Tag Archive for: muscle building

Muscle Building Secrets

Four Common Muscle-Building Myths

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Bodybuilding is a field that’s often flooded with a lot of conflicting advice. While conflicting advice can sometimes have two right answers, very often the advice that’s given is just plain wrong.

In this article, we’ll expose four of the most common muscle-building myths.

Myth #1 – Eat More If You Want to Build Muscle

 

One common myth is that if you’re skinny and want to gain muscle, you need to consume a lot of calories. Unfortunately, this is more likely to get you fat than get you built.

Yes, if you want to gain muscle mass you do need to eat a few more calories than you’re burning. But you don’t need to consume 2,000 more calories than you’ve been eating in the past.

Eat more food, but don’t stuff your body with calories. It’s not healthy and won’t help get you where you want to go.

Myth #2 – You Should Tense Your Abs When Lifting Weights

Another common myth is that tensing up your abs when you’re lifting weights will help give your spine more support, thereby reducing the likelihood of injury.

This myth stemmed from a research study that was conducted, showing that people who had back pain tended to have lax abdominal muscles. They concluded that by tensing up the ab muscles, back support was increased which reduced back pain.

This story spread among the bodybuilding community and has come to be accepted as fact today. Unfortunately, it’s just plain wrong.

In reality, your body naturally knows what to do when it’s lifting heavy objects. Yes, you do need to tense up your abs – but your body does that automatically already. If you tense up your abs even more manually, you can throw off the whole system and actually increase your chances of injury.

Myth #3 – The Trick Is to Eat a Lot of Protein

Yes, eating a lot of protein is crucial. However, just increasing the amount of protein you eat isn’t going to cut it.

In order to really make a difference in your muscles, you need to have the right kinds of proteins. You also need to have the right combination of proteins; and you need to eat other foods that support that protein intake.

Yes, increasing proteins is important – but it’s not the magic pill.

Myth #4 – The Path to Losing Fat is Not Eating Fat

Finally, a lot of people who decide to start building muscles decide that they need to cut all fats out of their diet. Unfortunately, this is actually harmful rather than helpful.

Your body needs fats in order to operate properly. Yes, you should definitely get rid of trans fats and oily foods, but it’s important to keep consuming healthy fats so your body has the resources it needs to work properly.

You can actually lose more fat by eating enough of the right kinds of fat than if you tried to cut out all fats from your diet.

These are four of the most common myths in bodybuilding today.

Muscle Building Secrets

What It Takes to Develop Six Pack Abs

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Six pack abs is one of the most common goals of people who get into body building. Yet it can seem very elusive for most people, as they can work out for weeks and months without seeming to make any progress.

That’s because most people go about building six pack abs wrongly. It’s not just about doing a lot of push-ups and sit-ups. Yes, ab exercises are important, but on their own they’re not going to get you there.

abs

Here’s how to actually get six pack abs.

Selective Working Out Doesn’t Work

Trying to just work out one area of your body to develop that part’s muscles doesn’t work. In other words, exclusively doing abdominal exercises won’t get you six packs.

Why? Because your abs have fat covering them. Even if under all the fat you have ripped abs, people won’t be able to see them. Unfortunately, when you’re just doing push-ups and sit-ups that’s what you’re doing: toning your muscle under the fat, without eliminating the fat.

The first step to actually getting six pack abs is to reduce the amount of fat in your abs. Unfortunately, you can’t selectively lose fat. You have to lose fat throughout your entire body for this to work.

Removing the Fat

Fat burning essentially comes down to doing cardio exercise regularly. Try to exercise at between 70% to 80% of your maximum heart rate for 30 minutes or more three or four times a week.

If you do this, in about a month you’ll start to notice your body overall becoming more toned. If you measure your body fat percentage, you’ll find the amount of fat in your body lowering and the amount of muscle increasing.

As this happens, your abs will naturally become more and more visible.

Diet

Of course, in order to burn that fat you’ll also need to make changes to your diet. You can’t just burn fat and then take the fat back into your body.

Eliminate all extraneous fats from your diet. A bit of fat from protein foods or other “healthy fats” is okay, but stay away from anything that’s unnaturally fat.

That means no deep fried foods, no fast foods, no meals that are frozen or microwavable. Read the calorie contents and ingredients of packaged foods before you buy.

Building Stronger Abs

The last and final step is to do the exercises that strengthen your abs. You can start the phase at the same time as when you start cardio and start changing your diet, but you’ll only see the results from the ab workouts once you do the rest of the steps discussed in this article.

There you have it. To build abs, you need to burn off the fat throughout your entire body so there’s minimal fat covering your abs. Then you need to change your diet to keep that fat off. Finally, use abdominal exercises to tone up your ab area.