Flex those muscles

Scott Schwab:
An interesting thing that I have been reading about lately is pressure. Not necessarily the pressure we feel day in and day out, but the pressure of elements. When you apply pressure to an ugly piece of black coal, what emerges? We all know that this process brings the beautiful diamond, which is a girls best friend.
Apply this same notion to the gym or exercise and what can we hypothesize? Our best workouts and exercises require pressure. We cannot build good, lean muscle unless we incorporate pressure. Too often, we want to achieve goals with our health, fitness, and body and do not put the appropriate pressure on our muscles. For our diamonds to emerge, we need to use the pressure of weights and strength training.
To properly do this, we must look at our overall goals and what we are trying to accomplish. Not only does pressure, or better said resistance, create growth; weight training also helps our bones be healthy and avoid osteoporosis. We do not need to pick up the max weight and swing it around like "Thor's" hammer. We need to use the weights that will provide resistance and then use additional reps to create the right amount of pressure for our diamonds to emerge.
The secret to good, lean, sexy muscle is lower to moderate weight, with moderate to high reps. It does depend upon your goals and body type for the exercises you choose to do, but you cannot go wrong with working the major muscle groups. My favorite exercises for anyone at any level who is trying to accomplish muscle growth are the following:

Squats:

Curls:

Lunges:

Bench:

Do these exercises or a combination of these above and adjust the weights. Experiment until you know what makes you sore. Being sore is not a bad thing! It is a sign that you worked and your muscles are thanking you for it. You do not want to work yourself past fatigue or being so sore you cannot exercise the next day, week, or month. The goal is to find the sweet spot and continue to return to that point. That is how you find the best workout for you and start building lean muscle.