Tag Archive for: Muscle Building And Cardio

Workout Routines

Find the Right Muscle Building Workout For You

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So you’ve decided you want to bulk up and gain some serious muscle mass but are unsure what exactly you need to be doing on a daily basis to achieve your goals. Unfortunately, finding the best workout for muscle mass is often the hardest part, and the place where most folks tend to slip up.

You see, everybody is different, and if you don’t find the right workout for you and your own situation, then you will struggle to reach your muscle building potential, and thereby make life more difficult and frustrating for yourself… and that just plain sucks, right?

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In this article I’d like to give some tips on the kind of questions you should be asking yourself when looking for the best workout for muscle mass. Use them as kind of a checklist and they’ll help you to find the right muscle building workout.

What Is Your Body Type?

This is one of the most important aspects and often overlooked by many folks searching for the best workout for muscle mass. Broadly speaking, there are 3 major body types – ectomorphs (naturally skinny, struggle to gain weight and muscle), mesomorphs (easily gain weight and muscle, naturally muscular), and endomorphs (gains weight easily, usually higher body fat levels).

The training routines for each of these body types will be notably different both in terms of exercises and nutrition. Find out what your body type and you’ll understand a lot more about what is the best workout for muscle mass.

What Level Are You At?

Are you a beginner who has never set foot in a gym, or are you a fitness fanatic that is looking to gain weight and pack on some muscle? Understanding your current fitness and muscular development level will help you find the workout and avoid pushing your body too much too quickly, or holding you back and preventing you from reaching your potential.

What Are Your Goals?

Are you a skinny guy or girl looking to add some serious slabs of muscle and gain weight, or are you somebody who is looking to gain some muscle while losing a lot of body fat in the process

Understanding what you want to achieve from your workouts is critical in finding the best workout for muscle mass, since you will need to adapt your training and nutrition requirements depending on your situation.

Does Your Muscle Mass Workout Combine Good Nutrition and Exercise Routines?

When you see a workout for muscle mass that you like, take a look to see if there is sufficient emphasis and guidance on the right approach to nutrition…if there isn’t, keep searching. Your diet and what you eat is absolutely critical if you want to see serious muscle mass gains. Any workout that doesn’t provide you with solid advice on what to eat and when to eat it, is not worth the time in my opinion.

How Flexible Is The Routine?

Does the workout allow you the ability to substitute certain exercises for others, as you may need to if working out at home or using an ill-equipped gym? Does the workout rotate training cycles which keep you changing your workout every few weeks? This is important as your body needs the constant stimulation and adaptation in order to continue building muscle.

How Often Are You Going To Be Working Out?

Does the workout allow you any off days or is it 6 days a week? In my experience, it is best to workout 3 – 4 times per week with rest days in between. This allows the optimum rest for your body to recover and develop muscle. Any more than this and you can stunt your muscular development by preventing your body’s natural recovery process. The best workout for muscle mass is one that will allow you to fit it into your current schedule and have the flexibility to move workout days around to suit.

Workout Routines

Finding The Right Workout Routines To Build Muscle

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There are 3 golden rules to building muscle. Eat right, sleep right and exercise right. And most focus in the body building world is on the exercise rule. Finding the right workout routines to build muscle consumes so much time of amateur muscle builders’.

The truth is that equal focus must be put on your diet and rest, but that discussion can be left for a different article. This article will stay true to its title and help you find the right workout routines to build muscle.

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If you’re eating right and sleeping right, almost any exercise routine should show results and help you put on considerable amounts of muscle. However, there are certain prerequisites that all work out routines must satisfy before you can put on muscle and get the maximum out of your gym time. Most important is the intensity with which you train which is affected by your rep and set number, your work out speed, your break length, and the weights you lift. For workout routines to build muscle, ensure that these following criteria are satisfied.

There are all sorts of myths out there like, high reps and low weight is for burning while high weight and low reps is for gaining, and work out longer and you will gain more muscle and so many more. One article isn’t enough for me to give you all the information you need to know about these myths and why they are nonsense, however, I will tell you how to go about doing things.

First of all make sure that the routine you’re doing isn’t overworking your muscles. Your muscles need a lot of time and energy to heal and grow, and working out for too long will drain them and cause muscle fatigue which is not what you want. So keep your work outs short and frequent with sufficient breaks in between.

To get the most out of these short gym sessions, keep your rest periods at a minimum and push beyond your limits. You can vary your rep and set range but for maximum muscle gains it has been found that a rep range of 8-12 is best.

When it comes to the weight go as heavy as you can, and try to find yourself a gym partner to help you with this. Also work out routines to build muscle come in all forms. Some maybe full body work outs while other’s are split body. Don’t focus on just one of these. Keep switching every few weeks so that your body doesn’t reach a plateau.

Keep your work outs intense, push heavy weight, take fewer breaks and switch your routines to keep your body guessing. Do all this along with the right type of diet and rest and your workout routines to build muscle will work better than they ever have before.

Muscle Building Secrets

Three Diet Tips for Serious Muscle Builders

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Serious muscle builders treat their diet in an almost scientific, equation-like manner. What is the scientifically proven, most effective way to build more muscles?

It takes a lot of discipline to follow the rigid guidelines for developing your body in the absolute fastest manner. But if you’re really serious, that’s what it’ll take to get results the fastest.

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Here are three dietary tips for serious muscle builders.

 40% Carbohydrates, 20% Fats, 40% Proteins

The 40:20:40 rule has been tested again and again to be the optimal balance of nutrients for losing fat and gaining muscle.

Keep in mind that many foods contain both fats and proteins in them without explicitly being a fatty or protein food. For example, when you’re buying your meats, make sure to read the labels and see what percentage of the meat is actually fat and what percentage is protein.

Also avoid eating carbohydrates close to bedtime.

In the beginning, you’ll likely have to record all the foods you eat in order to get a good sense for how much fat, carbs and proteins you’re taking in. After you get more experience, you’ll be able to estimate your intake with a high degree of accuracy.

Eat in 2.5 Hour Intervals

Don’t binge. Don’t eat big meals. Big meals cause your body to spike up in blood sugar levels and then crash. It also causes food build-up in the digestive system, which is detrimental to muscle growth.

To maintain a steady energy level and to facilitate the fastest growth possible, aim to eat smaller meals every two and a half hours.

That’ll come out to six small meals a day instead of three large meals. If you need snacks in between meals, go for something healthy like mixed nuts.

Cycle Your Caloric Intake

To keep your body from adapting to a certain caloric intake level, regularly cycle your caloric intake.

Consider alternating low calorie days with high calorie days. If you’re trying to gain weight and muscle mass, you can put in more high calorie days, while doing the opposite if you’re trying to drop weight.

This process doesn’t necessarily have to be rigid or planned, but you should still keep track of your calories and consciously decide the night before whether you’re going to have a high or low calorie day tomorrow. Track your high and low calorie days so you can make sure you’re getting a good balance.

These are three diet tips geared specifically towards serious muscle builders. If muscle building is just a hobby, these tips might not be for you. On the other hand, if you’re really dedicated to building the body of your dreams, these tips can help take you to the next level.

Muscle Building Secrets

Identify Your “Why” to Build Inner Motivation

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One of the most important questions you should ask yourself when you’re beginning your body-building journey is: Why? This question is so crucial, yet many people fail to ask it.

If you have a clear, concise and well-grounded answer to this question, you’ll be able to stick with your exercise routine through good times and bad. You’ll put in the time to study the theory, you’ll put in the time at the gym and you’ll have the inner motivation to put in an extra rep even when your muscles already hurt. It’ll make all the difference.

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On the other hand, if you don’t know your “why,” chances are you’ll start your workout routine, stick with it for a few days or weeks and then fall off the bandwagon when the going gets tough. After all, building a great body takes effort. You need to have the motivation to make it happen.

Identifying Your Why

Start with looking at your fitness goals. Different kinds of fitness goals tend to have different motivations.

Are you just trying to lose some weight? If so, what’s the most important thing you think you’d gain by losing that weight? Is it better health, more energy and a likely longer lifespan? Is it more social acceptance? Or more attention from the opposite sex?

If you’re skinny and want to bulk up a bit, again – ask yourself why. Why is having muscle mass better than having a skinny body? How will your life be different if you had more muscle mass?

Look at your goals and ask yourself: Why do I want my body to look this way? Often times finding your “why” is a matter of looking inward rather than outward.

Write Down Your “Why”

As the saying goes, “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” To keep your “why” alive, write it down on paper and keep it somewhere visible.

On days when you just don’t feel like getting up to go to the gym, that piece of paper can give you the push you need to get off the coach and into the gym.

Writing out your “why” also serves another function. Often times when trying to figure out your why, you’ll have a sense for it but not be able to put it into one concise sentence. Writing it out will help you form your why into a more concrete form.

To sum it up, finding your why is one of the most important aspects of being able to successfully keep up an exercise routine. If you have a strong enough reason for wanting to change your body, you can. Just make sure to keep reminding yourself of that reason, especially when times get tough.

Muscle Building Secrets

Compound Exercises: The Fundamentals of Good Muscle Building

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When it comes to muscle building, all exercises can be separated into two different camps. On one side are the compound exercises, on the other side are the isolation exercises. They each have very different functions.

As the name might suggest, compound exercises are workouts that exercise multiple muscle groups at the same time. Isolation exercises are exercises that target a specific muscle group.

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If you’re trying to build muscle, using compound exercises is a much better way to go about it. Both for building overall tone and putting on muscle, compound exercises will get you there faster.

Compound exercises work out your muscles, your tendons, your joints and your ligaments. It puts the most strain on the area of your body that’s the weakest, strengthening the overall system. It’s the “broad strokes” of building overall muscle quickly.

Is There a Time When Isolation Exercises Are Better?

Yes, there is. Isolation exercises are great for targeting and improving a specific muscle group that’s out of balance.

If your right triceps is larger than your left for example, you might want to do some isolation exercises targeting just your left triceps.

Compound exercises are the fastest way to build muscle mass in your body in general. However, compound exercises aren’t great for laser-targeting specific parts of the body to develop.

Isolation exercises also have an additional benefit of being able to put on short-term mass quickly. Professional bodybuilders will often do isolation exercises before a major competition to add an inch or so of muscle. This muscle doesn’t last, however, and will disappear if you stop working out.

To build muscles that really last, start with compound exercises, then refine your body with isolation exercises if imbalances come up.

A Few Popular Compound Exercises

What are some of the most popular and proven compound exercises in bodybuilding?

Perhaps the most popular is the bench press. The bench press works out many of the muscles in your upper body, including the many muscles in your arms and your back.

Squats are another popular compound exercise. Everything from your calves to your thighs to your buttocks is worked out by squats.

Dead-lifts are another popular compound exercise. Dead-lifts will work out your abs, your leg muscles, your back muscles, your hips and your forearms.

Of course there are many other compound exercises you can choose from depending on your fitness goals. Pick the exercises you use based on the kind of body you want to develop.

In summary, compound exercises are the main building block to a solid workout routine. While isolation exercises are definitely important for sculpting the body and perfecting muscle balance, the actual work of building muscle should be done primarily with compound exercises.