Build Muscle Workouts

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Weight training involves the use of equipment that enables variable resistance. This resistance can come in the form of "free weights" like barbells and dumbells, machines that use cables or pulleys to help you lift the weight and bodyweight exercises like pull-ups or dips.

Free Weights vs. Machines vs. Bodyweight Exercises

For maximum muscle gain, the focus of your workouts should consist of free weight exercises. Not machines or bodyweight exercises. This is not to say that you should not use machines or bodyweight exercises, but they should not be the focus of your training. To get an effective, muscle blasting workout, you must stimulate the most muscle fibers as possible, and machines do not do this.

The main reason for this is a lack of stabilizer and synergist muscle development. Stabilizer and synergist muscles are supporting muscles that assist the main muscle in performing a complex lift. The more stabilizers and synergists worked, the more muscle fibers stimulated. Multi-jointed free weight exercises like the bench press, require many stabilizer and synergistic muscle assistance to complete the lift. On the other hand doing a bench press using a machine will need almost no stabilizer assistance.

Since machines are locked into a specific range of motion and help to support the weight along that path, they fail to stimulate the muscles that surround the area you are working (stabilizers). This is a mistake. If your stabilizer muscles are weak, then the major muscle group will never grow!

Free weight exercises like the dumbbell press or squat, for example, put a very large amount of stress on supporting muscle groups. That's why you will get fatigued faster and not be able to lift as much weight as you did on the machine. But you will gain more muscle, become stronger very quickly and have a true gauge of your strength.

If you use machines in your program, they should be used to work isolated areas and only after all multi-jointed exercises have been completed.

Beginners should begin with a limited combination of machine exercises, bodyweight exercises and multi-jointed free weight exercises. Before increasing the weight levels, they should work on becoming familiar with the proper form and execution of each. Soon, bodyweight exercises will become insufficient to stimulate growth and they will need to focus on more free weight exercises.

Multi-Jointed Exercises

The exercises that work the large muscle groups are called compound (or multi-joint) movements that involve the simultaneous stimulation of many muscle groups. These compound exercises should be the foundation of any weight training program because they stimulate the most amount of muscle in the least amount of time.

Here are the basic movements:

* Bench Presses (works the chest, shoulders, tricep)

* Overhead Presses (shoulders, tricep)

* Pull-ups/Barbell Rows (back, bicep)

* Squats (legs, lower back)

* Deadlifts (legs, back, shoulders)

* Bar Dips (shoulders, chest, arms)

They will overload your entire skeletal and muscular system like no machine could ever do, giving you and effective workout in a very short period of time. If you can only do a few exercises, then do these. They have been proven to encourage muscle and strength gain unlike any other exercises.

Lift Heavy Weight

To build mass, you must weight train with heavy weights. To consider a weight heavy, you should only be able to do a maximum of 8-12 reps before your muscles temporarily fail. A weight is considered "light" if you can do more than 15 reps before muscle fatigue sets in.

Heavy weights stimulate more muscle fibers than lighter weights. It's that simple. More muscle stimulation means more muscle growth.

Don't Overtrain

Heavy weight training puts a huge strain on your body, so adequate rest and recuperation after your workouts is essential. If you are prone to train too often, several things happen:

You don't give your muscles enough time to recuperate between workouts. If your muscles have not repaired themselves, you will not be at maximum strength for your next workout. Rest is essential. Other than eating, this should be your main focus.

You are setting yourself up for burnout or an injury. You must pace yourself. You want to be able to keep this up for a long time, not burnout before you reach your goals.

Contrary to popular belief, you do not grow while working out; you only grow when you are resting.

Below is an example mass workout.

Wednesday (legs, abs)

* Heavy Squats, leg extension superset

* Seated Calve Raises, 4 strips sets

* Crunches (4 sets of 20)

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Friday (chest, shoulder, triceps, abs)

* Flat bench press, incline dumbbell flyes superset

* Shoulder press, side raises superset

* Tricep pushdowns

* Reverse incline leg raises (3 sets of 20)

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Sunday (back, biceps, abs)

* Wide grip pull-ups, latbar pulldown superset

* EZ bar bicep curl, incline dumbbell curls superset

* Crunches (4 sets of 20)

Nothing fancy, but effective.

While kettleballs have been around for over 100 years in countries like Russia, their use was not widespread until recently. In America, kettleball training is simple exploding, thanks to some very unique benefits that you can achieve with kettleballs. For anyone looking for muscle weight gain, kettleballs make a versatile entry in your workout routine.

Kettleballs resemble mini bowling balls with thick, large handles. They come in varying weights from around 4lbs to 70lbs, but the heavier weights aren’t often used, as kettleball training is more focused on conditioning, explosive strength, and movement, instead of sheer strength.

The incredible aspect of kettleball training is their versatility. In one short workout you can achieve many different objectives. Some of the many benefits you’ll get from kettleball training include:

• Strength improvement
• Explosive power increases
• Improvement in your level of conditioning
• Increased joint flexibility and range of motion
• Anaerobic conditioning enhancements
• Core strength increases
• Balance and stabilization improvements

But wait, I've saved the best for last: kettleball training can boost your metabolic rate for almost a full day after a workout is over, making kettleballs ideal candidates to add to your muscle workouts and shed fat.

Kettleballs do have drawbacks, however, but they can be overcome. The one cited most frequently is that kettleballs only work for upper body and core conditioning, and not your lower body. To make up for this you’ll need to pair your kettleball session with a good lower body routine, or maybe even a quick high intensity interval training (HIIT) routine.

Keep in mind that ketteballs will work best in interval-based workouts, so traditional strength training routines aren’t the best fit. However, if your goal is to build muscle up and you pay attention to advances in fitness science, you’re likely already aware that traditional body building exercises aren't the most appropriate option.

With the many advantages that kettleballs offer, they should be added to your workout routine, provided that your workout already emphasizes recent discoveries in fitness science and is a good fit for your body type and goals.

Technorati Tags: body build muscle, build muscle up, exercise build muscle, muscle weight gain

If your goal is to get 100% better at something, what would be the best way to approach it? I can think of two ends of the continuum. The approach you select will be somewhere along this continuum: doing one thing twice as good (or 100 percent better), or performing 100 activities 1 percent better. I think that most people try the first approach, but the latter is much easier to implement.

Taken a step further, to make each of these 1 percent building blocks more effective, you could also focus on things that occur outside of your workouts. So you concentrate on changing your habits and making incremental improvements that will stack on top of one another to bring you massive benefits.

So here are 5 minor lifestyle changes you can make to amplify your muscle workouts.

1) Replace Traditional Cardio with High Intensity Interval Trainign

Aerobic activities have a negative impact on muscle gaining because it burns glycogen and branched chain amino acids (BCAA). Instead, focus on interval training for fat burning, e.g. a 400-meter sprint followed by a 400-meter recovery jog, repeated 3 more times.

2) Increase Total Time Under Load

Rather than concentrating on the number of repetitions, concentrate on the total time your muscles are under load. Try spending 2 seconds on the negative contraction, 1 second at a neutral contraction (bottom of the exercise), and 1 second on the positive contraction. Lengthening the negative is an easy way to overload muscles and promote muscle weight gain.

3) Increase your Sodium Intake

Sodium increases amino acid absorption and carbohydrate storage while also improving the muscle's receptiveness to insulin. Just do in it moderation!

4) Mix up your Total Time Under Load

One really easy way to add variety to a workout, confuse your muscles, and build muscle up is to switch up your repetition tempo by adding an explosive day once per week, or an explosive set once per workout. It looks like this: 2-second negative contraction, 1-second neutral, explode as fast as you can on the positive contraction and repeat.

5) Try Something New

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. Commit to yourself to read a new (as in current and scientifically backed) exercise book every six months. You’ll pick up new approaches and new tips to add to your workouts.

Technorati Tags: body build muscle, build muscle up, exercise build muscle, muscle weight gain

I bet you've heard it over and over again: it's not possible to build muscle up and melt fat at the same time. You've been told that building muscle requires an increase in calories, while fat burning involves a decrease in calories. This conventional wisdom is partially accurate, but the beliefs are being tossed on their ears with research into interval-based workouts. The fact is, you can achieve muscle weight gain while you burn fat provided that you add interval training to your sessions.

Interval training isn’t new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and used these days. Whereas traditional aerobic activities were considered the only reliable ways to shed fat, and the only acceptable workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has proven to be beneficial to athletes in all fields, and for folks with wildly varying goals.

Old school aerobic activity is referred to as "steady state," meaning that you work up to a fixed intensity level and maintain that level for the duration of the session. During the training session, your body obtains half of its fuel by burning fat, and gets the rest through your oxygen system, and by cutting into your muscle and glycogen stores.

HIIT sessions, on the other hand, involve brief high intensity intervals followed by moderate intensity rest periods. HIIT sessions are muscle sparing and are quick, but are killer. A fifteen-minute HIIT session can raise your resting metabolic rate for almost day, enabling you to keep burning higher levels of fat for up to a day.

In addition to this, because your muscles consume calories during every minute of the day, the more lean mass you have, the more fat you burn, even while you're sitting still. Because HIIT not only spares your muscle, but also helps you build muscle, your future fat burning ability is increased, which makes it a great addition to your muscle workouts.

The bottom line is that regardless of your fitness goals, HIIT workouts can help you increase your overall fitness level in very short sessions. But even better, if your goals include muscle gain and fat burning, adding HIIT to your workout schedule is a no-brainer.

Technorati Tags: body build muscle, build muscle up, exercise build muscle, muscle weight gain