1. Always warm-up thoroughly.
   Warming up prepares your body for the intense physical effort to come. A proper warm-up will improve your performance and delay the onset of fatigue, as well as help to protect your muscles and joints from injury.
   
   
2. Intensity and concentration.
   Intensity is an over-used and misunderstood word in bodybuilding. For beginner and intermediate trainers a better word to use might be concentration.
   For example, concentrate on your training while you are actually lifting, not on other activities around the gym. Or concentrate on the muscle being exercised, not on the weight itself.
   
   
3. Focus on the muscles not the weight.
   Many people get caught in the trap of thinking that the purpose of weight- training is to lift weights. It isn’t – the purpose is to train the muscles with resistance. The weights themselves are a merely a means to an end.
   As you perform each repetition, squeeze the muscle or muscles being trained, and concentrate on the feeling inside the muscle itself.
   
   
4. Increase your weights gradually.
   Muscle growth is part of the body’s adaptation to the stress of weight-training. To keep it adapting – to keep the muscles growing, the stress (in this case the weight) has to be increased regularly.
   
   
5. Use correct form.
   Always use a full range of motion, and don’t be tempted to cheat. Remember, the purpose of training is to train the muscles, not just lift the weight by any means possible. Cheating allows more weight to be used, and can be used as a training tool by advanced strength athletes. But for beginners, cheating merely cheats the muscles out of a workout.
   
   
6. Breathe.
   Never hold your breath during an exercise, or force yourself to breathe in while lifting a weight, and out while lowering it (or vice-versa). Allow yourself to breathe as quickly (or slowly) as your body needs.
   
   
7. Use a 2/3 tempo.
   To make sure that the muscles work all the way through the range of motion (i.e. from the start of the repetition to the end) you must lift the weight slowly, taking about 2 seconds, and lower it even more slowly, say about 3 seconds. Advanced athletes can alter this tempo – using shorter, faster positives (lifting the weight) for power, or very slow negatives (lowering) for greater muscle size, depending on their goals.
   But beginners especially, and most trainers will benefit from slowing their repetitions down to this tempo.
   
   
8. Keep your workouts short.
   45 minutes has been identified as the ideal duration for a workout by many experts. For beginners, a short warm-up of around 10 minutes, a weight session of up to 45 minutes, and a 5-10 minute cool down period will suffice.
   
   
9. Don’t forget the water!
   Always keep yourself hydrated for performance and maximum energy. Dehydration can actually hinder muscle growth as well as slow fat loss amongst a host of other negatives. We recommend that you sip (rather than gulp) as much water as you need while working out.
   
   
10. Cool down period.
    A period of around 10 minutes of lower-intensity exercise can significantly enhance recovery, and assist the body’s return to normal. Again, some gentle aerobic exercise will suffice.

And finally, remember to rest!