Basic Big Movements

The first thing you need to do to build muscle is exercise. Specifically, you need to lift heavy weights. The idea behind weight
training is simple: when you left heavy weights and stress your muscles, you create micro-tears in your muscle fibers. Assuming you have a good diet and rest properly, your body will spend the next few days preparing those muscles. When it repairs those muscles, it makes them stronger than they were before. Gradually, after many weeks of doing this, your muscles will become significantly larger than they were before. However, none of this happens if you aren’t stressing your muscles. That's why going to the gym is so important. It is possible to build muscle exclusively with bodyweight exercises, but it is much more difficult than it is by lifting weights.  So if you're serious about building muscle, getting a gym membership is a good idea. So what should you do at the gym?
Well, you should primarily do compound exercises. These are exercises that stress multiple muscle groups at the same time.  An example of a compound exercise is squats. You could call squats the king of compound exercises because they work so many muscle groups, including your legs, glutes, and lower back. The other variation of weight training you can do are isolation exercises. These only work one muscle group at a time. An example of this is a bicep curl, which only works out your biceps. Isolation exercises have their place, but if you're interested in gaining muscle mass, you'll get the biggest bang for your buck with compound exercises. Take a squat for example. When you do a squat, you hit a bunch of large muscle groups. In addition, you hit the muscle stabilizers that connect muscles together, which isolation exercises do not hit.  Because you're hitting so many muscles at once, your body releases more growth hormones than it does with isolation exercises. That's all VERY good news if you want to gain weight and build muscle. With that in mind, here are the BEST exercises you can do at the gym in order to gain weight:

· Squats

· Deadlifts

· Bench press

· Military press

· Compound row

These are all compound exercises that hit multiple large muscle groups. If you JUST did these five exercises, then you would set yourself up nicely to gain lots of muscle.