Thursday, October 30, 2008

Building Muscle Takes A Lot More Then Just Lifting Weights

Adding muscle to your body requires the implementation of three critical steps. Miss any one of these steps and your ability to build muscle will be greatly compromised. You're most likely already familiar with the first step which is a good old fashioned bodybuilding workout to stretch and tear your muscles but what about the rest? What else do you need to add huge muscles to your body?

When it comes to building muscle the one step almost everybody is familiar with is weight training. Through some serious weight training you tear your muscles while working out in the gym and what a lot of gym goers don't realize is that you don't actually build any muscle in the gym. The only thing you're doing to your muscles in the gym is breaking them down and tearing them apart. Before we look at how we actually build the muscle, let's look at what muscles are made of so we have a better idea of how to repair the muscles once we've broken them down in the gym.

Protein and water are the two primary components of your muscles. One of the most misunderstood things about bodybuilding nutrition is that the primary ingredient necessary to building or I should say rebuilding your muscles is protein. If all you want to do is maintain your current body weight then all you have to do is consume a gram of protein for every pound you weigh. If you want to add muscle, you should be consuming about 1.5 - 2 grams of protein per pound of body weight. In addition to protein obviously you need water but you also want to consume a fair amount of carbohydrates so that your body has something to burn for fuel other then the protein in your muscles and the calories you consume.

One point about carbohydrates before we move on. Want almost imediate results? Have a carbohydrate and protein shake immediately after your workout and first thing in the morning. During both of these situations your body's glucose levels are very low, if you have any glucose in your body at all, and you're at risk of having your body eat away at your muscles for energy. You remember that protein in your muscles? Well given the choice between maintaining your muscles or survival your body wll always choose survival and eat away at your muscles! You wouldn't want that now would you?

So make sure you consume plenty of protein and enough carbs to maintain your weight and energy levels but not too much more becuase they will pack on more fat then muscle onto your frame.

Last but certainly not least is rest. The majority of muscle growth will occur while you're sleeping and that's because your muscles need plenty of rest to grow. So make sure you're sleeping at least 7-8 hours every night and if you're really serious about adding muscle then you won't expend too much energy during the day either. and if you really want to grow you'll drink a tall glass of milk and have some cottage cheese before bed. Milk and cottage cheese both contain casein which is perfect for building muscle at night.

So there you have it. As you can see adding muscle to your body is as basic as these three steps. Workout to tear the muscle. Consume plenty of protein and carbohydrates to maintain your weight and add muscle. And finally rest so you can give your muscles a chance to rebuild. Sleep. Eat. Train. Grow. Simple.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Build Muscle Up While Burning Fat with HIIT

I bet you've heard it a hundred times: you cannot build muscle up and burn fat concurrently. You've been told that building mass involves an increase in calories, while fat burning requires a decrease in calories. This conventional wisdom is based in fact, but the beliefs are being tossed on their ears with insights into interval training. The truth is, you can achieve muscle weight gain at the same time as you burn fat provided that you add interval training to your sessions.

Interval training isn’t completely new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and practiced in recent years. While standard aerobic activities were considered the only efficient ways to shed fat, and the only acceptable workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has proven to be beneficial to athletes in all fields, and for people with wildly varying goals.

Standard aerobic activity is often referred to as "steady state," meaning that you work up to a certain intensity level and continue working out at that level throughout the workout. During the session, your body gains half of its fuel through your fat stores, and gets the remainder through oxygen intake, and by cutting into your glycogen and muscle deposits.

HIIT sessions, on the other hand, involve short maximum intensity intervals followed by moderate intensity rest periods. HIIT sessions spare your muscles and are fast, but pack a wallop. A fifteen-minute HIIT session can raise your base metabolism for almost day, enabling you to continue burning higher levels of fat for up to a day.

On top of this, because your muscles consume calories during every minute of the day, the more lean mass you have, the more fat you burn, even while you're sitting still. Because HIIT not only spares your muscle, but also helps you build muscle up, your future fat burning capacity is increased.

The bottom line is that regardless of your fitness goals, HIIT sessions can help you increase your overall level of fitness with very short sessions. Better still, if your goals include mass building and fat shedding, adding HIIT to your weekly workouts is a no-brainer.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Build Muscle Up Fast in Fewer than Ninety Minutes a Week

You want to build muscle up quickly and you want to achieve it yesterday. You've likely been told how much hard work it will take, and you're getting mentally prepared to get to the gym five times a week for 60 to 90 minutes per workout.

You've been mislead. Conventional wisdom has led you down the wrong path.

With a properly-constructed workout, you can get better results in fewer than ninety minutes per week. By better, I mean that you can build muscle up just as fast as with the extended workouts, but you also get several additional benefits:

  • You can achieve muscle weight gain quickly and burn fat at the same time
  • You can use more calories as a result of a 15-minute anaerobic workout than in a 60-minute aerobic workout
  • You will increase your explosive power
  • You will improve your your overall fitness level and anaerobic threshold
  • You will improve your joint strength and flexibility
  • You can improve your core without doing core-specific exercises

These techniques are not secrets, but aren't widely used. These short workouts are based on interval trainings, which is nothing new. Intervals have been used successfully for quite a few years. But how you apply those intervals will determine your results. That's why it's vital that you pick a proven workout if your goal is muscle weight gain.

The two primary types of interval training you'll find in good plans are Tabata training and high intensity interval training (HIIT). HIIT sessions are generally used for the cardio workouts, and 15 minutes will replace 45 to 60 minutes of traditional aerobic exercises.

Tabata training is just one form of strength training using intervals and compound exercises that will have your muscles melting in 20-second sets. You can also generously sprinkle in functional exercises, kettleball training, sports-specific exercise and more to keep your sessions fun. But prepare for hard work -- you can't build muscle up unless you put forth maximum effort during your sessions.

But these types of workouts aren't for the squeamish. You must already have a base level of fitness before you try them, and your joints must be healthy to start. Anyone over the age of 60 should seriously consider getting checked out before attempting interval training. When you're ready, put your game face on and get to work. You'll love the results!

Monday, October 27, 2008

Five Easy Pointers to Build Muscle Up Quickly

If your goal is to get 100% better at something, how would you go about it? I can think of two primary approaches. The approach you select will be somewhere along this continuum: doing one thing twice as good (or 100 percent better), or doing 100 things 1 percent better. I think that most people try the first approach, but the second is much easier to implement.

Taken a step further, to make each of these 1 percent building blocks more effective, you could also change things that occur outside of your workouts. So you focus on changing your habits and making fractional improvements that will stack on top of one another to bring you massive benefits.

So here are 5 easy lifestyle changes you can make to help you build muscle up.

1) Replace Traditional Cardio with HIIT

Aerobic exercise has a negative impact on mass building because it burns branched chain amino acids (BCAA) and glycogen. Instead, focus on HIIT sessions for fat burning, for example a 400-meter sprint followed by a 400-meter recovery jog, repeated 3 more times.

2) Increase Total Time Under Load (TTL)

Instead of focusing on the quantity of reps, focus on the total time your muscles are under load. Try spending 2 seconds on the negative contraction, 1 second at neutral (bottom of the exercise), and 1 second on the positive contraction. Emphasizing the negative is a simple way to overload muscles and promote muscle weight gain.

3) Increase your Sodium Intake

Sodium increases amino acid absorption and carbohydrate storage while also improving the muscle's receptiveness to insulin. Just do in it moderation!

4) Mix up your Total Time Under Load

One really easy way to add variety to a workout, confuse your muscles, and build muscle up is to switch up your repetition tempo by adding an explosive day once per week, or an explosive set once per workout. It looks like this: 2-second negative contraction, 1-second neutral, explode as fast as you can on the positive contraction and repeat.

5) Cheat on your Diet

If you haven’t yet read the Cheat to Lose Diet, you should. It’s a pretty interesting theory into how the body metabolizes food. The short story is that your body burns fat when a hormone is present in your body, and that hormone comes as the result of overeating! So once a week, cheat, and follow your cheat day with two very low-carbohydrate, high protein days. You’ll enjoy the cheat day and burn more fat to boot.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

{Top 5 Benefits of Kettlebell Training|The five most significant benefits which you get if you start kettlebell training}

{For enthusiasts and true believers, kettlebells are considered as "the ultimate tool for extreme all-round fitness."|For real aficionados, kettlebells are "the definitive instrument for absolute, holistic fitness."} {Proponents of kettlebell training attest that the benefits of training with kettlebells exceed the other training equipment.|Promoters of kettlebell training verify that the advantages of kettlebell training go beyond other training equipment.}

{Here are the top five benefits of training with kettlebells according to the experts:

1.|The following are considered by experts to be the five best benefits of training with kettlebells:

1. } {Kettlebell training is several different workouts combined into one.|In the training known as kettlebell training quite a few various workouts are combined into one.} {For people who think they need separate workouts for strength training, flexibility, cardio and core conditioning, think again.|Those who believe they require individual workouts for strength and flexibility, as well as cardio and core training, need to reconsider.} {Kettlebell training for as short as 10 minutes to no longer than 45 minutes can be a full body workout and more.|No more than 45 minutes of Kettlebell training is required to equal a full body workout.}

{2.|There is no sentence to rewrite. I was in "auto accept next HIT" mode when this occurred and I don't want to return it, as it will affect my statistics, I hope that you won't reject it, either. Thank you.} {High repetition kettlebell training is an aerobic workout.|A workout consisting of high repetition kettlebell training is considered to be aerobic.} {Men who shudder at the thought of joining a step aerobics class or get easily bored with slow cardio programs need not to fret any further.|Men who are apprehensive to join a step aerobics class or who may be easily bored with less intense cardio programs now have an alternate.} {Women who enjoy intense cardio workouts can also develop strength for overall health.|Women participating in high level cardio exercise also develop strength as an added health benefit.} {Bottom line, you'll get the best of both worlds simply with kettlebell training.|The fact is kettlebell training brings the best of both worlds together.}

{3.|Number three.} {The kettlebell will give you infinite freedom of lifting.|You may lift the kettlebell in an infinite number of ways.} {A kettlebell workout is unique in how it strengthens the stabilizing and supporting muscles.|Kettlebell exercises uniquely strengthen the muscles that provide stability and support.} {Traditional weightlifting actually discourages the use of stabilizing muscles, ligaments, and tendons and target one particular muscle group at a time.|In reality, conventional weightlifting, which only targets one special group of muscles at a time, does not help the utilizing of steady muscles, ligaments, and tendons.}  {With kettlebells, you are working more areas of your body all at the same time.|Using kettlebells works out a greater number of body parts at once.} {If you don't want the bulk, kettlebell training will burn body fat, add muscle definition, strengthen tendons and ligaments and create functional strength for everyday tasks.|If you desire a svelte look, kettleball training will help you eliminate body fat, increase muscle tone, enhance tendons and  ligaments as well as build body endurance for daily tasks.}

{4.|Four.} {Because of its design, using kettlebells minimize the risk of training injury.|By design, kettlebells lessen training injury risks} {Shoulder injuries are virtually unheard of in people who train with kettlebells.|Training with kettlebells are highly unlikely to cause a shoulder injury.
} {In addition, the position of the handle allows dynamic passing of the kettlebell from hand to hand for a great variety of powerful juggling type exercises strongly endorsed by the Russian Federation State Committee on Physical Culture.|In addition, the position of the handle allows dynamic passing of the kettlebell from hand to hand for a great variety of powerful juggling type exercises strongly endorsed by the Russian Federation State Committee on Physical Culture.
} {These drills develop dynamic strength and injury-proof the body in many planes unlike conventional linear exercise.|Unlike linear exercise, the drills condition your body while developing dynamic strength.}

{5.|Five.} {Kettlebells are fun!|Kettlebells can be so much fun!} {No more reason to be in a sweaty gym.|You are better off to try this than go to a sweaty gym.} {Save on gym membership fees and do your training where you love it the most.|Complete your training where you want to be and save on the cost of belonging to a gym.} {You can even do most of your training outdoors.|Most of the trianing you will do can be done outside, in the fresh air.} {Kettlebell exercises and movements are simple, fun, unique and you can combine it with other exercise modalities.|While kettlebell exercises and movements are quite simple, many consider them both fun and unique; you'll also be able to combine them with various other exercise modalities.} {Use your imagination and creativity.|Be creative.} {Have fun and enjoy the results!|Have a great time and have fun with the overall results!} 

{Bonus benefit: They cost less than compared to other pieces of exercise equipment.|A bonus benefit is:  These cost less when compared to other kinds of exercise equipment.}  {You can get a complete body workout including cardio and resistance training and do it in around 20 minutes a day in one piece of equipment for under $100.|For less than $100 you can get a total body workout in only 20 minutes per day.} 

{So kettlebell training yields maximum output without sky-high costs.|Without paying a sky-high cost you can get maximum output from kettlebell taining.} {So what are you waiting for?|There is no good reason to wait any longer.} {Start doing kettlebell training today!|It is time to begin kettlebell training!}

{To read kettlebell reviews and buy a kettlebell cheap, check out kettlebellreviews.com|You can learn about kettlebell reviews and buy kettlebells cheap at KettlebellReviews.com}

Chest building made simple, dumbell chest building exercises

How to build the chest muscles

 

One of the many questions I get asked on my travels is “Can you tell me how to build the chest”?. There is no greater sign of power than a huge chest and the good news is that the chest muscles are one of the easiest muscles to build. In order to build the chest muscles to the maximum you need to incorporate a system of dumbbell chest building exercises and the flat bench. So here are two of the best chest exercises to help you build the chest you desire.

  How to build the chest:-   Exercise 1       Dumbbell Incline Press

      Lay on an incline bench, the angle of which should be around 30 degrees and no greater or else the workload is shifted to the shoulders and off the chest. Start with a pair of weighted dumbells that you can handle. Start with the dumbbells at arm length above the chest then lower slowly in a controlled fashion to a position as low as possible (below the chest) to give that full stretch. Then press the dumbbells back above your chest but do not lock out your arms. Repeat for 8 to 10 reps and 5 sets increasing the weight each tine.


 How to build the chest:-  Exercise 2       Pre exhaust Fly's and Flat Bench  

This is the combination of exercises that will build you a solid striated chest, do these regularly and you will be astounded by the results. Be careful these are very intense exercises. You will need a flat bench, dumbbells and a barbell.

 Start with a pair dumbbells that will enable you to perform 8 reps with maximum effort. Lay on a bench and hold the dumbbells together pressed above your chest. Now lower the dumbbells in an arc as low as possible (below chest level) then press back in the same arc to the starting position, repeat for 8 reps. When the last repetition is finished drop the dumbbells then without rest, press the barbell off the support to full arm extension above your chest. Slowly lower the barbell till it touches nipple level then under control hold for a short one count, breathe out and press back to the starting position. Repeat at least 8 times. The composition of these 2 exercises constitutes 1 set, 3 sets need to be performed.  

With over 30 years of bodybuilding experience, we can show you how to build muscle and burn fat guaranteed


   

Friday, October 24, 2008

Gaining Muscles: Are Machines More Effective For Gaining Muscles Than Free Weights?

To see the definitive sports instrument for athletes and enthusiasts of many different kinds of sports and hobbies also check out the NSD Powerball.

Free Weights vs. Machines

A lot of people debate about which one is effective when it comes to exercising and producing muscles. These people often debate whether machines are more effective for gaining muscles fast or free weights. Basically, barbells and free weights are classified as free weights. On the other hand exercises that have pulleys or cables to help you lift the weight are machines.

In order to build muscles, you need to focus more on free weight exercises. For all machine enthusiasts out there, you might rethink about which one is more effective. Free weights are indeed more effective for gaining muscles. Although the exercises here are much more difficult to execute because nothing is actually assisting you to employ the correct execution, this fact alone is why free weight exercise is much more effective.

The free weight exercises allow you to stimulate most of the muscle fibers as possible. This is impossible to do when you are exercising on a machine. Why?

Basically, machines lack in promoting stabilizers and synergist muscle development. Basically, these two muscles are what support the main muscles when you are performing a complex lift. For example, if you need to do bench presses, you need to be able to make use of the stabilizers and the synergist muscles in order for you to achieve lift. And, you need a lot of it. If you bench press using a machine, it will not really need any assistance from the stabilizers as the machine itself is already supporting your main muscles.

Machines basically fail to stimulate the muscles around the area you are working on, which are the stabilizers. You need to remember that in order for your main muscles to grow, the stabilizers should be strong. And, there's only way to do this and that is by doing as much free weight exercises as you possibly can.

Free weight exercises, such as squats, dumbbell presses, dumbbell fly, bench presses, bent over dumbbell row, and others put a lot of stress in the supporting muscle groups, which is why you get tired really fast doing free weight exercises. However, even if you do get tired really fast, you will gain more muscles and you will become a lot stronger at a very fast rate.

Of course you can still include machine exercises in your program but you need to do it after you did all the free weight exercises. This way, you will be able to take advantage of the strength you have on free weight exercises and not deplete it on machine exercises.

If you are a beginner, concentrate on lighter weights. Your primary goal is not muscle gain yet. You first need to properly execute the free weight exercises you have in your program in order for you to move on to heavier weights.

Concentrate on strengthening the supporting muscles first and when it is able to support the weight you are lifting and that you are able to execute the free weight exercises properly, then it's time for you to concentrate on the primary muscles.

Also, in order to build muscle mass, you need to lift heavier weights. What heavy means is that weights that are challenging for you and weights that you will be able to lift with 8 to 12 repetitions for 3 sets. If you can do more than 15 repetitions before temporary failure sets in, then it will be considered as light weight.

Remember these tips and you can be sure that you will be able to gain muscles fast. Always remember that one of the keys to muscle gain is to strengthen the supporting muscles. And, only doing free weight exercises will be able to do this efficiently.