Consistency is very important, stick to your routine.
It's just as important that you vary that routine at least every six weeks. Otherwise you plateau and you're just wasting your time.
And you have to eat right
Very good advice there.
Lower body workouts help your upper body grow as well. The lower body contains the largest muscles, and working out your legs will make your natural testosterone and growth hormone levels rise.
And more good advice. Of all the training I have ever done, none was more effective than High Intensity Interval Training. I'm assuming that you are a young man, Calvin, so this should be much easier for you than it was for me. Still, I'm going to start as if you're not in very good condition. Try this: Stretch! Very Important! I can not overemphasize this. Now run at about seventy percent of full speed for thirty seconds. Rest for ninety seconds, but keep moving. Walk as fast as you can. Now sprint at about ninety percent of your top speed for thirty seconds. Ninety seconds rest again. Repeat this until you've done six sprints total. On the last sprint, give it everything you've got. Be sure to stretch again afterward. Since each sprint and rest rep takes two minutes, the whole thing only takes twelve minutes. You should spend more time than that stretching.
Stay with this routine, but work on jogging during the rest period. Don't do this more than once every two days. Once you can jog during the rest period, work on lowering the rest period to sixty seconds. You'll probably have to revert back to a little bit of walking again. Once you've got that down, reduce the rest period to thirty seconds. You doing thirty second sprints and thirty seconds of jogging? Fantastic! Now it's only taking you six minutes plus stretching.
Work on adding reps. Take it all the way up to fifteen reps and you are Ironman my friend. Once you make fifteen reps of thirty seconds sprinting and thirty seconds jogging, take at least a month off and replace this with some other exercise.
A few things to remember:
Stretch! Ignore this and you will come up injured in a hurry.
The first sprint is done at seventy percent because it is also part of the warm up.
Stretching afterward is almost as important as stretching beforehand. It wouldn't hurt to walk a mile even after you stretch.
The last sprint is where it all happens. Give it all you've got. Destroy those quads.
Run with your arms. By this I mean focus on moving your arms faster and your legs will follow. Trust me on this, just try it.
This is not easy. The third time I went out to run I literally cried. Seriously. I sobbed like a little girl. It was nothing short of excruciating agony. But I was in my forties.
Like Ronde says, the largest muscles are in your legs. This exercise made my legs blow up in a hurry. It also raises your metabolism substantially for at least twenty four hours. I lost a pound every time I did this. Since my muscles were getting larger and heavier, it meant I was losing a lot of fat.
Not for the faint of heart. Good luck.
