Posts Tagged ‘build muscle mass’

Depending on where you look there is a lot of great information out there on how to build muscle up. However here a re a few tips that you may not have heard before but can certainly help you in term of building muscle up. Here they are:

Try drinking green tea. This can inhibit the enzyme that inhibits nor-epinephrine which mean that you should experience raised levels of this muscle building metabolic hormone which can also aid in weight loss. It is also full of anti-oxidants and can help significantly in terms of post workout recovery and also general health.

Ingest the healthy fats. These are essential for correct functioning of many parts of the human body like the brain, heart, production of energy and the regulation of hormones too. Excellent sources of this are: natural peanut butter, oily fish, avocado and oily dressings.

Take on board casein protein. This type of protein takes longer to digest and breakdown so therefore supplies an ongoing release of protein. This is excellent if you eat it before going to sleep as your body can make use of it throughout the night for growth and repair.

Take on board at least 20 grams of protein as soon as you wake up. Immediately on waking up drink a protein shake. This will put a stop to the catabolic state of your body that you may have been experiencing whilst you were asleep and also give you a solid start on achieving your protein intake target for the day.

Try drop sets for difficult to grow body parts. This is a severely intense technique that can trigger muscle growth even in very hard to grow muscles. Simply do your set as normal and when you have squeezed out your last rep reduce the weight by 10 percent and do more reps, then reduce the weight once more. Continue repeating this process as many times as you can bear but the next day you are likely to experience significant muscle soreness and a tremendous burn at the time.

Take on board lots of water. Do not underestimate the benefits of reaming well hydrated during the day. water is of upmost importance to all muscle building reactions in the body and that includes reactions for muscle growth.

Stay educated and keep learning. There are many new ways, techniques and strategies to try in developing your physique. experiment and find out what helps you build muscle up the best and stick with those.

So, by applying some of the above weight gain tips you should be able to build muscle mass even faster than before. Good luck.

Depending on where you look there is a lot of great information out there on how to build muscle up. However here are a few tips that you may not have come across before yet are extremely powerful. Here they are:

Try drinking green tea. This can inhibit the enzyme that inhibits nor-epinephrine which mean that you should experience increased levels of this muscle building metabolic hormone which can also help in fat loss too. It is also packed full of antioxidants which are great for general health and also for post workout recovery.

Eat healthy fats. These are essential for correct functioning of many parts of the human body like the brain, heart, production of energy and the regulation of hormones too. Oily fish, natural peanut butter, avocado and oily dressings are all excellent sources of this.

Ingest casein protein. This specific protein is digested by the body very slowly and is therefore released in to the body gradually. This is great news if you consume it just before sleeping because your body can then make use of it in order to build muscle up whilst you sleep.

Eat a portion of around 20-30 grams of whey protein as soon as possible after waking. Immediately on waking up drink a protein shake. This will put a stop to the catabolic state of your body that you may have been going through whilst you were sleeping and furthermore give you a great start on achieving your daily protein intake target.

Try drop sets for difficult to grow body parts. This intense technique can produce growth in even very stubborn hard to grow muscle groups. Simply do your set as normal and when you have squeezed out your last rep reduce the weight by 10 percent and do more reps, then reduce the weight once more. Continue repeating this process as many times as you can bear but the next day you are likely to experience significant muscle soreness and a tremendous burn at the time.

Take on board lots of water. It is important not to under estimate the positive benefits of reminaing well hydrated during the day. water is used in nearly all of the bodies natural reactions to some degree inclduing muscle building ones.

Keep learning and educate yourself. There a great variety of alternative strategies to develop your physique. try out alternative methods and find out which one helps you build muscle the most.

So, by applying some of the above weight gain tips you should be able to build muscle mass even faster than before. Good luck.

Spending hours in the gym to build muscle up and not making progress? Great news! There is a very good chance that you are struggling to build muscle up for one very important reason. Once acknowledged and dealth with properly this knowledge can boost your progress a great deal. For a lot of people this little known truth can easily help them build muscle up fast.

So what exactly is this well kept secret? A new amazing routine or something?

No definitly not. It is something known as Cortisol and has actyually been known about for a long time but its affects are still ignored by some.

Exactly what is cortisol?

Cortisol is a hormone released by the body steadily throughout the day and is produced in response to stress such as weight lifting. Cortisol levels are greater in the morning and drop slightly through the day.

What exactly does it do?

Well, it actually improves short term memory, helps detoxify the liver and aids in regulating the blodds sugar levels. However it can raise blood pressure and decrease bone density if your cortisol levels get too high, however this would be unusual. However it will restrict muscle mass as it increases the use of muscle as energy and not fat stores. this is the reason that workouts should be under an hour long. They will actually be reducing their progress and not increasing it after this time!

Here are a few guidelines to ensure that you are not wasting your time trying to build muscle up:

1) limit your cardio workouts, too much cardio causes the body to release cortisol which as explained is not what we need.

2) Cortisol levels also increase due to caffeine intake so try to keep this to a minimum.

3) Make sure your training sessions are less than an hour. Stay focussed wear headphones if you need to avoid talking to people.

4) Stress causes the body to release more cortisol too so try to relax, although granted this is easier said than done.

5) Consume small frequent meals as infrequent meals make the body assume it is starving and will thus try and use muscle mass as a form of energy before it makes use of fat reserves by releasing more cortisol.

6) Sleep. This is when your cortisol levels are lowest and your muscle building hormones highest so aim for 8 hours if possible.

With those building muscle tips in mind you should be able to give your workouts a great boost and help you to build muscle mass more efficiently.

We hear loads of advice and guidance on what to do to build up muscle but much of it is conflicting. For that very reason we are going to set the record straight on a numberof different issues right here and now. Here we go, 7 things not to do when trying to build muscle up:

1) Train for more than 45 minutes. training longer than this can actually inhibit muscle gains because at this point a hormone is produced that limits the muscle building process, train for less than 45 minutes and the hormones level is about correct for building muscle.

2) Eat lots of everything. Often you hear that you should just eat as much as everything as you can. Well sure we need excess calories to build muscle mass but do you really think that stuffing yourself full of E numbers, simple carbs (sugars), fatty red meats, fast food and so on is going to benefit you long term. Of course not, stick to sensible nutritious foods and you will put on lean muscle mass and save your body from long term health problems too.

3) exercises that isolate individual muscles. That means exercises that focus on one muscle alone like tricep presses. This is not a very efficient use of either your energy or time. Stick to multi joint exercises like presses, squats, pull ups and so on. These exercises trigger muscle growth in a few muscles at a time.

4) Neglecting aerobic fitness. I’m sure you have heard that you should steer clear of aerobic stuff as it consumes valuable calories that could be put towards building muscle. yes this is correct but come on there is a sensible balance to be had. Sure get big, but do you really not want to be able to walk up a few flights of stairs without losing your breathe. Train aerobically two or three times a week and just consume additional calories to make up for these sessions.

5) Alter your exercises a great deal. You may know that variety ensures muscles keep growing, that is correct but naturally at the same time not letting your muscles establish an exercise rhythm can also limit your progress that you might otherwise make. Stick with an exercise for a couple of months before dropping it.

6) Train too often. Over training is probably the biggest cause for lack of progress. The majority of people will make good gains from just two workouts a week.

7) Stop trying. Too many bodybuilders quit just because there muscle growth eases up a bit. This is the exact time when you should be rising to the challenge and training with more intensity, paying attention to muscle building nutrition and showing determination.

Go get huge!

Just as a tree cannot grow with out sufficient water, sunlight and soil no matter what else you give it, to build up muscle your body also has several things that you absolutely must provide it with in order to grow. No amount of fancy exercise equipment, supplement or outfit will allow you to grow muscle if you do not take the following essential steps:

1) Eat big. Some people never really embrace this fact! If you desire more muscle then you have to give your body something to built it out of, like more calories. If you are not taking on extra calories then your body has nothing to build up muscleswith. A good way to make sure you do not forget this is to buy a set of over sized crockery. In this manner you constantly remind yourself each meal of your need for calories for muscle growth. Five or six meals a day will allow you to easily consume lots of calories for muscle growth.

2) Workout intensely. If you are not pushing yourself in the gym then your muscles have no reason to grow. Give your muscles a reason to grow by training intensely for up to 45 minutes. To build up muscle mass make use of the proven mass builders: squats, benchpresses, deadlifts, shoulder presses. These build up muscle quicker than any other exercise.

3) Drink ample amounts of water. Just as your body needs excess amounts of quality calories for to support muscle growth your body also needs water for all of the muscle building reactions to occur. Your fluid intake will need to be higher because of your workouts. Take a bottle of water around with you.

And of course just as you cannot expect a plant to grow if you throw harmful substances and so on on it there are several things you absolutely must not do in order to build up muscles

1) Do not over-train. You are more likely to decrease your strength then increase it if you train too much. Why? Well, micro tears in the muscle actually occur after every intense workout. The over the subsequent few days it builds itself back up bigger and stronger. You will always be unable to grow if you do not allow you muscle sufficient time to recover. Quality rest is essential. 

2) Do not stuff your body full of useless calories. Sure your body needs a lot of calories but it also needs then to be of decent quality in order to build up muscle. Food products such as these: eggs, fish, chicken, potatoes, leafy green vegetables, pasta, fruit, rice and so on should be a pretty average days food. To build muscle up they can’t be beaten.

3) Don’t ever give up. What works for some people may not of course work for you. If progress is not apparent then mix things up and experiment with different exercises, a different diet in fact do anything you can but never ever give up. Stick to your aim and you can reach it. remember to relax and enjoy the process of building muscle up, you will not turn into Arnie in a few weeks it will take sometime, keep a training diary to track your progress and for motivation.

So why not ask yourself if you truly are sticking to these very basic guidelines. If you are not then if you really want to build muscle up then wouldn’t now be a good time to change?

There are hundreds of different exercises you can do with free weights and resistance machines or with just your body weight to build muscle mass. You should include mainly multi-joint compound exercises in your workout as they build muscle fastest. The time proven and most effective are: shoulder presses, bench press, pull ups, dead lifts, squats and rows.

Whilst they are very effective your body needs to be constantly challenged in new and different ways if your goal is building lean muscle mass. Here are a few awesome exercises that are often overlooked yet work really well. Try and include them in your workouts now and again for variety. Variety provides new stimulus for your muscles to grow and prevents you from getting bored.

For calf muscles try running on the sand, skipping or donkey raises. making use of ajump rope for skipping and also running on a sandy place bear foot will place great pressure on your calves to grow. Calf muscles tend to respond better to sets in the higher rep ranges as they are used a lot everyday for walking. Donkey raises are when you place your toes on the edge of a 3-4 inch high block bend over to 90 degrees at the waist and rest your hands on a bard or bench at that height. get a friend or training to jump on to your back then pump your calves to move all of your body weight and theirs up and down. This exercise is more difficult than the usual machine calve exercises as you have to use stabiliser muscles to keep you steady whilst performing them.

When was the last time you did dips for your chest muscles? A great mass builder for the chest muscle is dips which are great for triceps also. For this exact exercise many older gyms have parallel bars. Often a v shape is formed which provides scope for different grips. This allows you to really target various areas of the chest muscle and triceps effectively.

Try hitting your hamstrings with stiff legged deadlifts. This hamstring exercise is awesome yet seldom seen. The motion is the same as deadlifts but you must maintain straight legs throughout by bending at the waist, keeping a straight back and lifting the barbell upwards. Be warned however these reps can make you extremely sore the next day and also whilst lifting the weight ensure it is close in to your legs to maintain control.

Want big arms, try hammer curls! The only difference between these and normal dumb bell curls is that the palm of your hand is kept facing in towards your body at all times. This directs much stress on to an inner bicep muscle giving it both thickness and size throughout and is named the brachialis muscle, the exercise also hits the main bicep muscle too.To stop yourself from cheating and swinging the bar to aid your curl stand with your back flat against a wall whilst curling.

When was the last time you noticed anyone hitting their quads with lunges in the weights room? Both mass and shape are given to the quads with this exercise. With a pair of dumb belss in your hands take a decent stride forwardsand bend both knees down to 90 degress step backwards and repeat with the other leg. A superb workout alternative to squats.

For creating muscle definition and for a superb aerobic workout why not try boxing padwork it is very effective for the hitting the entire upper body or do uphill sprints to shred your leg muscles or even get on an exercise bike for uphill intervals immediately following a leg workout. That is a real killer!

with those group of classic exercises in your thoughts change your routine around a bit to build more lean muscle mass.

To build muscle as fast as possible here are a few tips to do exactly that. No messing around here seven top build muscles tips:

1) Eat frequently and often. For bodybuilding newbies you may possibly find it difficult to consume enough calories. To overcome this you should eat 5-7 meals per day and eat for two people.

2) Get plenty of rest. Your muscles need times to rest in order to grow. They do no grow in the gym. So just as you should workout to build muscle mass you should also rest a lot to get big.

3) Restrict your training to less than 45 minutes a workout. Training for much longer than this causes the body to release a hormone that will prevent your body from building muscle mass. Finishing your workout after 30 to 45 minutes means that your body’s hormones are at an optimum level to support muscle growth.

4) Use a training log. tracking your progress provides information on what workouts work well for you. You can then use them again at a later date. They also mean that you can have meaningful goals for every single training session which enhances your motivation and proves that you are improving.

5) Use supplements in your diet. If you have cash spare use the following supplements to improve your development: essential fatty acids, whey protein, multivitamins and possibly creatine. If you do not have money for this do not lose heart, you can make awesome progress with simple good old correct muscle building nutrition.

6) Train with determination, focus and intensity. Keep intensity levels as high as possible in your training sessions by using techniques such as: drop sets, negatives, super sets and giant sets.

7) Do not give up…ever! You are going to be in this for the long haul. Sure you want to get big as soon as possible but remember the journey to get what you want is half the fun. So with those brutally effective building muscle tips in mind go out and get huge.

A typical dilemma for any active sportsmen who lifts weights and wants to gain muscle mass is that they know there goal to build muscle mass conflicts with the fact that they do a lot of cardio-vascular work. How can someone like this build muscle fastest whilst still doing cardio, indeed is it even possible?

Quite often it is recommended that to build muscles fastest you ought to keep aerobic training down to as little as possible. This is said because cardio workouts do two main things that work against muscle building, they are: 1) use up a lot of calories 2) increase the speed of your metabolism. Both of these two things contribute to the same problem, namely, not getting enough calories on board. The next question to naturally consider is that of how many calories should I be taking on board each day?

Well, to maintain weight each day you must eat enough calories to cover the energy expenditures of your body as if it were at rest (this is known as the basal metabolic rate), then consume enough extra calories to cover the exercise that you will do. Each day you need to eat a further 500 calories if you wish to build muscle mass.

Is there a method to work out this number?

Yes, certainly one method of doing so is by using the Katch-McArdle formula (BMR based on lean body weight). Here it is:

Men: BMR = 66 + (13.7 X wt in kg) + (5 X ht in cm) – (6.8 X age in years)

Women: BMR = 655 + (9.6 X wt in kg) + (1.8 X hght in cm) – (4.7 X age in years)

Once you have gotten this figure you should then multiply it by one of the following to allow for your daily activity levels:

Sedentary = BMR X 1.2 (little or no exercise, desk job)
Lightly active = BMR X 1.375 (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/wk)
Mod. active = BMR X 1.55 (sports 3-5 days/wk/moderate exercise)
Very active equals BMR X 1.725 (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days/wk)
Extr. active equals BMR X 1.{9 (hard daily exercise/sports & physical job or 2X day training, i}.e marathon, contest etc

So, if you are doing cardio and weights frequently then you should multiply this by at least 1.725. This will give you the figure that will cover your daily energy needs. This total then needs to changed according to your specific goals. Assuming your goal is muscle building a further 500 calories each day need to be added to this amount.

So if your final figure is 3000 calories then you would be looking at eating 6 meals per day of 500 calories each. the constituents of every meal would therefore be protein: 37 grams, carbohydrate 62 grams and 11 grams would come from fat. This is calculated as so because one gram of fat equals 9 calories as opposed to one gram of protein or carbohydrate which is worth 4 grams.

Correct muscle building nutrition and working out your calorie needs like this is what is going to ensure you build muscles fastest, not any miracle new exercise!

Stressing your muscles in different ways is one of the keys to continuous and uninterrupted growth to build muscles mass. By completing the same weight training routine again and again your muscles become very familiar with that particular type of stress and little by little the routines ability to trigger muscle growth will lessen. Fortunately there are a few easy things we can do to shake things up a bit build muscles mass and get your muscles growing again.

1) Progressive Overload. Well actually this should be done as a matter of course. You may either keep increasing the amount of weight you lift or try to do more reps. A combination of the two is fine also

2) Giant sets. This is when you do one exercise set and then follow this immediately with another exercise for the same muscle group. For example, squats followed immediately by leg extensions. You can then rest one to three minutes between sets and do it again.

3) A superset is where you do one normal set and then straight afterwards you do another set for that muscles opposing partner muscles. This can create a really good pump in that muscle group. Such as, rows after bench presses, tricep pushdowns followed by bicep curls.

4) Reps that are forced. On a regular set, rather than failing on the last rep you basically get a partner to aid you in doing the final repetition and then allow them to continue to assist you in completing a further 2 or 3 repetitions. The assistance should be minimal and just enough to allow you to do the reps.

5) Negatives. This is when you complete a regular set to failure and then with the assistance of a buddy do another rep but this time you have to lower the weight with no assistance under complete control yourself.

6) Drop sets. after completing a normal set to failure then decrease the weight and then perform more reps until failure, drop the weight again then do more reps and so on. This is a very intense technique that creates a real burn and can help build muscle mass a great deal.

This is just a start on the different varieties of exercise that can be done to build muscles mass but be warned these can leave you feeling quite sore for the next few days so always ensure that you allow sufficient rest between exercises.

there are many articles, websites, magazine columns and so on that all supply information and advice about the easiest ways to build muscle. So if there are so many different ways to build muscle then why is it so difficult for people to do so? The answer is in part within the question. With so much differing advice about, both on the net and in bookstores, web sites and magazines, how on earth is someone new to weight training supposed to make sense of it all?

Whilst some of this advice is good, much of it is irrelevant to the novice bodybuilder who just needs to get the basics down properly to start making progress. So with that in mind here are three sure fire steps to help anyone build muscle easily.

1) Train intensely. Try to include the following proven muscle building exercises in your routine: dead lifts, rows, squats, benchpresses and pull ups. These classic proven mass builders will ensure you build muscle easily. Try to veer away from exercises that promote isolation of individual muscles, these are really for muscle carving and defining and not for building mass. Remain focused in the weight room, push yourself hard for no longer than 45 minutes then leave.

2) Pay attention to muscle building nutrition. For many years experienced trainers have been quoted as saying that 80% of bodybuilding success is down to correct muscle building nutrition. This is still true today! As a general guide half of your food should come in the form of carbohydrates, protein should make up 30% and the remainder should come from fats.

The following foods are recommended, for carbohydrates: potatoes, rice, pasta, brown breads. For protein: turkey, beef, chicken and fish especially tuna and mackerel. these foods will supply all the fats that you need naturally. If you really wish to boost your progress and have the money available then try taking the following: whey protein, essential fatty, acids, creatine and a good multi-vitamin product.

3) Rest. Muscle recovers and grows whilst you are at rest so naturally you should spend sufficient time allowing your body to grow. Many novice bodybuilders do not understand just exactly how important it is that their body has a chance to recover properly after each workout. Two workouts per muscle group a week will be sufficient for most people.

Ok, I said at the start it was simple process and it is. If you just stick to those basics you too can build muscle easy. basically that is all you need to know, although you can delve much much deeper of course into all of these topic areas. Now with those things in mind, ensure correct muscle building nutrition, train hadr and intensely and give yourself time to recover!