A good muscle building program will take into consideration how often you train, how long you train, how you cycle your training and what exercises are best for training.

How Often Should You Train?
Training each body part only once or twice a week is suggested by some muscle building programs.  That works if your workouts are so intense that your body needs more than 24 hours to recover and rebuild – that is, if you want to have massive muscles.  But, if you want big muscles like an olympic swimmer or a male gymnast you should work like a swimmer or gymnast – several workouts, more than once or twice a week.  Three to four times a week of the right exercises at the right intensity will give your muscles time to recover and get bigger.

How Long Should You Train?
Also, less than an hour is all the time you should take for each workout.  Testosterone levels are at their highest about 27 minutes into your workout, and by 45 minutes into your workout cortisone – the stress hormone that promotes body fat storage – levels go up significantly.  So 40 – 45 minutes should be the most time you spend in the gym.

Cycling Your Training
Your shorter workout has to be more productive.  You should cycle your training so you are always taxing the muscle – working it in different ways.    Muscles will get used to any one routine after a while, so you should  change your training before the muscles adapt and stop growing.  Don’t switch before you see significant progress, though.  Most good programs will have you change your routine every four weeks.  This will also keep your workouts from getting boring.

Cycling the Intensity
In addition to cycling your exercises, you must also cycle the intensity of your routine.  Push yourself almost to the edge of overtraining, then back off for a little while, then push yourself to the edge again.  This will engage all the fibers in your muscles and keep your muscles working through the entire workout.  Details about why interval training works to build muscle faster can be found in this article.

Another way to make your workout more productive is to use bodyweight exercises.  Bodyweight exercises have the benefit of taxing more than one body part at a time.  Your body also moves in a more natural way in a bodyweight exercise, not isolating only one body part.  Exercises such as dips, chin-ups, push ups,squats, lunges and all of the variations of these exercises will work more than one body part at a time.  Changing the movement or adding weights to the bodyweight exercises will increase the intensity of the workout.  A declined push up is harder than a level push up, a weight added at your belly will increase the intensity of a chin-up or dip.

So, vary the intensity and exercises performed using bodyweight exercises, work out 30 – 45 minutes only, stop spending hours in the gym. Soon you will see considerable progress in your muscles’ contour.