Are your workouts giving you the results you want? Do you look in the mirror and see bulging muscles growing more massive? Or have you been spending hours at the gym and still seeing the same "old" you in the mirror?

If you have been seriously trying to build muscle month after month with only modest gains in muscle mass, you're doing it wrong! But, you're in good company. 95% of the people in the gym are failing and never achieve their goals.

Building muscle is really quite simple but not easy to do. It is simple in theory but it takes hard work. You must be willing to work harder than you have ever worked before. This doesn't mean that you need to spend more hours in the gym. Quite the opposite. More intense body building workouts of shorter duration are what you need to achieve muscle growth.

I realize that this may be counter to popular belief. Conventional wisdom says that the harder and longer you work, the more you get. This has been applied to our professions, school, physical fitness - virtually everything we do.

But it does not apply to building mass muscle. Work hard, yes. Work long, NO. If you want big muscles, you have to train big but not long.

Muscles grow due to a natural survival response, and if you don't give them a good reason to grow, they won't. Entering the gym and simply going through the motions without breaking a sweat just is not going to do it. Muscles have to be overloaded with heavy weight and high intensity to see real results. This is without a doubt the most effective means of stimulating muscular growth.

Muscles gain strength and size in response to a threat. If we tear our muscles down one session, they will recover and grown back slightly stronger. But we have to give them time to recover. If we trained to the maximum every day, our muscles would never recover and never gain strength.

We have a natural tendency to ease off or stop our routines when they become difficult, so we never threaten our system. We know deep down that we could do another rep or add an extra 10 pounds, but when it becomes difficult we quit. Then the next day at the gym, we use the same amount of weight, the same routine, the same number of reps. We do what we are comfortable with.

Guess what. Our muscles are comfortable too. They get used to our routine and never have to get stronger to survive.

To gain maximum muscle mass, it is necessary to break down our muscle tissue in the gym. The time to stop is when you physically can not do another rep. The mind says "yes" but the muscles just wont do it. They have failed. The body sees this as a threat and rebuilds the muscles to get bigger and stronger so it will be better able to handle the threat in the future.

Then you add a little weight and your body responds by adding a little more muscle. It doesn't take much more weight to be effective over time. Ten more pounds every few workouts and your body doesn't even notice it. But the gain over a few months will be significant. Your mirror wont believe it.

Obviously you can not and should not try to overwork any one muscle group each time you work out. Muscles need to rest and rebuild. Train hard 3 days a week for no more than an hour at a time to build maximum lean muscle in the minimum amount of time.