Saturday, December 15, 2007

Muscle Building Tips - Don't Start Pumping Without Reading These!

By Hanson Habnor

One of the basic principle of muscle building is simply to eat more calories than you burn. Thus you should always strive to give more than sufficient amount of calories for your body. This amount is approximately 17 to 20 times your body weight and you should alter it accordingly based on your metabolism rate, activity level and goals.

What are the the right type of calories that you should strive to eat? They are the calories from these 3 food groups. First is the High Quality Protein, second is the High Fiber and Low Glycemic Carbohydrates and third one is the Healthy Unsaturated Fats group. Ideall, you should consume food from these categories at least 5 to 7 times a day.

Drink more water. A slightly dehydrated body will have a significant impact on your strength and performance level. Even a 3-4% decrease in your water level will lead to a 10-20% decrease in your muscle contractions. To find out how much water is enough for you, simply multiply your bodyweight by 0.6.

Get a journal or a notebook and record every detail of your workout session. Yes, this sounds tedious however this technique is crucial to your muscle-building efforts. The underlying principle behind your weight gaining success is progression. And the only way that you can monitor that is via your logbook.

Be prepared to train harder than before! Training harder in this context means that you put in your maximum effort for every set of repetitions you are working on. This also means that you have to stretch yourself until you cannot do a single more rep despite all the energy that you put in. This technique is called the concentric muscular failure.

Don't over train and waste all your muscle gaining efforts. Some of you may be inclined to start hitting the gym every single day. This can prove to be detrimental as your body may not have enough recovery period. Instead, focus on training hard every week in the gym. Push yourself to concentric muscular failure on every exercise.

Don't over-emphasize on your diet supplements. Supplements are there not to do the work for you. They are just supplements that will fill in the missing gaps in your system and slightly speed up your progress. However, the one who is building your muscle is you and that is who you need to focus on.

Application and consistency is everything. You can read dozens of muscle magazines and books but theory is not enough. You have to apply and implement the knowledge on a continual and systematic basis. Your muscle building success is a big result of the many small steps. It's a cumulative effort and persistence is the key.

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