Are you trying to get yourself into good shape? If so, there is a good chance that you are spending hours at the gym working with your intense weightlifting. When you want to get good results, there are some important things to keep in mid.

Remember that if you want to see the results that are so important to you, you need to avoid overtraining. Overtraining is something that occurs if you work to hard. You are not going to give your body the rest that it needs and you’ll find that weightlifting sessions that go too far are going to hold you back rather than push you forward.

Let’s talk about how your body builds muscles and what you need to do to get there. Remember that when you work out, you are not making your muscles bigger. What you are actually doing is creating tiny rips and tears in the muscles that you have and encouraging them to heal as time goes on.

What you should take from this experience is that the tears that have healed and built up are tougher than the tissue that was there before. When you move forward and stretch your muscle, you will find that you need to let your body repair so you can get the building stage.

When you overtrain, you’re not giving your body the rest it needs in between workouts to properly build and repair. What this means is that you’re actually preventing muscle from building.

What are the symptoms of overtraining and what can you do to make sure that you are going to be on the right track?

Remember that when you are working too hard, you’ll be exhausted but you are not going to see any results. Not seeing results is bad enough when you are looking at all the time that you are putting in, but there are other things that you should keep an eye on as well.

First remember that when you are working out too much that your testosterone levels will go down. The more you overtrain, the more your testosterone drops.

You might also notice that you are going to put on more fat. This might seem somehow unfair, but it is true. As you work out, you will be breaking down muscle, not letting it heal and increasing the levels of cortisol in your body. Cortisol is a stress hormone that makes your body hang on to its fat.

You might find yourself getting sick more often and much more easily than usual. When you overtrain, your immune system reacts by becoming weaker. So if you find yourself getting colds and flu more easily, slow down. A good bodybuilding regimen should make you less susceptible to colds and flu, not more so.

Loss of muscle mass. Finally, it bears repeating that when you overtrain, you lose muscle; you don’t gain it. Since this is the absolute opposite of what you actually want to accomplish, a good bodybuilding regimen is in order to help you both avoid the symptoms and get the muscle you want.

How are you going to avoid overtraining? The truth is that that is easy. Nutrition is a key factor and when you want to build your body, you’ll find that you should intersperse days of intense weightlifting with days of good rest.

It’s a good idea to do some light cardio on your “rest” days, but the big point here is that you should be resting your muscles from heavy-duty lifting. They need time to recover and to repair.

Finally, remember that when you want to build up bigger muscles that your body needs the tools to do it. Go for lean proteins, fruits and vegetables. This will help you get the results that you need and it will keep you healthy while you do so!