Wow, lots of broscience on here, huh?
I am by no means an expert, but I have been lifting for the past two years, and have only recently (the past 6 months or so) become an absolute nut when it comes to eating right, lifting HARD, and educating myself on what it actually takes to make your body grow.
First off, you need to find a workout routine that works for you, and there are a TON of different opinions on what is optimal for muscle growth, but I can say with certainty that if you want to grow you need to switch up your routines from week to week or else you will very soon hit a plateau once you are past your "noob gains" phase (ie. when you first start working out and even if your diet is relatively bad, you can still gain muscle while dropping fat). Personally, I have never liked full body workout that some people swear by, I think they blow, period. I like to do a 4 day split for lifting with 3 days of cardio worked in during the week. For example...
Mon - Back/abs/cardio
Tues - Chest/cardio
Wed - Legs/Shoulders
Thurs - Arms/abs
Fri - Off
Sat - Cardio (HIIT cardio)
Sun - Off
Also, keep in mind that going up in weight is nothing if you don't have proper form. It is always better to use the correct form during an excercise, even if that means using less weight the correct way. Just look around the gym and 9 out of 10 people are doing curls with their back or bench pressing half with their shoulders/tris instead of isolating anything. In any case, it took me a while to realize that I was one of those tards who was bench pressing more weight by using my shoulders more than my chest or doing pull downs for my back at a 45 degree angle like an idiot because that's what I saw the other morons doing, and I didn't have the education at the time to know any better. In any case, through using proper form on all of my sets it has helped greatly with my results.
The next bit of advice that I would give you, and this is MUCH more important than any supplement under the sun that you will take, is that you NEED to have your diet in check if you want to see results from what you are doing in the gym. Remember, supplements are just that, DIETARY supplements that are meant to SUPPLEMENT your diet, not replace it with magical pills or powders. Certain supplements can certainly help you in breaking through a plateau, but they are nothing compared to a well balanced diet that is based around YOUR goals. By your goals I mean that it is very important for you to decide what you want to do with your body. Ideally, we would all like to gain nothing but lean mass, and shred fat at the same time, but unfortunately in the real world those type of gains take an extermely long time to achieve, and are pretty hard to attain at the same time (noob gains aside). It is much more effective for you to either decide to "bulk" or to "cut" and base your diet around those goals. Bulking is essentially eating "X" amount of calories above your daily caloric maintenance needed to stay at your current weight (usually 500 cals over is good for 1lb/week gain), while cutting is the exact opposite with taking in less calories than are needed to maintain your current body weight (300-500 cals under maintenance is a good starting point). To determine your daily caloric intake the following link is very useful...
http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showth...hp?t=107459791
Once I got my diet in check I started to finally make some real progress from the effort that I was putting in the gym. I have always been a relative thin guy, and for the past six months I was stuck at 155lbs (I'm 5'9" or so btw). I started bulking around two months ago, eating 500 cals above maintenance daily (3,000 cals per day for me), and I have been gaining a steady 1lb/week for the past two months (I am currently at 163lbs). I have been doing a "clean bulk" where I am trying to minimize fat gains as much as possible, while supplying enough cals for my body to put on optimal lean mass, and although I haven't tracked my BF I can say that I doubt I have gained much at all so far, but I have been making nice gains in size and having strength increases that I never thought I could attain. My plan is to bulk up to 175, and then determine from there if I want to cut or continue getting bigger. In any case, the point is that your diet will either make or break you when it comes to seeing results from the long hours that you are putting in at the gym. Also, when it comes to nutrition there are 1,000 different opinions on what type of macros you should be taking in (I prefer a 40/40/20 split between Pro/Carb/Fat, but as I continue to up my cals that becomes unrealistic as 250g+ protein for a 160-ish lb person is retarded so I have adjusted it accordingly). Basically, you want to make sure that you are meeting your daily protein requirements where you should shoot for 1g-1.5g of protein for every lb of bodyweight, then you need to make sure that you are taking in enough GOOD FATS which should be 20-25% of your daily caloric intake (and I can't stress this enough because some idiots think that taking in omega 3,6,9's and other healty monounsaturated dietary fats will lead to weight gain), and you can take the rest in carbs. I prefer to eat relatively clean so if you have any questions about nutrition I would be happy to help out if I can and give you some ideas on what foods you can eat to help form a balanced diet.
Finally, as far as supplements go there are 10 billion different products out there that will claim to turn you into arnold himself by the end of the bottle, but if you stick to the basics you can actually get your money's worth. The essentials IMO are a good multivitamin (ON opti-men or NOW Adam are good), Fish Oil (any brand really), whey protein (ON is very good, but I also like dymatize, but there are several good options, and no, muscle milk isn't one of them
), glucosamine (great for your joints), creatine (I prefer Universal Storm, but Controlled Labs Green Mag is also very good, and unlike some of the BS that you might hear you won't get massive "bloat" from taking newer forms of creatine unlike monohydrate, but you will get very good gains from having high ATP reserves, and these are gains that you will keep as its not just water weight like some people claim), and some type of protein blend (ON nitrocore 24 or dymatize 12 hour are some examples, but basically any qualtiy whey/casein/egg blend that you can use either pre workout/pre bed or any other time during the day that you are using a protein shake as more of a meal replacment where you don't want only whey that is a fast digesting protein (20-30 min digestion rate) for post workout. Sure, there are also Stims/NO products, fat burners, prohormones, etc, but you should have all of your bases covered with the basics IMO.
Get your diet on track, lift HARD, and you will make gains.
