This series of articles assumes you know nothing at all about bodybuilding. It was written for absolute beginners. In fact, even beginners are likely to already know some of this stuff. But it's important to have a good grasp of the basic concepts, and make sure there aren't any gaps in your knowledge. And for the more advanced bodybuilder, a little recap might be just what you need to help you push past that sticking point.

But before we begin, there's one thing you should know. In fact, if you've ever been around bodybuilders for more than a minute, you've probably already discovered it...

When it comes to bodybuilding, none of us can agree what works best. If you ask 10 of us a question, you'll probably get 11 different answers.

The one thing that most will agree on, however, is that success in bodybuilding relies on three key steps:

1) Stimulate the muscle. Give it a reason to grow. Put it under stress and make the bugger work. When you do resistance training (with weights/cables/etc) you actually break the muscle fibre down and rip little micro-tears in it. This is fine, because your body rebuilds itself, and does so bigger and better than it was before. It adapts to meet the new pressure you're putting it under. At least, it does - provided you also follow steps two and three.

2) Feed it. Give the muscle the nutrients it needs. Your body's clever, but it can't build properly when there are no materials to build with. And since protein is the building block of muscle, it's protein that bodybuilders need most - and lots of it! Carbs and fats also play an important role - but more on that later. For now, let's just say it's important to provide your body with enough new material so it can repair the damage you did to it during training. If you don't, chances are it will nick its own materials by breaking down your hard-earned muscle from somewhere else (just as you and I did as kids when there was a shortage of Lego blocks).

3) Rest it. Muscle doesn't grow in the gym. It takes time to repair the damage you caused in your last workout. And when does your body do most of its repair work? When you're asleep. That's one of the reasons growing teenagers can sleep so much. In fact, during deep sleep your Growth Hormone levels rise - so make sure you get quality as well as quantity. Seven to eight hours of shuteye is a minimum.
The other important time frame is the period you leave in between working a certain muscle on one day, and working it again on another. This is the trick to designing a good workout routine, because you have to leave enough days in between for the muscle to recover properly before attacking that muscle again.

There's actually a fourth point, too - "Repeat". Commitment is everything in bodybuilding. A good plan, covering points 1, 2, and 3, is nothing if you don't stick to it.

Almost always, if you're not making progress, the fault lies in one of these areas. Even experienced bodybuilders fall into this trap regularly, so make sure you keep the basics covered.

Well, that's the easy part done - the overview, where everyone agrees. Now it's time to venture off the safe ground, and start looking at the details in more depth. How do you set up a basic workout routine? What kind of diet should you have?

We'll start with diet, because it's the part of bodybuilding that is so often neglected, and yet it's probably the most important. So I'm going to force-feed it to you, like it or not - and I promise that we'll get to the fun stuff like workout routines later on.

All those for diet class, just step this way...