12 Week Mass Building Workout to Get Huge 

Building muscle is all about consistency. That means finding the right mass building workout and then sticking to it, week in week out. Too many guys flit from one program, training system or nutritional plan to another without giving their body the time to benefit from what they’re doing.

While it’s true that your muscles need variation in their training, you also need to give them continuity. Sticking with a program for 12 weeks will allow you to maximize your strength and muscle building potential.

By the end of the first 3 months of this muscle-building routine, you can realistically double your strength and add a half-inch of lean muscle tissue all over your body. All I ask is that you bring dedication, effort and consistency to the table.

Back to the Basics

When it comes to building lean muscle mass, you need to concentrate on performing basic compound exercises. These are the moves that give you the best bang for your buck. Rather than wasting your time with supplementary moves such as barbell curls and leg curls, you need to give your full focus to the big moves that hit multiple muscle groups at the same time and allow you to lift the maximum amount of weight.

Your mindset on this workout schedule should be to get in, blast your muscles like hell and then get out. When you walk into the gym, your mission is clear - train the target muscle group to the point where it is totally annihilated, i.e. you have worked it to the point of both positive and negative muscular failure. That is the point that you need to get out of the gym.

A Word on Intensity

Along with doing too many exercises, most people don’t train hard enough on them. If they did, they wouldn’t be able to do so much. It’s the difference between sprinting and jogging. Not that you want to rush through your exercises, but you want to have the same intensity level as a sprinter.

Attack every exercise as if it were the most important set of your life. Learn to use techniques that will make the exercise more intense such as forced reps, slow negatives and drop sets. Have a goal in your mind as to how many reps you will achieve, making sure that it is more than you managed last time you did the exercise.

Rest Between Sets

Closely associated with intensity during the set is the amount of rest between sets. Remember that your goal is to cause the worked muscle to get to the point of failure. When it does, you will have caused small micro-tears in your muscle fiber. These tears are the key to muscle growth.

If you’re training for pure mass with basic compound exercises you need to rest for two minutes.

3 Key Training Concepts

Time Under Tension

 Yet, the average length of a set is only about half of that time. There are ways to increase your time under tension. The following two training concepts will help you to lengthen out your time under tension.

Eccentric Training

To take advantage of eccentric training, and to increase your time under tension, simply lower the weight at a slower pace than you lift it. It should take 1-2 seconds to lift the weight. By concentrating on the negative, you can take 4 seconds to lower it. This is exceedingly difficult because you are fighting the force of gravity, but it is also very effective.

Training this way will force you to reduce the weight you're lifting. That doesn’t matter. You already know that it’s not the weight that counts, but how hard the target muscle is being worked, right?

Drop Sets

Perform your reps then immediately place the weights back on the rack. Now grab the next pair of dumbbells down in weight and do another six strict reps. Continue going down the rack, pumping out six reps each time. Do this until there are no weights left to pick up!

The Mass Building Routine

Your 12 week mass building routine involves the following six exercises:

You'll be training on a one on / two off sequence. That will provide your body with 48 hours to rest, recover and grow between each training session. So, in Week One, you will train on Monday, Thursday and Sunday. Then, in Week Two, you train on Wednesday and Saturday. Even though this does not give you a set day to train every week, it does provide you with the ideal training frequency.

There's no upper/lower split, isolation exercises or non-pure mass moves like the dumbbell bench press in this workout plan. We're not concerned about fat loss here, either. The sole purpose here is to build muscle - and lots of it!

Ok, let's drill down on the exercises!

The barbell squat is more than a leg developer. This perennial mass developer is a catalyst for adding muscle mass all over your body. It will stimulate the release of key anabolic hormones like testosterone and human growth hormone in the 24 hours after your workout. This sets up the muscle-building environment that you need to rebuild and repair the muscle fibers that are damaged (in a good way) by your training.

You will be doing just 5 sets of squats. But those five sets are going to be super intense. That's because you'll be making use of a little known technique called Devil Sets. Here's how it works...

On your first three sets, you do 8-10 reps, going as heavy as you can with proper form. However, you will not lockout at the top of each rep. Locking out provides you with a mini pause at the top of each rep. That is not what we want. Our goal is to scorch the quads with maximum intensity. Stopping just short of lockout and going straight into the next rep will keep the pressure on your thighs.

After six reps, pause in the bottom squat position for 3 seconds. Now do another 6 partial reps, pause for 3 seconds in the bottom squat and then finish with a final six partial reps.

That 18 rep set will make your quads feel hotter than hell. In fact, your legs will be a quivering mess. But, you've still got one more set to compete - just like the last one. You've got 2 minutes to rest (I suggest lying on the floor!) before you get under the rack again.

The barbell deadlift is another old school mass builder. Every mass monster throughout the history of bodybuilding, from Sergio Oliva to Dorian Yates, has used deadlifts as one of their mainstays to build muscle. This is a true full-body exercise that directly hits your hamstrings, lower back, lats, rhomboids, trapezius, deltoids and biceps. In this workout, you'll be doing a twist on the conventional deadlift rep scheme that will ramp up the intensity over 6 sets of 6 reps.

Choose a weight that you can get 10 quality reps out with. That should be your 10 reps max, so that you cannot do an 11th rep without your form breaking down. That is the weight that you will perform your 6 sets of 6 reps with. Your rest between sets is just 60 seconds.

Even though you do not increase the weight on each set, the cumulative effect of your reps will make each set progressively harder. However, it is vital that you are strict on both your rest time and your exercise form for every single one of those 36 reps.

The incline bench press is an awesome upper body mass developer. The emphasis is on the pectorals, the deltoids and the trapezius, making it a great counter to the previous exercise, which targeted the muscles of the backside of the body. You're going to be doing 5 sets on this exercise, and making use of all three of the intensity enhancing techniques we covered earlier:

On your first three sets of the incline bench press, focus on a slow, controlled eccentric rep. Count off in your head 3 seconds to lower the bar, bringing it all the way down to just touch your mid pec and then powering it back up in a slight arc to finish just short of eye level. Do not completely lock out your arms. This will keep the tension on the pecs throughout the entire movement.

Focus on smooth, controlled piston-like reps for all 10 reps, remembering to think 1-2-3 on the way down and 1 on the way up.

For your last two sets of the incline bench press you will be doing drop sets. You will start with the same weight that you used for the previous 3 sets. 

This is when a training partner really comes in handy. If you do have to do the job yourself, make it quick then get back under the bar. Now pump out another 10 reps. Then perform another 50% weight drop and rep out with a final 10 reps. That means that your final two sets will have you doing 30 reps per set. That will make sure that every single muscle fiber is on fire by the time you walk away from the incline bench.

By the time you move on to your 4th exercise, your deltoids are already going to be firing as a result of deadlifts and bench presses. As well as targeting your front delts, the barbell overhead press will also hit your pecs, traps and mid-back. You'll just be doing three sets of this exercise, with a focus on eccentric reps. But then we throw in a burn out set to totally annihilate the shoulders.

Go hard and heavy on the main 3 sets, leaving nothing in the tank. You will be using the 3 second eccentric, 1 second concentric rep cadence. Avoid locking out at the top of the rep to keep the tension on the front delts the whole time.

Our final exercise in this mega muscle building workout is the one arm dumbbell row. Of all the versions of the row, this one does the most effective job of hitting your latissimus dorsi and your rear delts. To get the best bang for your buck from this exercise, don't pull the dumbbell straight up as if you are starting a lawnmower. Rather, pull it across your body and up while resting your non-working hand on an incline bench in front of you. Don't do the exercise with one knee on a bench as this will limit your ability to get that cross pulling movement that really brings the lats into play.

You must also avoid using momentum to bring the weight up. That applies to all exercises but is a key reason that most people fail to get any benefit from this particular movement.

Use a heavy weight and focus on the eccentric with a 3 second lower of the rep. Focus on fully stretching and elongating the lats during this negative portion of the rep.

Focus on Form (Not Weight!)

You now have a super effective 12 week program to build muscle throughout both the upper body and the lower body. I've included some extremely powerful intensity enhancing techniques that will literally force your muscles to renewed growth. Yet, unless you focus on proper exercise form, you won't get the most out of this or any other workout program.

So many guys are so obsessed with the weight on the bar that they completely sacrifice good form to get the weight from Point A to Point B. They end up completely wasting their time at best, and suffering serious injury at worst.

By stripping the weight back to 60 pounds, you are able to use strict form, where the only movement is through the elbow joint. Now, you’re able to maximally stimulate the biceps.

The Final Ingredient: Mind Muscle

Let’s say that you’re training at 7 am. The night before, when you’re lying in bed, you should be thinking about the coming morning’s workout. Visualize yourself doing the exercises, lifting the weight that you want to lift and hitting a new max rep count with that weight. Drift off to sleep knowing exactly what you will do in that gym the next day.