Archive for November, 2008

3 Strength Training Principles

Saturday, November 15th, 2008

by Caleb Lee

Strength training is a skill. Basically, everyone is walking around with a “V8 engine” (their musculature) but only firing on “4 cylinders” - no one is actually using their muscles to their fullest potential.

Your body actually keeps you from using all the strength of your muscles, as a safey mechanism. Your strength generally does not exceed 30% of your tendon structural strength. For instance, when people are electricuted their muscles often contract so hard that they break their bone structures.

For this reason, you can become A LOT stronger by learning how to “fire” more of your muscles and get them to tighten harder with more tension… if you just stick to these three rules for all-out strength training:

Rule #1: Focus On A Few Full Body Exercises

If you want your entire body to be on top form, just give attention to a limited full body exercises. Therefore, you should do it all as one unit. As well as you will find ideal hormone stimulation by training your whole body by way of this. Squats, Deadlifts, Overhead Press, and the Bench Press are perfect.

Rule #2: Focus on High Resistance

To build strength your lifts must be done with high resistance. This is done by lifting heavy weights (or doing bodyweight exercises with unfavorable weight distribution and poor leverage) and by maximally contracting (tensing) your muscles as you lift.

The purpose is to gain extra muscle fibers by:

1. Tightening up every muscle as firmly as possible during the course of the workout and…

2. At the same time sustaining high tension lifting the weight as rapid as possible.

Rule No. 3: Give Attention To Multiple Sets of Low Reps

Because strength is a skill you can’t practice “sloppily”. Practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. So you must practice being strong. Each rep must be done as perfectly as possible (according to the above guidelines). Keep the reps low so you can stay mentally focused. Also, this will keep you from getting fatigued and getting sloppy. Avoid muscle failure.

In other words, you should learn to lift weighty stuff as possible. While remaining invigorated as possible.

About the Author:

Bodybuilding Dieting, Tips to Do it Right

Friday, November 14th, 2008

by Ricardo d Argence

All right, so you want to get strong and go to the gym to work. You may think that pumping weights is all you have to do, but it is not that simple.

Nutrition plays a very large part of recovery and growth. Bodybuilding diets are constantly changing due to the increase of your muscle mass, if you put muscle on you have to eat more, if you lose muscle you need to eat less. So how do you keep an eye on what is happening inside the body?

Watching your weight daily is important if you are trying to increase your mass. If your weight is going down or staying the same, you may need to consider eating more. If you find yourself gaining a lot of weight you need to take a closer look at what you’re eating. Be careful, while you can expect to gain fat while attempting to gain muscle, you should keep an eye on it to ensure you don’t gain too much fat.

Fat calipers are another great way to determine if you are building muscle or fat. When you use calipers every two weeks, you can see what precisely is going on, for example if you see your muscle going down from not eating, the calipers will reveal that you should eat more. Eat less if the calipers show that your body fat percentage is increasing.

Every good gym will have a set of calipers and assuming it is the same person doing the measurments each time you will get a honest reading as for what is going on. After you have figured out the amount of millimeters and your bodyweights, it is then that the chart which comes with calipers will determine what bodyfat percentage you are.

In order to figure out what the amount of your body fat you have, you need to take your body weight, in pounds, multiply it by your body fat percentage. This formula will tell you what your total body fat is. Subtracting this amount from total weight will estimate your free fat mass. This total includes not just muscle but all structure in the body, but it is a good estimate for our purposes.

After these two figures have been worked out, you should keep notes of your total body fat and free mass. You can then compare these measurements in the future to check if your body fat percentage has increased. You’ll discover that with proper food consumption and balanced exercise and nutrition, the amount of mass without fat increases while bodyfat total decreases. If you don’t eat enough, your muscles and fat free mass will decrease, but your body fat will increase.

About the Author:

Building Muscle Tips -Squats, Dips, Bench, Military Press, Raises

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

by Dave Vower

Building Muscle Tips - A Wide Range Of Movement Is Better

So what sort of exercises should we do anyway? You wanna learn to run fast? You gonna do some bench and call it a day? Nope I didn’t think so. Hey, bench is a great exercises, but it’s not the right one for this goal. We’re here to find out what’s the best way to get your muscles big, and fast!

Let’s think about it. What should we do if the goal is to gain muscle and put on some solid weight? The best exercises are called comprehensive exercises. Why waste time doing lots of small ones when we can get better results with one big exercise right?

So we’ve got about an hour to workout. (probably closer to 45 minutes) This includes, warm up, lifting exercises, and warm down before our body starts burning muscle for energy. We certainly DON’T want our body burning muscle fibers for energy. So keep it under an hour, keep it intense and get as much done as possible. So What exercises do I do?

The Best Exercise List

Here it is These are the exercises you’ll need to do in order to work out the most muscles in the least time. Do these exercises often and you’ll pack on large amounts of solid muscle in very little time.

# Standing Free weight Squats

# Flat Bench Press

# Stiff Leg Deadlifts

# Behind The Neck Barbell Press

# Bent Rows

# Chin-Ups (if you can’t do chins, do Lat Pull Downs)

# Dips (if you can’t do dips do Decline Dumbell Bench Press with your hands facing each other)

Don’t even worry too much about the last 2 exercises because the other exercises are so comprehensive that you’ve already done a full body workout! Do them only if you have trouble doing some of the other exercises, or your feeling especially energetic.

Do at least 3 workouts each week, and make sure you do squats during every workout. They’re the foundation of your body and they’re the largest muscles too. Working them out hard will stimulate your body to produce testosterone more efficiently.

On that note: WORK HARD! These exercises work, if you work them. Don’t change them, do them as described and you’ll get results. Work out hard and keep at it. In a few weeks you’ll notice the results. That’s when you know you’re about to get REALLY BIG MUSCLES! Do about 5-7 heavy reps, and do no more than 3 sets each. Lift as much weight as you can and get someone to spot for you. You’re the one who must do the work.

The biggest secret nobody talks about in the bodybuilding community is that you must work out your body with HARD WORK RESISTANCE TRAINING if you want the best results. No wonder all those guys grunt and groan when they’re working out! That’s why it’s called a “work” out.

About the Author:

How to Increase Muscle Mass, Basic Techniques

Monday, November 10th, 2008

by Ricardo d Argence

You will have better luck building your muscles if you begin as young as possible. Until you can grasp the meanings of water, food and supplements in your daily consumption, it is better to keep your bodybuilding lifestyle minimal. The best thing to do is to begin your workout as early in the morning as possible in order to jump start your metabolism while building muscle and burning fat during the entire day which will produce even more muscle mass.

Commit to ignoring marketing ploys and comparing the appearance of other bodybuiders to yours when focusing on your own endeavors. It is imperative that you understand how or why you are doing what you do to build muscle mass.

On the other hand, changing your routine too often will not cause the right stimualtion of muscles. The body takes time to adapt to change. This means that if you wish to change or grow you muscles, you will need to do something over and over. Building and keeping muscle requires plenty of time, patience and regular repetition of workouts. Muscle growth tends to stall and plateau with the same workout, so you have to alter your routine slightly if you want to see continued growth.

Look for a weight-training regimine that makes you workout good and be loyal to it. When you notice it is becoming non-effective change it. Shift to another routine after gaining from first.

To achieve you’re goals you’ll only have to rely on the basics. With the countless number of workout programs, supplements, pills, training methods and theories out there it would be prudent to be skeptical of these claims. Keep yourself focused and motivated by using healthy and straightforward values. Are supplements really necessary? Absolutely-that is, if you want all the essential nutrients and vitamins your body requires. If you are a bodybuilder you need to consume protein, creatine and various multivitamins. They aid in recovering from your intense daily workouts.

It is important to learn how to exercise, which means learning the benefit of compound movements, which will help muscle grow fast. Isolate your movements, it will help with the response of hormones, endurance, and quick muscle building quicker than heavy lifting. Meaning sensibly heavy enough for you to achieve results. As you continue to work out, you will be able to slowly increase the weight you use.

Attending to your body by keeping close tabs on your diet will help you to attain top results. Make sure you do not diet incorrectly to hinder the long term growth of your muscles. People can actually lose some of their muscle mass through not following a good diet plan. For every pound of total body weight you lose, you lose 60% muscle and 40% fat. Do not starve your body of what it needs. Keep in mind that you should alternate the days you perform cardiovascular workouts in your training routine, and that these workouts will burn calories.

Don’t forget that you need rest and time to recover from exercise-related inflammation and promote muscle building for the long run.

About the Author: