When trying to build muscle up it is very easy to get carried away and sabotage your own progress and also to put yourself at risk of injury or illness without even realising it. Sure it is fantastic that you wish to train and build muscle up but at the same time just one single injury, one moment of carelessness can put you out of action for weeks or months and with consequences related to both health and financial matters. Such traumatic incidents can easily be avoided by adhering to the following guidelines. Here we go with our build muscle up safely guidelines:

1) Always check and double check you have put the barbell collars on before you start lifting. Just a slight looseness of a collar can cause one side to be heavier. The heavier side will drop down and the weight disc can slip further and drop off. When this occurs that side of the bar will be extremely light and leveraged upwards by the heavy side. The barbell will then swing through the air and could do some real damage to people or equipment!

2) Use a spotter if you sre doing one rep maximums. This is someone who can aid you should you not be able to push or lift the bar back up. The last thing you want to occur is to have yourself stuck weighted down by a heavy barbell, you may laugh but I’ve seen it happen.

3) If you are ill stay away from the gym. sounds really obvious yet I often see people spluttering and coughing there way through a workout whilst running a fever also. More often than not the trainer beats none of their best scores and only lands themselves in bed for a few days. Exercise lowers the immune system for a while and if you are already feeling sick this is when the virus will capitalize on your weakness and take a hold of you more.

4) Maintain correct technique. Performing squats with a bent over back, swinging barbell curls and so on will not only produce little muscle growth, because they do not target the muscle properly but they will also put you at risk of serious injury. Use strict form all the time.

5) Don’t do too much. It is very common when motivation is high especially for newbie’s that you want to lift weights as often as possible. This motivation is good but training everyday or even every other day will probably be too much for most people unless it is a split routine. You will actually weaken your muscles if you workout again when they are not yet fully recovered.

6) Failure to follow a decent diet. Emphasis will have to be placed on muscle building nutrition if you want your muscles to grow. You will be wasting your time in the gym if you are not taking on board enough calories to support muscle growth. Throughout the day consume high quality meals.

7) Boasting to you gym partner. Attempting to more than your mates can end with disastrous results. It is much more productive to try to beat your own personal best scores. Keep track of your progress every session with a training diary so you know what score to beat. This is much more beneficial and safer for you.

Warm up adequately. If you don’t your muscles are much more likely to strain and snap. This could possibly restrict your participation for months. It is very simple to do, 5-10 minutes cardio, stretching exercises followed by a few warm up reps will do fine.

With those above guidelines in mind and with correct muscle building nutrition there is no reason why you should not build muscle up happily and safely where ever you train.

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