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The Most Powerful Muscle Building Tool Available
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, thats 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 thats 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 arent always getting better, then youre 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 youre 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 arent getting stronger every week, you absolutely will not be getting any bigger. Examine your training approach closely. If you havent been paying laser-like attention to the amount of weight youve been using, the number of reps youve 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.
BONUS : The Myth Of Gaining Muscle Without Fat!
Many of you have expressed concerns about gaining too much body fat while on such a high calorie diet, and wonder if you should do some aerobic exercise to offset the weight gain.
Absolutely not.
That will be detrimental to gaining muscle. For best results, you either have to train and diet to gain muscle or lose fat. One or the other. If you are a true hardgainer, you cannot do both. If you try, you will not make any substantial progress either way. So, now is the time to gain weight. You will worry about losing fat later.
The fact is that there are no magic pills, powders, foods or exercises that will allow you to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time.
It all is determined by your genetics and metabolism. Some people can do it, some can't. If you are naturally thin and have a difficult time gaining weight of any kind, it would be silly of you to think that you will be able to gain muscle while trying to keep your body fat low.
Most skinny guys want to gain more muscle, but are afraid of gaining body fat. They see all the bodybuilder photos and read the stories about people gaining pounds of muscle while losing pounds of fat -- They want to do the same. When looking at these photos, you have to remember that most of these people do not have your body type. The majority of them are overweight and want to lose fat, not gain muscle.
'Well', you say, 'What about those people who transformed their bodies? They lost fat and gained muscle'. Yes, but almost all of these people were overweight, or had high levels of body fat. In other words, their metabolisms were, for the most part, slow. They simply dieted and trained for fat loss.
Weight training helped them to tone up and slightly increase their muscle mass by replacing some of the fat with muscle. However, you will never increase your body mass far above your original starting weight on that type of diet.
In other words, even though you gain some muscle, you will actually weight less!
For example, Big Joe weighs 189lbs with 18% body fat. This works out to be 34lbs of fat and 155lbs of muscle. He then goes on a fat loss diet and slowly diets down to a ripped 5% body fat at 168lbs, which is 8.4lbs of fat and 160lbs of muscle. He lost 26lbs of fat, and his weight only went down by 21lbs. So, looking that this we realize that he managed to also gain 5lbs of muscle. You can see that he has more muscle mass than when he started, and he looks totally ripped, but his weight decreased because his main goal was fat loss. He looks much better, and his measurements changed, but he only increased his total weight by five pounds.
If you are very thin, you cannot do this. Yes, your body fat will decrease, and this will also give you more muscle mass, but it will not increase your weight. You will just get much thinner. Big Joe was 'big' to begin with; we are not. To get the same results as Big Joe, you must first gain the weight, and then concentrate on losing the body fat later. Joe had the size; he just needed to trim down. We do not have the size to work with, so we have to force our bodies to grow beyond our body's comfort range. This is the hard part.
This is why if you want to grow beyond your current size, you have to diet for it specifically.
Remember, most of you have extremely fast metabolisms. Gaining weight will be extremely difficult.
The only way you will get bigger is to shock your body.
You must shock your body by:
1. Training with heavy weights, and
2. Eating a lot of calories.
The first shock is with weight training. You must focus on compound free- weight exercises, and lift heavy weights, which will stimulate the largest amount of muscle fibers. Your body responds to this stimulus by increasing your muscle mass.
The second way we must shock our body is by eating more calories than your body is used to. This is the most important factor in gaining mass. When you overload your system with plenty of protein and fats, your body has no other choice but to gain weight.
Many of you have expressed concerns about gaining too much body fat while on such a high calorie diet, and wonder if you should do some aerobic exercise to offset the weight gain.
Absolutely not.
That will be detrimental to gaining muscle. For best results, you either have to train and diet to gain muscle or lose fat. One or the other. If you are a true hardgainer, you cannot do both. If you try, you will not make any substantial progress either way. So, now is the time to gain weight. You will worry about losing fat later.
The fact is that there are no magic pills, powders, foods or exercises that will allow you to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time.
It all is determined by your genetics and metabolism. Some people can do it, some can't. If you are naturally thin and have a difficult time gaining weight of any kind, it would be silly of you to think that you will be able to gain muscle while trying to keep your body fat low.
Most skinny guys want to gain more muscle, but are afraid of gaining body fat. They see all the bodybuilder photos and read the stories about people gaining pounds of muscle while losing pounds of fat -- They want to do the same. When looking at these photos, you have to remember that most of these people do not have your body type. The majority of them are overweight and want to lose fat, not gain muscle.
'Well', you say, 'What about those people who transformed their bodies? They lost fat and gained muscle'. Yes, but almost all of these people were overweight, or had high levels of body fat. In other words, their metabolisms were, for the most part, slow. They simply dieted and trained for fat loss.
Weight training helped them to tone up and slightly increase their muscle mass by replacing some of the fat with muscle. However, you will never increase your body mass far above your original starting weight on that type of diet.
In other words, even though you gain some muscle, you will actually weight less!
For example, Big Joe weighs 189lbs with 18% body fat. This works out to be 34lbs of fat and 155lbs of muscle. He then goes on a fat loss diet and slowly diets down to a ripped 5% body fat at 168lbs, which is 8.4lbs of fat and 160lbs of muscle. He lost 26lbs of fat, and his weight only went down by 21lbs. So, looking that this we realize that he managed to also gain 5lbs of muscle. You can see that he has more muscle mass than when he started, and he looks totally ripped, but his weight decreased because his main goal was fat loss. He looks much better, and his measurements changed, but he only increased his total weight by five pounds.
If you are very thin, you cannot do this. Yes, your body fat will decrease, and this will also give you more muscle mass, but it will not increase your weight. You will just get much thinner. Big Joe was 'big' to begin with; we are not. To get the same results as Big Joe, you must first gain the weight, and then concentrate on losing the body fat later. Joe had the size; he just needed to trim down. We do not have the size to work with, so we have to force our bodies to grow beyond our body's comfort range. This is the hard part.
This is why if you want to grow beyond your current size, you have to diet for it specifically.
Remember, most of you have extremely fast metabolisms. Gaining weight will be extremely difficult.
The only way you will get bigger is to shock your body.
You must shock your body by:
1. Training with heavy weights, and
2. Eating a lot of calories.
The first shock is with weight training. You must focus on compound free- weight exercises, and lift heavy weights, which will stimulate the largest amount of muscle fibers. Your body responds to this stimulus by increasing your muscle mass.
The second way we must shock our body is by eating more calories than your body is used to. This is the most important factor in gaining mass. When you overload your system with plenty of protein and fats, your body has no other choice but to gain weight.
