When you train properly (which means training to muscular failure) you are creating microscopic tears in your muscles. This explains the soreness that comes with the few days after your workout. When your muscles heal, they rebuild themselves bigger and stronger. So what does all this mean? Why does it matter? Well by now the answer should be obvious. Your muscle growth actually takes place outside of the gym! Your recovery time is just as important (if not more important) as your time spent inside of the gym! Therefore, an adequate amount of rest between your training sessions is essential. If your muscles never have time to heal, they will never grow! It’s as simple as that. To sum it all up, make sure that you train hard the gym. Push your body as far as it can go, and then get out of the gym!燱eight lifting only breaks down your muscle, not build them. You will not develop any more muscle by spending extra time in the gym. You are just wasting time and it is actually counterproductive. If your muscles are still sore then there is no reason to train them! This means that they are still repairing from your previous workout. Too much time in the gym will cause over-training, which is a huge muscle killing mistake.

Best Wishes,

Greg Shyne

One thing that people don’t realize, that by adding some kind of weight lifting in their workout, you really help boost your metabolism.燛ven after only doing 20 minutes of light to moderate lifting, your body will continue to burn calories hours after you have finished.燱hile doing some sort of cardiovascular exercise should still remain the key area of your training, by adding just a little weight lifting, you will start to drop weight much faster.

Now, please keep this in mind.營f it has been a long time since you have lifted weights, then you really want to start slow and with very light weights.燭he worse thing that can happen is that you over do it and become so sore that you can’t workout for 2 days.燗lso, by starting slowly, you will also avoid a possible injury as well.

So add some variety to your gym routine.營f you find yourself getting bored with the treadmill, then head on over to those weights and help boost your metabolism.

Quick Pull Ups

It is recommended that somewhere in your home in a place where you will not mind having installing and having a pull up bar such as a closet or the entrance to a private bathroom, that you do this for easy quick access to a few sets a day. Making sure you are positioned right and the bar is even, doing about 3 to 4 sets per day will give you that upper body workout that you need to maintain what you have already worked hard on.

Squatting

When doing squats it is essential to make sure that you do not allow your knees to come in on the ascent. Not using proper technique when doing a squat will result in knee problems eventually. Doing about 3 to 4 sets of these will give you the lower back and leg strengthening you need for each day.

Simple Stretching

A lot of times we can forget that simply stretching our bodies can also work out our muscle groups and this is basically the essence to yoga. Some people are not a fan of the art of yoga and that is perfectly fine but doing stretches not only wakes your muscle up to handle the workout for the day it still keeps tone intact. Side stretches and floor stretches should easily provide what each muscle group needs to get awake and ready.

Some simple less time consuming floor stretches are as follows:

Sitting on the floor with your legs straight out in front of you, slowly you will posture yourself to sit straight up and reach slowly as high as you can and hold the position for 5 seconds then slowly descend to reach and touch the tip of your toes. Be careful not to hyper-extend your feet. Hold this position for 15 seconds and then slowly return to the upright position. You will benefit most by doing this 5 times.

Staying in the current position, spread your legs apart just to the point of feeling the stretch in your upper thighs. Stretching your arms up and holding the position just as in the first floor exercise and holding the position for 5 seconds and then slowly ascending to the floor and making your way to position your head as close to the floor as you can. Be sure not to arch your back too much, trying to keep the same straight posture as you were when you were sitting straight up. Over arching your back can cause lower back pain that could last for hours.

Doing these simple exercises once or twice per day will keep your body in check between lifting and workouts.

Why Do We Need Lean Muscle Mass?

For men the advantages of adding muscle mass are obvious. A good looking physique with broad shoulders and big arms is desired by most men and admired by women. Unfortunately, most women avoid adding muscle mass, fearing that it will make them look bulky or huge. This is absolutely not the case. When women add lean muscle it makes them appear lean, toned and sculpted. Think fitness model or athlete, rather than female bodybuilder.

It is possible to add approximately one pound of muscle per week to your body. Since muscle burns more calories than fat, adding this one pound means that you will burn approximately 50 extra calories a day just while resting. You might not have known that your body actually burns calories while you are resting or sleeping. The amount of lean muscle mass on your body plays a huge factor in the amount of calories that you burn. Over the course of a few months you can see how this can really add up.

Feel Great Inside & Out

In addition to increasing your fat burning ability and your appearance, a weight lifting muscle building program makes you feel good!

You’ll not only have increased strength and energy, but a more positive outlook on life and a happier mood. This effect also increases over time. The more effort you put in means faster and more dramatic the results which leads to increased motivation.

Imagine feeling amazing every singe day both mentally and physically! That’s the ultimate goal and it’s entirely possible for anyone to achieve.

You Can Do it!

By starting a weight lifting muscle building routine you can start on the path to a new body both physically and mentally. If you are unhappy with your current exercise or cardio plan I invite you to give a weight lifting program a fair shot. I guarantee that if you stick with it you’ll not only feel great, but will look better than you ever have before.

Looking For a Muscle Building Program That Actually Works?

What is Plyometric training?

Think of plyometirc training as explosive training. It consists of many jump ups, jump downs, fast push ups, explosive push ups, and many more. It is a prime training method of building power.

Athletes tend to use this type of training a lot because of its ability to build great power. Power is your muscles ability to produce maximum force in the shortest amount of time. This type of training is not just for athletes… normal people can use it too.

It has the great ability for the “normal” person to create more energy. It also builds up the stabilizer muscles in the joints… making your weight training 100% more effective.

The Amazing Effect of Plyometric Training & Weight Training

Normally I would not have thought about combining these two types of training. It would seem that the intensity would be so great that over training could result. A study conducted by the Department of Physical Education at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, in Spain proves otherwise.

They took 37 male physical education students and divided them randomly into a training group and a control group. The training groups of students follows a training schedule that consisted of 6 weeks of weight lifting and plyometric exercises.

Since this test was use to measure an athletic act, they measured their maximal angular speed of the knee during instep kicks on a stationary ball. That is not the important measurement though. Just list to what happened to their other statistics…

Training resulted in a 4.3% gain in muscle hypertrophy, increase in size of type2a muscle fibers by 8.4%, increase in 1 rep maximum of their inclined leg press by 61.4% and their half squat by 45.1%, and in increase in their vertical jump.

In the control group, these variables remained unchanged. You would expect that because the control group did not do anything according to this study. I was hoping that they would have at least done just weight training or just plyometric training.

However, it was concluded that weight training and plyometric training showed significant improvement to not just the kicking speed, but many other physical capabilities.

This would be an ideal method for 4 week training. In order to get the most out of this type of training while not killing your body, you need to follow this schedule.

Alternating weeks do one week of 3 days of weight training and 2 days of plyometic training. The following week do 3 days of plyometric training followed by 2 days of weight training. You would need to keep the weight training routines balanced. I suggest you use super-sets with alternating muscle groups (random).

After these 4 weeks take an entire week off and measure your results from the first week you started. The ability of your body just skyrocketed and you not only feel great, but you look even more amazing.

Your shoulders and lats
create that impressive v-taper and make
your physique look powerful and strong.
Your back is also the biggest muscle group
in the body. Thus, effective back routines
are an extremely important part of your weight
training routine.

Solid back routines for weightlifting should
center around one exercise: the deadlift.
Walk into any gym and count how many people
perform the deadlift in their back routine.
I bet you can count the number on one hand.

In fact, I bet you don’t even need to know
how to count because the number of people
you see using the deadlift in their back
routines will most likely be zero. This
is usually true with the squat as well.

And how many trainees have well developed
legs or a powerful well developed back?
Not many. Sadly, these two exerices are also
the best choices to develop the muscles people
do spend a lot of time working – the chest and
the arms.

Most of the time, the deadlift should be
the centerpiece of any back routine. I say most of the
time, because it’s an exercise that can very easily lead to
overtraining and you need to take breaks from
time to time.

The back is a very complex muscle
group and you can benefit from having a variety
of back routines in your bodybuilding program that allow
you to switch up your routine every 4 to 8 weeks.

You can center your back weight training program
around the deadlift for 4 to 8 weeks and then
put together a weight lifting routine for your
back without the deadlift.

Effective back routines should include
the deadlift for another important reason. Like
the squat, the deadlift seems to increase muscle
mass throughout the whole body, not just the back.

Your body will not develop smaller body parts like
your biceps and triceps too far out of proportion
to your larger muscle groups. So working your legs
with squats and your back with deadlifts will help
your smaller body parts grow as well.

In addition, the deadlift is an exercise that will
help you become as strong and powerful as you look.
Your muscles will not just be for show, like so
many pump artists that look good but can barely squat
or deadlift their own bodyweight.

Following are a couple of good back routines for
weightlifting that you can use to develope a thick,
wide, powerful back. The first one centers around
the deadlift.

The following routine includes four quality sets on
the deadlift. First, perform three light sets with
increasing weight to allow your body to warm up and
for you to get into a groove with proper technique.

Back Routines #1

Deadlift 4 x 6 – 8

Curl grip Chins 3 x 8 – 12

Perform this routine twice per week. It doesn’t seem
like much but believe me, if you put in the necessary
intensity to those deadlifts you will not want to do
any more work than this.

Back Routines #2

Curl grip Pulldowns 3 x 8 – 12

V-Bar Seated Rows 3 x 8 – 12

One arm dumbbell rows 3 x 8 – 12

In order to design effective back routines for weightlifting or practical weight training routines in general, it’s important to understand
the fundamentals of weight lifting.

Gregg Gillies is the founder of Build Lean Muscle.com. His articles have appeared in Ironman Magazine. He has written two books and is a regular contributor to Body Talk Magazine. He publishes a free fitness newsletter available at his site that includes lots of weight training tips, fat loss, nutrition and exercise program information to help you build your best body as quickly as possible. check it out at Build Muscle and see how you can get a customized muscle building nutrition plan at http://www.mynutritionjournal.com.

The majority of hypertrophy occurs while you’re asleep. A typical bodybuilder will sleep 9hrs, which means the body goes without nutrients for most of that time. The process of building muscles relies on the protein in our body. The nutrients from protein stay in the body for roughly 2-4hrs, so that means during the night, 5-7hrs your body goes without any nutrients. Therefore it is essential that you eat something that will prolong digestion while you sleep. In this case it is dietary fat. When you mix dietary fat and protein before bed, you will have the protein last throughout the night.

To continue on with the protein in your system, this also means you need to eat every 2-4hrs to ensure that there is nutrients in your body at all times to repair muscle tissue. This isn’t to say that you couldn’t eat high fat and protein foods to prolong digestion, but your body is in an active state now and needs energy nutrients that digest fast.

There’s no reason to miss a meal ever. You should always plan ahead and have a prepared meal. Even if you didn’t think ahead and got stuck in a traffic jam, you can always stop off at McDonalds or another fast food joint. When you’re buying, buy just the burger, no fries or drink. This is the best choice.

These are the keys to maximum hypertrophy for bodybuilders. It isn’t what you do in the gym to get muscle; it’s what you do outside the gym.

If you need more information on building muscle, click here for Male Bodybuilding.

Try doing the full squat instead of a regular squat. Regular squats you just go squat down to the point of sitting in a chair. A full squat is when you go down until your butt is almost touching your ankles. This will really give your legs a workout.

A military press is another great exercise to put in your routine. You need a barbell and you’re going to hold it above your head, gripping it at shoulder width. Next, you’re going to bend your arms and let it come down to your chest, then explosively push it back up. This will work the shoulders and upper chest area.

Try the inclined lying row. Find yourself a bench and incline it to the lowest incline. Next, lie against the bench with a barbell underneath it. Grip the bar with your palms facing out and pull the bar up to your chest area. This will work your back and rear deltoids.

Lastly you should try doing chest dips. This exercise has a profound effect on the production of testosterone. Find the dip apparatus and lean forward, so that your chest will do most of the work. Push your body up and down.

These are the most powerful bodybuilding exercises you can do. Give all these techniques a try for a few weeks and see how well you improve.

If you need more information on building muscle, click here for Male Bodybuilding.

Just exercising doesn’t do much to strengthen muscles. If it did, marathon runners would have the largest muscles. To become strong, you have to exercise your muscles against progressively greater resistance.

Just exercising doesn’t strengthen bones either. Female marathon runners sometimes stop menstruating and lose tremendous amounts of bone, even though they may run more than 100 miles a week. To regain bone, they have to eat more food which will usually start them menstruating again, and include weight-lifting in their workouts. They may also need to take estrogen.

Many people with muscle or nerve diseases can also benefit from lifting weights. They may be unable to work out as long or as hard as a healthy person and they will take longer to recover from their workouts. However, if they stop exercising when their muscles feel heavy or hurt and they take off when their muscles feel sore, they can make dramatic increases in strength.

Anyone starting a weight training program should be guided by an experienced instructor. Exercise with several different machines two or three times a week, never on consecutive days. On each exercise, use the heaviest weight you can lift comfortably eight or ten times in a row without losing your form. Do three sets of ten repetitions on each machine. Then allow at least 48 hours for your muscles to recover. Do not lift again until the soreness is gone.

Also see How to become very strong

Dr. Gabe Mirkin has been a radio talk show host for 25 years and practicing physician for more than 40 years; he is board certified in four specialties. For more information and hundreds of fitness and health reports, visit http://www.DrMirkin.com

Free weekly newsletter on fitness, health, and nutrition

Let’s face it everyone that lifts weights can’t help but talk about it. Just the fact that you’re bigger than most people you socialize with or meet will often spark a conversation on the topic. Whether your buddy lifts or knows nothing about it you are likely to be asked the question, “How much can you bench press?” Are you going to reply, I can do 315 lbs for 6 repetitions? It just doesn’t paint the same picture as saying I put up 365 lbs. Maybe you could care less what people think and the bragging rights don’t matter to you. However if you are a powerlifter or an Olympic lifter you will be tested with a one-rep max. Most high school and college football programs test their players with a one-rep max as well. If you don’t practice the one rep lift how will you be prepared?

If somebody asks you what you bench press, you could always give them a projected max based on what the chart says right? Not necessarily. One of the most important reasons for doing singles is to break past barriers. Using our previous example, if you do 315 lbs for 6 reps you should be able to get a one-rep max of 365 lbs. This is not always the case. People set up limits in their minds that are tough to overcome. I swear I have seen people do 295 lbs for three reps but they just can’t get 300 lbs. This has nothing to do with strength. This has to do with mental barriers and confidence issues. I personally would not tell someone my one rep max based on reps. If I know that I have never benched that weight than I just can’t take credit for it based on a chart. Performing a single lift in the bench is a great way to build confidence. Nothing feels better than actually beating your personal best. If you keep doing singles you will break past sticking points and barriers that you have set for yourself. If you have a goal of benching 300 or 400 lbs the numbers can be very difficult to prepare for when you don’t practice singles. Working your way up with singles will give you the confidence you need to reach your goals.

Many bodybuilders concentrate on their form and don’t care about how much their max is. Lifting singles can actually help your form. When you are performing a one-rep max you have to have perfect form or you will not complete the lift successfully. When you are using lighter weight and doing many reps there is a lot of room for cheating and bad form. You can still complete the lift with sub par form by using other muscles to help. But, when you are maxing out you have only one chance to press the weight and to do so you need absolutely perfect form. You have to be mentally prepared and your groove has to be precise. There is no room for being sloppy. Before you start working out with singles it’s a good idea to practice strict form with higher reps first. Developing perfect technique is the key to a heavy single. If you are lifting 275 with careless technique for five reps you won’t be able to do a single of any significance. Build a base and let your body adjust to the heavier workloads. For 2 weeks lift with reps of five. After you have finished this stage you can progress and do sets of 3 reps. Now your form should be down and you have should have adjusted to lifting heavier weights. You can now insert singles to your routine that will help you in your quest for a big bench.

Exploit your weak areas with a single. Like I mentioned before there is more room for error when doing sets with higher reps. You may not be able to determine what aspect of the bench needs work. When you max out you will tend to see where you fell short. This is great for evaluating what area needs improvement. Maybe you couldn’t lock out and you know that you need to work harder on your triceps. Lifting is all trial and error and the single is an effective way to measure your progress and assess what needs to be changed to break the stalemate.

Singles will help you develop a different kind of strength compared to lifting higher reps. When you lift heavy weights you bring your attachments into the lift. Tendons and ligaments are often the key to unlocking your potential. If you are constantly lifting with higher reps you don’t activate your attachments. Functional strength lies in not in the muscles but in your tendons and ligaments. You’ve heard the expression that you are only as strong as your weakest link. Lifting heavier weight will strengthen your weakest link, which may not be getting the attention it so desperately deserves.

To follow are some tips for a successful single. Proper warm up is essential to prevent a tear. At the same time there is a balance between warming up and tiring yourself out. I recommend the following before doing a single.

Warm up set of 10 reps with a very light weight.

Set of 5-6 reps.

Set of 2-3 with a heavier weight.

Set for 1 rep with a weight closer to your max.

Perform your single.

Some experts think that when performing a single you need a shorter rest period between sets because the progression of sets in warm up is shorter than in your normal workout. Powerlifters will assume that because they are dealing with heavier weights they need a longer rest period between sets. I recommend waiting until you have completely returned to your normal breathing pace. Once this has happened get yourself mentally prepared and than it’s time for another set. Don’t wait so long that you get tight. Let somebody else do a set, get a drink of water and visualize your next lift. Performing a back off set at the end of your single lift will help you preserve the workload. It will also give you the pump that you are looking for.

Follow this advice and you can incorporate singles into your program. Doing them once a month is a good starting point but as you become more experienced it is okay to do them more often. Everyone is different so try for yourself and let singles help you build confidence, strengthen your attachments, exploit your weak point, develop perfect form, and break past your personal barriers.

Mike Westerdal is the owner of http://www.criticalbench.com He is a certified personal trainer, powerlifter, and muscle writer. He is also the author of the Critical Bench Program designed to help you increase your bench press by fifty pounds in ten weeks. Stop by http://www.criticalbench.com to see one of the biggest weight lifting portals on the Internet.