion. To overcome this, focus on tiring out the main muscle before doing the exercise with both muscles working together.

5. Do supersets – supersets are done by doing two exercises without any rest in between them that focus on the same muscle groups but are different types of exercise. This will fully utilize all the muscle fibers in that muscle group.

6. Do partial repititions – You will not be able to complete the full range of movement for any given exercise once you reach the point of failure. Using only a segment of the lift by doing a partial rep will work your muscles beyond the point of failure. It allows you to increase intensity without adding extra routines that could cause overtraining.

7. Try using isometric contractions – Holding the weight still at the point of failure to stimulate a static contraction in the muscle.

8. Employ forced reps – this involves completing one or more final reps after the point of failure has been reached. You will need the assistance of an experienced helper to attempt this.