Nancy Rishworth asked:


Copyright (c) 2009 Nancy Rishworth

Are you interested in increasing your overall strength? Whether you just want to feel stronger and healthier or if you have a specific goal or an athlete, increasing strength is always a good idea.

You’ve probably heard the various recommendations for increasing strength and you may have even looked into strength training routines. The problem is, for many it may conjure up images of bulging muscles and weight lifters. But resistance training routines are much more than the weight lifting you see at the Olympics.

A good resistance training routine will help you become stronger and leaner but also increase your flexibility and your agility. If you enjoy playing sports, such as golf or tennis, resistance training can help you become a stronger athlete. .

Resistance training routines don’t necessarily mean big, bulging muscles. A good training program will allow you to gradually increase resistance while toning muscles. When you combine resistance training with a stretching routine, you not only tone the muscle, but you also stretch the muscle and tendons. The stretching process makes the muscles longer and leaner.

You can easily build strength by working with lighter weights than a traditional weight lifting routine. Lifting large weights for low repetitions will increase the likelihood of muscle tears and will over time build greater bulk. While working with smaller amounts of weight still builds muscle and strength, just not the bulk that classical weight lifting results in.

Typically, resistance training routines result in muscle growth, but it usually takes at least six weeks before that muscle growth is obvious (but don’t give up, the work is worth it and once you start building muscle mass you’ll be glad you stuck with it). Of course, if you have practiced resistance training exercises in the recent past, you may find that your muscles rebound faster than a beginner.

This type of training allows you to become stronger and have greater stamina. If you play golf, resistance training routines can help you develop a more powerful swing, or a great backstroke for a tennis player. Many professional athletes incorporate strength training routines into their sports training just for the purpose of becoming stronger in their chosen sport.

Strength training routines result in lean, strong muscles. When combined with a routine of stretching, you’ll have amazing strength and flexibility. Imagine the difference it will make for your appearance – , your lifestyle and your favorite sport.

With just a few simple muscle stretching activities, you can rebuild your muscles and take them to a new level of functionality. You’ll feel better, have less tension, and be able to perform your favorite activities with more strength and energy.



Muscle Gain

Shawn Lebrun asked:


Correct muscle building nutrition and a quality muscle building diet are often the most neglected parts of a weight training program.

Building muscle requires the right nutrition. Make no mistake, it’s an essential part of weight lifting and if you want to build muscle, you have to get it done. Bottom line — if you want to build muscle, you need to consume quality calories.

How many calories?

You need to consume more total calories in your muscle building diet than your body uses each day. It’s important to understand that the human body is constantly working, using and storing energy day and night.

It’s also very important to understand that in order to keep the machine rolling, you need to know what and how much to feed it. This is the single most important element in the muscle building process.

You need to feed your body a correct balance of calories, protein, carbohydrates and fat. Complete muscle building nutrition is the key. If you can find this key, your muscle building efforts will sky rocket.

Complete muscle building nutrition leads to optimal nutrition and optimal results. Over supplementation of certain nutrients will lead to imbalances in overall nutrition and is damaging to your weight lifting diet and health.

It is very important that you understand the importance of nutrition when building muscle. Without good nutrition and diet, your muscle gains will be non-existent and at best, poor.

As a muscle builder, it’s important that you get your muscle building nutrition down to a science. Your success is dependent on a well-balanced and complete diet that includes your optimal nutritional intake.

Poor dietary habits will hinder your progress and may eventually lead to injury to muscles and bones because they are not supplied with the nutrients needed to support the added stress of weight lifting.

What builds muscle?

Protein builds muscle. Without an adequate supply of protein, your body will not support any kind of muscle growth. If you supply your body with the optimum amount of protein, you ensure optimal growth; it’s as simple as that.

After all, you want to build muscle and to do that, you need a steady supply of high quality protein. You must include an optimal amount of protein in your muscle building diet in order to build and sustain muscle growth.

So how much protein should you include in your muscle building nutrition for maximum performance and muscle gain? Each of us has very different body types and the amount of protein will differ from individual to individual.

Protein intake will also depend on the amount of activity involved and how frequently you do it.

Your muscle building diet should be comprised of 30% to 40% protein, or about 1 to 1.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight. You will have to do a bit of experimenting at the beginning to find out your optimal protein intake.

What fuels muscle?

If you want to build muscle, you’re going to have to take in a lot of quality, complex carbohydrates. No question about it. You are going to have to fuel your body to handle heavy weight lifting.

You must include an optimal amount of carbohydrates in your muscle building nutrition program in order to fuel heavy weight lifting sessions.

Carbohydrates are a very important source of fuel for the muscles as well as the leading source of energy for your body. When you have a hard workout, your body draws on carbohydrates, which is stored as glycogen in the muscles.

Glycogen is the product of glucose, which comes from the breakdown of carbohydrates after the digestion of food. Glycogen is stored in the liver and muscle.

During a long intense muscle building session, you can easily deplete your glycogen reserves. When your muscles cannot get enough glycogen, fatigue sets in and your body begins to lose endurance and performance drastically reduces.

However, there is a way to delay the onset of muscle fatigue. By taking enough carbohydrates each day in your muscle building diet, you are ensuring that the amount of glycogen stored in the muscles is being constantly replenished.

Every meal must have sufficient carbohydrates to sustain your hard intense workouts It is suggested that your muscle building diet consist of 40% carbohydrates. If you want to build muscle, you need quality carbs every meal.

If you don’t consume enough quality carbohydrates, your body will resort to other fuel sources such as protein.

Protein is a second rate energy source. Protein’s primary job is to build muscle, not fuel it. Therefore, keep your body filled with grade A fuel to support and maximize your hard, intense muscle building workouts.

If you use the tips written above in making your own personal muscle building nutrition, you’ll be a lot healthier and you’ll succeed in having the rock-hard body you’ve always wanted.

But this can happen only by having good muscle building nutrition.



Muscle Growth

The bodybuilding debates will never end. The endless arguments over how an effective muscle-building program should be structured will most likely continue until the end of time. Just scour the Internet message boards, flip through any muscle magazine or talk to the sales rep at your local supplement store. No matter who you talk to or what you read, it seems that everyone is an expert these days.

If everyone is an expert, confident in their own ideas and beliefs, how can the average beginner possibly know who to listen to? He or she is instantly confronted with endless questions that seem to have no clear-cut answer.

How many days should I train per week? How many sets should I perform for each muscle group? What type of rep range should I be using? What are the most effective exercises for stimulating muscle growth? How long should my workouts last?

These questions go on and on until he or she is eventually led to believe that building muscle is an infinitely complex process involving rocket-science precision and an intimate understanding of human physiology. I mean, that’s what takes to build muscle, right? Wrong! Believe me, there are answers to these important questions, and if you are willing to put in the time and effort you will most definitely find them. But that’s not what this article is about.

You see, amidst all of the confusion and endless debating, the majority of lifters end up losing sight of the big picture. Beyond all of the specific workout principles, such as rep range and exercise selection, remains one crucial principle, a principle that lies at the very heart of the muscle growth process. If this principle is not given full attention, or even worse, completely ignored, building muscle becomes next to impossible.

The bottom line is that muscles grow as they adapt to stress. When you go to the gym and lift weights, you create “micro-tears” within the muscle tissue. Your body perceives this as a potential threat to its survival and reacts accordingly by increasing the size and strength of the muscle fibers in order to protect against a possible future “attack”. Therefore, in order to continually increase the size and strength of the muscles, you must focus on progressing each week by either lifting slightly more weight or performing an extra rep or two. In doing this, your body will continue to adapt and grow to the ever-increasing stress.

Building muscle is all about building strength!

So what is the most powerful muscle-building tool available? Quite simply, it is a pen and a piece of paper!

Every time you go to the gym you must write down exactly what you accomplished and then strive to improve upon it the following week. If you aren’t always getting better, then you’re either staying the same or getting worse. Every week you should have an exact plan of attack ready to be executed. You absolutely cannot afford to start throwing weights around aimlessly without a clear-cut goal in mind.

The specifics of building muscle are important to understand and implement, but regardless of what style of training you’re currently using the ultimate deciding factor between success and failure is progression. You can sit around all day obsessing over specific principles, but the bottom line is that if you aren’t getting stronger every week, you absolutely will not be getting any bigger. Examine your training approach closely. If you haven’t been paying laser-like attention to the amount of weight you’ve been using, the number of reps you’ve been performing, and then striving with every ounce of your energy to improve upon those numbers each week, you are completely ignoring the very foundation of the muscle growth process. If you want to see the best gains in muscle mass and strength that you possibly can, a pen and a piece of paper is the most important tool you could possibly have in your arsenal.

Muscle Building