So maybe you're ready to hit the gym for the first time and sculpt the body of your dreams, but what you don't know is that you're also stepping into a minefield of possible injury with the looming possibility of less than sterling results.
Or maybe you've been working out for couple of months now, but seem to be going nowhere fast.
Even if you're doing almost everything right, just making one of these three common bodybuilding mistakes could cause permanent damage to your efforts.
But once you know these mistakes, you can wipe the floor them and build the body of your dreams.
Mistake One: Insufficient Prep.
Bodybuilding begins well before you step up to the elliptical weight machine.
Proper nutrition, hydration, and avoidance of ineffectual artificial substances such as diet pills can make the difference between flab and and slab.
In general, bodybuilders need more calories than a non-bodybuilder, even one who weighs the same, in order to support their greater amount of muscle and training regimen.
Depending on your personal bodybuilding goals, you may need a different balance of fats, carbs, and protein.
In general, carbohydrates power up the body with the necessary energy for both training sessions and recovery.
It is better for bodybuilders to eat slow digesting carbs such as low-glycemic polysaccharides.
High-glycemic polysaccharides provoke a sharp response in a person's insulin which causes the body to store excess energy from food as fat instead of muscle.
This wastes energy and hinders muscle growth.
While carbs provide the instant power for your workout, protein gives an essential, perhaps the most essential, component to the diet of the bodybuilder.
The exact balance of protein vs.
overall calories is still being hotly debated, but a good rule of thumb is to get 25 to 30% of your calories come from protein.
Without protein, no matter how hard you work out, you won't gain muscle.
Also, avoid diet pills or other substances that make pie-in-the-sky claims to help you develop muscle with minimal effort.
In bodybuilding, effort equals results; if you try to cheat this you only cheat yourself.
Mistake Two: Overtraining.
Overtraining comes in three flavors, neglecting to warm-up, increasing the pounds on your weights too quickly, or trying to train more than the suggested three days a week.
The difference between amateur and professional bodybuilder is the attention paid to the warm-up.
A proper warm-up should always include some form of stretching.
  Stretching helps develop muscle as well as maintaining flexibility.
There are two kinds of stretching: passive and dynamic.
Passive stretching involves holding a stretch in a static position for a period of time.
While this is the most familiar kind of stretching to most of us, new research has shown that it has the potential to hurt your performance, and even lead to injury.
Dynamic stretching, in contrast, requires movement while stretching, increasing one's reach gradually as well rate of movement.
Dynamic stretching should not be mixed up with ballistic stretching (which involves jerky or bouncing motions -- not a recommended way of stretching).
In addition to neglecting stretching, another mistake of overtraining is trying to add too much weight too quickly.
There's always a temptation to pile on the pounds, but trying to jump up in chunks of five and 10 pounds is more likely to lead to injury than success.
The same thing goes for trying to lift weights that are just too heavy.
You're better off to cut all of the weights you're working with by 10% and work on technique.
After a month or so, you'll be able to incorporate those weights back into your workout and still have perfect technique.
This will lead to new, healthy muscle growth.
And when you start working with even heavier weights your growth will jump up even more.
Lastly, rest is just as important as training so don't neglect your rest days.
You ought to lift a maximum of three days a week, each day focusing on a different major muscle group.
Mistake Three: Wrong Exercises.
Don't kill your time, energy, and body on the wrong exercises.
One major mistake is to be too consistent.
Continuously training of one muscle group without giving it time to rest leaves you spinning your wheels with no muscle growth.
Also, focus on the on the large-scale exercises that promote building, such as squats, deadlifts, leg presses, dips, chins and bench presses.
You can always refine your muscles once you have them.
And remember to avoid injury.
An injured bodybuilder is dead in the water.
So focus on technique -- avoid yanking, keeping, dropping, and other dangerous errors.
If you've been doing an exercise with controlled speed of repetitions, and good technique, and have also tried modifying the exercise in a sensible way, and it is still causing you pain, stop that exercise.
In bodybuilding pain does not equal gain, and injury is the enemy.
If you avoid these three common mistakes -- insufficient prep, overtraining, and getting the exercises wrong -- your dreams of bulking up and achieving that ripped, chiseled physique are easily within your grasp.