Monday, March 10, 2008

Never Hit A Plateau Again - 3 Phases Every Workout Must Have

Most beginners get great gains from any weight training workout, but soon after the initial gains everyone eventually hits a plateau. Experienced lifters know this and try just about everything to avoid plateaus.

Before we get to the 3 phases I am assuming you are consistent with your workouts and don't skip days, cut your sets short, or avoid doing real work. If that is the case, it won't matter at all how good of a program you are following, because you aren't in fact following it. A good program is designed to be followed exactly as it is written, right down to finishing every set and rep in the exact amount of time it says. Resting for 80 seconds when it says 60 won't do, and doing 11 reps when it says 13 isn't going to cut it either. The workout you are following will only work as well as your ability to follow it to a tee! Ok now that we got that out of the way lets get to the 3 key phases that help you avoid plateaus in both muscle gain and strength gains.

1) Maximum Strength Phase - this is a phase where you are handling the heaviest weights you can, around 80-90% of your max, in the 3-7 rep range. Take longer rest periods of about 2-3 minutes between sets. This phase will force your muscles and tendons and nevrous system to adpat to pushing maximum weight at the limit of your capacity. Every single rep should feel like a maximal effort. There is usually no burning feeling for this type of workout, just an overall muscular exhaustion.

2) Muscle Hypertrophy Phase - During this phase you are handling weight around 65-80% of your maximum and doing between 8-13 reps. Rest periods are around 1-2 minutes. These workouts usually drive alot of blood into your muscles giving you really big muscle pumps, it also stimulates expansion and growth of the muscle fibers. The sets should flow from one rep to the next building up a burn feeling towards the end and a flushing the muscles with blood.

3) Strength Endurance Phase ! - This is a muscle conditioning phase handling weights around ! 50-70% o f our max, doing between 12-20 reps. Rest periods are very short between 45-90 seconds. This phase builds strength endurance, which means teaching your muscles to handle moderately heavy weights for long periods of time (This is differnet than cardio endurance that can lasts for hours). This phase is necessary to build up your muscles ability to deal with prolonged stress, low blood ph (that intense burn you feel), and overall muscle fatigue.

Each of these phases contributes to the effectiveness of the other. Stay on each for about 4 weeks (as your body adapts to your training very quickly) and continue to cycle through each one. I build these phases into all of the workouts I design as they are the essential building block to an effective muscle building program.

John Barban is a accomplished professional strength and conditioning coach and the author of a radical new workout program designed to build the ideal! male physique. His program is called the Adonis Effect.

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Weight Loss Blog

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Stop Being So Positive

Although it sounds like quite a different stance from what a lifecoach would take, it is not intended toward your attitude but toward your high intensity bodybuilding workouts. It is a well known fact that in order to stimulate muscle growth, there must be an intense contraction and in most cases, a full range of motion. It is also well known that the muscle as it relates to exercise has three levels, the positive portion or lifting the weight, the contraction portion or holding the weight and the negative portion or lowering the weight. The portions we are going to talk about here are the contraction/holding portion and the negative/lowering portion.

It is all about adaptation. As you adapt to certain levels of training stress, by growing stronger and larger muscles, increased intensity is required to further stimulate that same adaptive process. The problem is that there are other factors involved like friction and blood flow. A muscular contraction can become so ! intense, that the blood flow to the muscle can decrease, however, if the contraction is short enough and the rest is long enough, you have eliminated the problem. Unfortunately you can not control the duration of the contraction and still generate the desired intensity but you can control the amount of rest.

I find this cardio pulmonary issue mainly with athletes that are advanced and already strong and heavily muscled. It is obvious because of the greater mass and the ability to work at maximum intensity, these athletes use up a lot more reserve or fuel and oxygen and thus create a great deal more waste product than those athletes that are not as advanced, massive and strong. Even in a conventional set carried to complete muscular failure, every rep to the point of the last intense rep, still complicates this problem.

The solution is no movement! If we could bypass the gym and stimulate muscle growth with no sets, then 100% could go into the adaptation stage wi! th nothing wasted on the workout, but we haven't quite found t! hat solu tion yet, but we have come close.

Back in the early 90's, a former Olympian bodybuilding champion named Mike Mentzer, was doing some work with the solution I am about to discuss. At the time, I was building a small personal training practice and Mike helped me with ideas in putting it together along with my own understanding of anaerobic exercise. Mike was the thinking man's bodybuilder and my mentor, teacher and soon became my friend. He revolutionized bodybuilding by dispelling the much believed concept that bodybuilders had to spend hours in the gym. Mike saw that bodybuilders were applying a social economic principal to bodybuilding science. It's called context switching and it is a grave mistake. The economic principal they were applying is the "More is better" principal... but its application does not apply to anaerobic exercise and bodybuilding.

The solution is an intense contraction followed by a slow negative, completely bypassing the positive portion of! the exercise...with a limited number of reps and enough time between each rep to allow a somewhat normal blood flow to the muscle. Who said anyway that a set has to have 5, 6, 10 or 12 reps? The body only understands, stress, reaction, solution... again, if we could bypass the gym and stimulate muscle growth without any exercise, the body's limited resources for recovery would not be tapped, and 100% could be put into muscle growth. Remember, your body recovers systemically, thus it first compensates for the exhaustive effects of the workout, then, whatever is left over, goes into the overcompensation phase, laying down muscle. To add a twist, your body has the ability to increase in strength by almost 300% while at the same time, your ability to recover increases maybe 50%, so you can see where I am headed. And to add the topping to the cake, in doing a conventional set, each rep is almost a waste because it is nothing more than a warm up rep to the final and last almost ! impossible set that turns on the growth mechanism. In that con! ventiona l set, the last rep and the contraction time of that last rep is only a second or two. We want a more intense contraction and a full range of motion and this accomplishes both.

Because of the nature of what is required for an intense contraction, exercises that allow for resistance in the top or contracted position must be employed. These exercises in most cases must be done on a machine. I prefer Nautilus and Hammer Strength for their design but other can work. Examples of these exercises are flies, pecdeck and crossovers; laterals raises... side and rear; lat pulldown performed close grip hands facing you, rows and shrugs; machine curl and machine triceps extension; leg extensions, leg curls and calve raises and the like. As I said, if you do not have these machines in your gym, you can make others work. Cables are also an option.

In using this technique you will only require three or less reps. Rep one of the set will be much heavier than what you would use as! an all out single rep, thus the contraction is more intense. You will need someone as a training partner to help you move into the contracted position, bypassing the lifting portion of the movement. Use a weight that is 20 to 30% greater than your normal rep. This is a good place to start but you will have to be the judge ultimately. Your goal is to hold this weight for 7-10 seconds (upper body) in the top or contracted portion of the exercise. Do not stop however, if you could hold it longer, continue to the point to where you feel that if you held it any longer, you would not be able to control the negative or lowering portion of the movement, it is usually just before you feel you are going to loose it. For lower body I recommend 20-30 seconds. The negative portion of this movement should be super slow all the way to the totally extended position. Take a 10 second rest and reduce the weight by about 20% and perform another rep in the similar fashion. In most cases this ! may be your last set and it is my experience that my clients a! re not a ble to reach the recommended threshold on the second set, no problem. Hold it as long as possible and follow by a slow negative. If your negative is still strong on this rep, continue with a third rep, reducing the weight another 10-20%, after resting another 10 seconds. This third rep may turn out to be a pure negative as in many cases you will not be able to hold in the contracted position. Do not go any further than this third rep.

This works very well with all the exercises exampled above. One of my clients using this technique was scheduled for a chest workout. He found that after just one set of machine flies performed in this fashion, that he was not capable of proceeding to his next set of smith machine bench press. Just one set done in this fashion was enough to completely leave his pectorals spent. Since this particular client was training shoulders and triceps in the same workout, I suggested that he follow the exercise with just one set of Nautilus shoulder! press and then triceps push downs, performed to failure in regular fashion. This is but a 3 set workout allowing intense stimulation without delving deep into his limited recovery ability. The next step would be to drop the triceps push downs as the press will thoroughly stimulate an already strong and muscular triceps muscle, bringing the total workout down to two sets.

I have found these abbreviated intense workouts to be super productive in my clients. They are in the gym minutes a week and they progress each and every workout... reaching their genetic potential in the shortest time possible. My best test results were with a client who trained once a week, with a three set workout lasting 15 minutes. Within 17 weeks gained 40 pounds of pure muscle. Amazing! If you do this right you will progress each and every workout but you must manage the volume and the frequency. As you get stronger and bigger, you must continue to adjust downward.

Remember, as a bodybui! lder, your job is to get into the gym, stimulate muscle growth! in the most efficient way, turn on the body's growth mechanism and get out allowing it happen. It could take, depending on your level, from 4 days to two weeks for this recovery process to happen. It is not how long you train or how often, but how hard and if that process is short circuited by another workout, you get zip! So, stop being so positive and blast your progress into the stars!

Bill Sahli is a 36 year veteran X Competitive Bodybuilder, HIT Trainer, Author and Life Coach.

Bill is author of two High Intensity Training Books: "R U Serious ®?- The Foudation" and

"High Intensity Powerbuilding - The Next Step".

His Audio Teleseminar - "High Intensity Mindset" along with his books can be found at " http://www.ruserious.info

He is available for personal coach on a limited basis. Bill has trained bodybuilders, athletes, professions, the handicapped & both men and women. His amazing techniques save! hours in the gym, with most clients training 15-30 minutes within a week, allowing them to reach their goals in record time. You can reach Bill online at http://www.ruserious.info

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Fast Weight Loss

Friday, March 7, 2008

Get Big And Ripped With Backward Progress

So you wanna bulk up and gain weight?

But you do not want to get fat, right?

Well, that could be a problem.

You see, traditional bulking programs will add weight but much of it will be fat.

Often times, guys who are desperate to gain weight will get addicted to watching the scale climb and they don't even realize they're gaining too much fat.

Until one day, they look in the mirror and realize "I'm fat!"

But don't worry. Because today I'm going to reveal a secret strategy that you can use to build lean muscle without gaining blubber.

And it works by making what I call, "backward progress."

Here's what this is all about:

Advanced power lifters know all about "backwards progress."

When striving for a new personal record, they structure their training so that they build up to super heavy weights and then come back down.

It might seem like they should lift super heavy weights all the time. But they can actually ! make faster progress by making "two steps forward, one step back."

The Myth Of Bulking

Many wanna-be gurus will tell you to simply accept fat gain as part of the process and to spend a couple of years building up your weight and strength.

But now, there is a better way.

Listen, instead of continuously bulking for six months straight, why not take a more intelligent approach?

Bulk for 12 weeks. Try to eat clean, healthy foods but realize that you must consume more calories than you burn off in order to gain weight. Therefore, some fat gain in inevitable.

After 12 weeks, take 2-4 weeks to strip off some fat. (Two weeks if your bulk was fairly "clean", four weeks if you ate too much junk food).

Then, go back in to weight gain mode for the next 12 weeks.

"Backward Progress" Leads To

Lean, Hard Muscle

This approach of taking two steps forward and one step back will ultimately lead to more lean, hard muscle and less fat ! gain.

Here are two scientific reasons why this works so ! well:

First of all, every knows that most effective part of a fat loss program is the first 2-4 weeks. During the first 2-4 weeks of a fat loss program, the weight seems to fall off in chunks.

This is because your metabolism is still running red-hot. After the first 4 weeks, everything starts to slow down.

But, since you are only going to be on this fat loss program for 2-4 weeks, you'll never experience the metabolic shutdown that most dieters have to slog through.

Leanness = More Muscle Gained

Best of all, when you switch gears and go back to your muscle-building strategy, more of the weight that you do gain will be muscle and less of it will be fat.

Here's proof:

A study from the New York Academy of Sciences shows that your starting leanness will determine what percentage of your weight gain will be lean muscle and what percentage will be body fat.

Translation: If you are already a little chunky and you decided to go on a bulking di! et, approximately 70% of your weight gained will be fat and only 30% will be muscle.

But if you're already lean and you decide to go on a bulking diet, the percentages flip. 70% of weight gained will be muscle and 30% will be fat.

So by taking a couple weeks to drop some fat, you can actually build more lean muscle during your next weight gain period.

So if you have been struggling to gain LEAN muscle, give this "backwards progress" strategy a shot.

Matt Marshall is not a personal trainer or a professional bodybuilder. He's just a former skinny guy who figured out how average guys (with average genetics) can build muscle and develop outstanding physiques. You can check out his blog at http://www.AverageWhiteDude.com

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All About Weight Loss

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Body Building - Advise and Tricks

Starting out with body building is not easy. There is a lot of information and it might be hard to separate valuable from invaluable information. However, you should really use advice from people who know what they are talking about. By that I mean professionals who have proven that body building is not just a sport but also an art. To find these experts one needs to use common sense when choosing one. Choosing even more than one expert can be also a good idea. Please be aware that some information might be contradicting and you end up being confused. Nevertheless, especially if you start out with body building you need to have the right information and knowledge, for you not to get injured and potentially putting yourself in danger.

For example, there are many people that would like to develop their deltoid muscles because they are one of the most prominent muscle groups on the body. The deltoid muscles are in your shoulder area and can make you look proportionally! fit and trim. Doing lateral raises can work your deltoids to new heights, but do these raises leaning slightly forward. It's normal to want to try and lean a bit backward, but if you do this, you won't be working this muscle group fully. This example illustrates the importance of having the right advise and information before you start. As I mentioned before you can injure yourself and it is vital that you avoid this at any cost.

Be aware of the controversial issue involving supplements. It is true that if you want to start body building and grow muscles that sources of protein are vital. Keep in mind however, that not all supplements are equally good. Supplements provide your body with the right energy and help your muscles to grow effectively strong and big. It will also provide you with the right energy to endure during your workout.

Also, it's might be good idea to work with a training partner during your body building workout. This partner can provide moti! vation as well as tips and advice to help you maximize your tr! aining a nd concentrate on your goals. They can also push you beyond what you feel your limits are and make you work harder than you could on your own.

By the way, nutrition is very important to a body builder. Probably the best body building tip I can offer you right now is to stay very hydrated in the first place. Water is a good hydration source and you should avoid drinks that contain too many sugars. Eating well and having a balanced diet is also vitally important to body building. Instead of three big meals a day, eat 5 or 6 smaller ones that are well-balanced and filled with proteins and carbohydrates. The carbohydrates will provide you with energy and the protein will contribute to more energy in your body building workout.

To summarize, please keep an open mind and learn as much as you can about this sport. There are a lot of good sources of information, especially on the internet if you are serious about body building. However, using your common sense and compar! ing different experts might be a good choice before you decide to use their advice. There are a lot of free sources and information on the internet but if you are serious about body building make sure you get an established mentor or advisor.

To Learn More about Building Muscles visit Handsome Guy's - Body Building Site and Learn How to Build Muscle. You will get Plenty of Free Information about Body Building - Read Reviews about eBooks and Articles at: http://www.BestMuscleBooks.com

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All About Weight Loss

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Eat Your Way to Sexy Abs

We are on the brink of spring time and everybody is trying to shape up by eliminating that nasty belly fat. The harsh reality is that all the sit up and crunches in the world can not give you a sexy six pack if there is a layer of fat cover it up. The proper workout needs the correct diet to go along with it. Just like a car with a bad engine, you will be headed nowhere fast. Do not dump your working just because you have not seen the results that you would like to see. Patience is a virtue. Good things come to those who wait.

Throughout my experience, the most difficult part of this process is tightening up my abs because there is no sole solution to this problem. If you really want great abs, current studies indicate that what you eat is just as vital as how much you work it off. Below are some foods that you should add to your diet to decrease your belly fat:

Eat fruits and vegetables - It is understood that fruits and vegetables work wonders for you but th! e orange ones are great for building solid abs. They are loaded in anti-oxidants, also they are full of fiber which helps take away unnecessary hunger since you are a lot fuller. Vitamin C and beta-carotene have historically been known to help reduce ab fat. Carrots, cantaloupe, squash and peaches all contain beta-carotene. While obtaining Vitamin C in the likes of oranges, berries and kiwi, there are other sources you can get these benefits as well although they may not contain as much as the actual fruit itself.

Eat more protein - The obvious route for building ab muscles is to increase the amount of protein that you intake. Protein increases metabolism and energy this enables you to burn more fat and as a result this leads to weight loss. The weight loss is most noticeable in the ab region in particular. Eating lean cuts of poultry or fish will also help a great deal. Nuts, low-fat yogurt, fat-free mil are sources of protein as well. It is a must that you pay atten! tion to the calorie count.

Try to drink a glass of wine ! everyday - Wine can be very beneficial to this process as well. Wine is rich in anti-oxidants and often provide numerous health benefits on top of weight loss. Please do not use drinking win as an excuse to fight weight loss, that is not the right frame of mind to have when taking this step. Some health professionals suggest drinking win protects against female midsection weight gain and recommend one glass of win a few days a week to see results.

Add the mineral selenium to your diet - Selenium is one of the best minerals that you can put into your body. It helps fight cancer as well as lowering the rates of abdominal obesity in may people. Although you can find selenium in plenty of tasty foods, it is suggested that you take it in supplement form in order to meet your daily requirements.

With this in mind, I am suggesting the purchase of Truth About Six Pack Abs. I have completed an extensive research of the author. He is a credible source. The product is great. It pro! motes losing weight naturally. This is no doubt the most comprehensive weight loss book I have ever read. This book is for everybody who wants six pack abs or needs to lose weight and flatten their stomach.

To learn more about The Truth About Six Pack Abs System and to find out how YOU can start burning the fat and getting your dream's abs, visit our website The Truth About Six Pack Abs: http://www.truthsixpackabsreview.com

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About Weight Loss Diets

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

6 Pack Abs - It's Not All About The Looks

It seems that every single one of us are all in the same boat after all. We're all after those perfect 6 pack abs, that irresistible mid section of a Greek God. Let's face it, it's human nature to want to look good and attract the opposite sex, and in some cases look good for the same sex too.

It is completely natural for us to possess these instinctual drives and it is in fact healthy for us to feel this way, however, there are many practical health benefits in obtaining a toned mid section that are neglected by a lot of people out there. It's not all about the looks. To a great degree it's also about improving the quality of our life, as well as our health.

Let's have a look at a few health benefits in obtaining those great 6 pack abs:

  • Prevent back pain and injury. Your abs will help lighten the load when picking things up off the ground, specifically when bending over. If our abs are not properly developed it's possible fo! r us to injure ourselves quite badly.

  • Important for everyday functioning. Your abs contract every time you move your arms or legs, this contraction takes place to give maximum stability to your spine. This is vitally important.

  • Stabilizes your torso and as a result maintains good posture. It helps you stand more up-right and takes a lot of the strain off your back.

  • Minimizes risk of heart disease, high cholesterol, and even diabetes. By working your abs you are generally losing body fat. The less body fat we have, the less chance we have of developing these diseases.

As you can see there are a lot more benefits to obtaining 6 packs abs than just looking good on the beach. In certain cases it's vital that we have a strong enough core to support our back, spine and mid section in general while performing every day tasks.

For more inter! esting facts and resources on exactly how to achieve those 6 p! ack abs, I highly recommend signing up for this popular FREE 6 Pack Abs Mini Course which explains the above points in detail as well as some of the best techniques used by experts in the field today.

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Top 10 tips articles

Monday, March 3, 2008

How to Start? - 5 Building Muscle Mass Tips for Beginners - Part 2

I'm glad you read this because it proves you felt great power behind simple principals I gave you in my free report, video lessons and part one of this article. They proved to be very much effective and thousands of regular people (just like me and you) use them with great success. As you can see out from tools I give you (I hope you took them by now), things are not at all complicated. It is only the false propaganda of the mighty supplement industry which is responsible for making people fail in their attempts to make solid advancement in their attempts to build muscle mass. Let me now explain most important building muscle mass principals, exactly those they don't want you to know and master.

1).Find the professional gym.

You may have fully equipped home gym at your home but this will not help you make solid advancement, at least in beginning. Even advanced weight lifters report that it is very difficult to train at full intensity and over an extende! d period of time in a home gym. You need the mood, the motivation and group of friends with similar goals. If you don't have them yet, don't worry you will soon. Your results will attract them to you.

Once you are in the gym you need to know all details of the workout routine you are going to hit today. Focus on your workout; avoid talking and doing anything that destructs you from achieving your daily / weekly lift goals. Use the presence of big guys around to draw more motivation. Ipod with good music choice can help you to build up intensity and focus your attention to build muscle mass workouts. That will give you best results!

2). Use heavy weights - train with intensity.

This is the basic one. There is no workout program which can give you good results without implementing this principal. This is very important. High intensity + heavy weights and low reps to failure is formula you need! Off course there is more to this, this is the essence of ! the building muscle mass science.

3). Take enough res! t.

Rest enough. This is a big mistake made by all beginners; they are too keen, too enthusiastic and shortly after too over trained. When you weight train you make microscopic tears in the muscle fibers that you train, you need to recuperate between workouts so these tears can heal and in the process they grow a little bigger and a little stronger. If you tear these again before they recuperate then you will be tearing an already injured part, it will now take even longer to heal, and you will find yourself a little weaker next time you train. Continue with this and you will find yourself not only weaker but slightly smaller.

You can see guys like this in the gym for years, training and training and always using the same weights and never getting bigger, never making progress - the best thing for them is to take a month off to recover then start again with more rest periods.

4). Train each muscle group ones a week.

As a basic guide you should aim a! t training each muscle group once a week, keeping in mind that going trough chest training routine will also hit shoulders and triceps somewhat, and training back will train your biceps to a degree.

5). Proper diet.

You better take this seriously if you want big things to happen with your attempts to build muscle mass Eat plenty of protein and fresh natural foods. Regardless of how much you think you eat you need to eat more. You may need to eat fewer calories but more nutrients. You need to eat 6 to 8 evenly spaced meals through out the day to keep your blood sugar levels up, to keep a constant flow of amino acids and a positive nitrogen balance in your body. Many boys and girls get scared from this. Like it or not but Building Muscle Mass is entirely dependent on proper diet. We need quality meal plan filled with a variety of food which is not rocket science to prepare and afford. I! personally use same diet plans you get from us because 12 ful! l weeks of no-guesswork, just healthy eating for fast muscle growth lifestyle is something I like very much.

Good diet is, believe me when I say, the most important thing you can do to gain a nice muscular physique. Eat clean, natural foods. Fresh food should be the entire constituents of your diet. Manufactured foods, tinned and frozen foods are not good for you. Too much sugar, bad fat percentage, unhealthy fats, various nasty additives and the carbohydrates are so processed that often you may as well be eating sugar.

This will give you a good start, as you go along and learn more you will start to adjust the training for your own requirements, but for the first year just follow these proven principles that made thousands upon thousands of skinny guys into bodybuilders.

Sasa James

http://www.advice-masters.com

You can download my Building Muscle Mass e-Book and contact me with any questions you may have. I'll be more than happy to help you get near to your muscle building goals fast.

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Health & Fitness, Medicine for you

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Use Protein To Build Muscle Mass - A 4 Step Process To Make Sure Your Muscles Never Go Without Again

You need protein to build muscle mass. Body building 101 - without enough of it, your muscles can't grow or repair themselves between workouts. Check out the rest of this article to find out how to use protein to build muscle mass.

Step 1

The first step to using protein to build muscle mass is to understand why it's that particular nutrient that you are using. The answer is simple - because protein is the SOLE nutrient that your muscles can use to rebuild your muscle fiber. Your muscles get torn and broken when you work out, so you need this stuff to help them grow back bigger and stronger. Not enough protein is a major reason that many people don't see good gains starting out.

Step-2

Get some whey protein. When I first started out and learned how important it was to raise my intake of certain nutrients, I used to eat cans of tuna like they were going out of style. That's definitely one way to use protein to build muscle mass. Nothing! wrong with that, hey, I like tuna, but it made it hard to keep up with if I was out or in a business meeting or whatever. It's much easier if you get some whey protein powder though. You can mix it into some pretty cool tasting shakes, and then you get the benefit whenever you need it.

Step-3

Understand the pound rules. The general rule is that if you want protein to build muscle mass, you need to eat about a gram and a half of protein per pound of your body weight, per day. It seems like a lot, but don't forget you can use the protein shakes to really boost your intake.

Step-4

Get some casein protein also. This is largely found in cottage cheese, and is much slower burning, which makes it ideal for circumstances when you know you may be going a while between eating or between shakes. Most people are unaware of using this kind of protein to build muscle mass. It's ideal to have just before going to sleep or something like that, as the ! slow release can prevent your body from breaking down your mus! cles.

From this you should have at least a working knowledge of how to use protein to build muscle mass. Click on the links below for some expert advice.

CLICK HERE to get your free review of the best workout plans - they'll have you ripped and with single digit body fat in no time - it's right here, and it's fast and easy

CLICK HERE for the best resources on the net for teaching how to burn fat right off your body- Not only that but you'll also learn how to get more gains in less time and what foods are REALLY good for building muscle

Brian Waters is webmaster at http://www.MusclebuilderReview.com

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Weight Loss

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Muscle Building Diet Plan

So you've decided to build your muscles. Congratulations! You also need to make sure that the food you are eating complements your fitness regime rather than working against it. Which means you need a muscle building diet plan to work hand in hand with the rest of your muscle building regime.

1. Don't eat immediately before a workout

You need to give your body the chance to digest the food you've eaten. So allow at least 30 minutes from eating before you start your exercise routine.

2. Eat carbs for energy

Especially the "slow burn" carbs that you can find in places like the GI Diet. These release their energy slowly (as opposed to, say, the energy rush you get from eating something sugary) which helps your body get over the energy peaks and troughs it would otherwise encounter.

3. Include lean protein

Whilst you can buy protein shakes, it's better to get your protein naturally. Chicken, fish and turkey are acknowle! dged to be amongst the best protein choices for those people wishing to build up their muscle.

4. Drink lots of water

Quite honestly, this applies to everyone. Not just muscle builders. Your aim should be to drink at least 8 glasses of water a day. This will help replace the water that your body loses during exercise and will keep you hydrated. Ideally, the water really should be water. Not soda drinks, coffee, tea or even "energy" drinks. The closer you are to drinking natural water, the easier it will be for your body to work with it.

5. Eat more calories generally

Obviously these should be "good" calories, not ones that always come from snacks and junk food. Your body is using more exercise during muscle building, so it needs more fuel to cope.

6. Monitor yourself

In theory, any exercise routine should be OK'd by your doctor. So if you have any doubt, consult them before embarking on your course to make your body l! ook more like the famous Charles Atlas. Inbetween visits, you ! can buy scales that will tell you how much of your body weight is composed of fat. Use these to fine tune your diet choices and to make sure that you really are putting on muscle. While you're at it, get hold of a blood pressure monitor as well. These are inexpensive and will keep track of both your blood pressure and pulse so that you know you're not over exerting yourself.

7. Keep note of the food pyramid

The guidelines contained in the food pyramid will help you to make the healthiest choices while you are building up the muscles in your body. Eating plenty of fruit and vegetables is a good start. But make sure that they are in the right form. Sure, it's easier to drink a smoothie or juice raw vegetables but you're missing out on the important fiber contained in fruit and vegetables if you do that. Steam your vegetables to keep in as many of the nutrients as possible.

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