Workout and Nutrition for Young Athletes

I've been looking at a lot of questions from young athletes lately on various message boards. That got me thinking about all the mistakes I made as a young lifter. Therefore, I thought I give some simple advice for those just starting to lift weights:

• Use compound exercises (exercises using multiple body parts, such as bench press, pullups, squats)--these should be the core of your workout. In fact, you could make darn good progress using only those three exercises.
  
• If you do try muscle specific exercises (such as bicep curl or tricep extension) make sure you do the big compound exercises first because they work the largest muscle groups and that is where you will add the most muscle mass.
• Don't workout for more than one hour at a time. This was a huge mistake I made because I wanted to add muscle so badly. When you do workout for over an hour, your testosterone levels start to dip and you are being counter-productive.
  
• Eat your protein. Try to get 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight. As an ectomorph, I didn't make big gains until I applied this concept.
• Do your homework and think about the future. Working out will get you plenty of girls for now, but when you're a poor twenty-something year old, nobody will be interested in how much you bench press.
  

There you have it. Its actually pretty simple. The good news is, as a beginner to weightlifting you are going to make gains way faster than I do these days.