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Tip: Mass Building & Mass Definition are Two Different Things

When it comes to building mass quickly, some newcomers to the practice think that all one needs to do is grab some free weights, throw them around for an hour or so, four or five times a week, and magically muscles will appear.

For true mass builders, this random approach will do nothing other than improve the general fitness level. There are very specific purposes for each muscle gaining exercise you do, and they are designed to meet two goals: a) either increase muscle mass or b) increase muscle definition.

So to get the most out of your workouts, you must understand that there are differences between mass building exercises and muscle definition exercises. To repeat, it's not that traditional weight training won't get you results, but if you're going to workout, you might as well try to pack on as much muscle and get as defined as possible for the time you spend.

Mass Building

The most common body building exercises people perform are known as compound exercises. Compound body building exercises primarily assist with mass building.

A compound exercise is one in which more than one body part is put under stress. Bench presses, while generally considered chest exercises, also provide secondary stress to the biceps, triceps and shoulders. So, these other muscles grow as well as the chest although not to the same degree.

Another compound exercise is the squat press, which consists of a front squat leading into an overhead press; and the swimmer's press, which consists of an arm curl followed by a twisting overhead press.

Muscle Definition

Muscle definition exercises are primarily isolation exercises. That is, they focus on working one specific muscle at a time: the more refined the muscle group, the better. These exercises can be employed with high repetitions to burn fat and usually follow a cycle of mass building so as to create the definition that mass requires for aesthetic looks.

Of course, there are other areas that need to be taken into consideration as well, such as a proper diet, a scientific workout routine, proper recovery time, and motivation, but regardless of the routine, each exercise will fall into one of these broad categories of exercise.

Conventional wisdom is wrong. You can build muscle up fast and burn fat in less time than than you think. But you need to follow a solid interval-based workout plan. We review several promising build muscle up programs on our blog.