In the first two parts of this gaining muscle series I talked about the things that you can do in the gym to jump start muscle growth, everything from types of sets and reps to the amount of time per workout. Now it is time to look at the factors outside the gym that can help you in gaining muscle.

Fist of all most people that are serious about weight lifting will tell you that the gym is at most half of the factor important for gaining muscle, the rest is rest and diet so I will deal with them here.

Rest to help muscle gains

Most people know that there is an important correlation between rest and muscle recovery but there is more to recovery than getting a lot of sleep, in fact getting eight hours of sleep per night is only the first part of your gaining muscle rest and recovery. One of the things that you must do to allow your muscles to recover is to watch your amount of exercise. You heavy workouts are very important to help you gain muscle but other things like cardio or extra exercise can be a very dangerous factor toward overtraining your muscles.

You want to make sure that you workouts are really great in stressing your muscle but if the next day you do a tough cardio workout it will be very difficult for your body to heal your muscles in your off time. If you are concerned that this lack of cardio may lead to some weight gain that is fat and not muscle than you are right.
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In this second weightlifting article I want to start by hoping that you are not feeling to sore from your first workout, you will make short term gains regardless but you will want to have interest in doing weights over the long term. Today I want to go over the benefits of strength training as well as go over the Tuesday/Friday workouts.

There are many great benefits to doing weight training. The first benefit is that extra muscle mass will burn more calories allow you either to eat more food or lose fat quicker. The second benefit is that you will improve your posture and the way you move on a daily basis as you will get rid of those little aches and pains caused by weak core muscles. And finally you will feel better about yourself because of the changes that YOU are making to your body.

Here is the 2nd Day of a Two day split

Upper Back Exercises

Bent over Rows, to do a row you hold a light weight in your hand and put your right knee on one chair and your right hand on another chair now with your back straight raise you left hand parallel with your body and slightly back so that the stress is on your upper back muscles. Do three sets of ten repetitions of this with each arm. Read the rest of this entry »

Strength training will probably be the hardest thing to get started now that you have cardio under your belt. The tough thing about weight training for everyone is that they do not realize how hard they are pushing themselves in the beginning and end up being sore for four or five days afterwards. For the first few workouts just go through the motions and do not push yourself to hard so that your muscles can recover from these initial workouts.

Weight lifting bodyparts

The body can be split into eight muscle groups: shoulders, chest, back, biceps, triceps, Quadriceps, hamstrings and calves. We are going to start with a two day split right off the bat so that the workouts do not take as long and so that you can recover half of your body each day instead of the whole body. On Mondays and Thursdays you will work shoulders, chest, triceps and calves. On Tuesdays and Fridays you will work back, biceps, quads and hamstrings. Today we will look at the Monday/Thursday weight workout. Read the rest of this entry »

Many people have questions about how many sets they should do for and exercise and how many reps as well as how many exercises for each muscle group. The question is very large and the answer is even larger as it depends on what your goals are.

How many exercises per muscle group

First of all we should look at the number of exercises that you are going to do per muscle group. There are nine muscle groups that we can distinguish just for simplicity; calves, quadriceps, hamstrings, abs, chest, back, shoulders, biceps and triceps. The best way to work a muscle is to work all of the muscle fibers and the only way to do this is to do exercises that work the muscle from different angles so that you can tax each part of the muscle. Often advanced body builders will do three or four exercises for each muscle group. This means for example that for your shoulders you would do front lateral raises for the front deltoid, side lateral raises for the medial deltoid and reverse flyes for the rear deltoid.

Number of sets per exercise

Next we will look at the number of sets you will do for each muscle group. I believe that it is important to not overtrain your muscles and the best way to do this is to reduce the number of sets that you do in each workout. The way that I get the sets going when I have had a long layoff is to do one set for each exercise and three exercises for each muscle group.

You will be able to gauge when it is time to increase the number of sets by listening to your body. Your muscles quickly adapt to any kind of weight training and so after a couple of weeks you will be able to add a set to one of the exercises and then another set to another exercise maybe a week later and as you get stronger you will feel you have more in you after you have rested a bit after a set and can come back with another set to further push your muscles. It is most important though to go to failure in each of your sets then it is to just do more sets. Try your best to make each set more difficult instead of trying to get more sets in per muscle group.

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I used to do a lot of really heavy weightlifting, nothing like a pro bodybuilder, but have always been impressed by the Mr Olympia. Last weekend the Mr Olympia took place and Dexter Jackson won the Sandow (Mr Olympia trophy) and the title as Mr Olympia 2008.

Dexter has been a very high level bodybuilder for many years first placing 9th in the 1999 Mr Olympia so it has taken him until his 10th Olympia to win one.

There are many many bodybuilding contest but the Mr Olympia has overshadowed all of them except maybe the Arnold Classic, which is a contest sponsored by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Even the Mr Universe, which was popular in the 1960’s and 1970’s, does not have nearly the hype surrounding it as the Mr Olympia has.

The local sports shows as you may have noticed do not seem to talk about bodybuilding or this contest although there are a lot of hardcore followers that knew exactly what was happening this weekend in Las Vegas. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday I decided to change things up and change my reps for my workout.

It was a killer workout. The workout took 35 minutes. And I am still sore today.

The workout I did was a high rep workout where I did the same exercises as usual, mostly, and instead of sticking to 6-12 reps per set I actually pushed my reps to 50-60 per set for only a couple of sets per exercise.

This is a High Rep Workout

• 1 set of 60 reps of incline bench press followed by 12 reps of incline flyes
• 1 set of 30 reps of military press
• 1 set of 25 reps of one armed bent over rows
• 1 set of 50 reps per arm of alternating curls
• 1 set of 25 reps of tricep kickbacks

I went through this set with a longer than regular time between sets, maybe a minute or so, and by the end I was really winded and wiped. I took about a 10 minute break and did it again. Read the rest of this entry »

This day and age it can be very difficult indeed to go to the gym.  Life is very hectic and busy, which will create a serious challenge for remaining consistent with exercise each day.  Exercise is  however, just what we all need to reduce stress, and give the body the extra energy it needs to carry out normal living.

The best results of exercise are achieved through the use of refined techniques, functional exercises, cardio, the right nutrition, variety, awareness,  consistency, and motivation over a period of time.  The refined techniques mean correct form to isolate muscles or to target areas of the body.  Efficiency is need to ensure stimulation of the muscles.

With weight lift training, which is also known as  resistance training, you’ll need to eliminate any type of momentum.    Read the rest of this entry »

In the first article in this series I dealt with the way that we can do our individual sets to increase our muscle gains in the gym. Now I would like to deal with the other issues in the gym that will make a difference in gaining muscle.

The big things that we can do to gain muscle are more or less sets, time between sets and compound versus isolated exercises.

Number of sets per exercise

This is a source of confusion for most people as I find that all bodybuilding magazines would have you doing 16-20 sets per muscle group. The thing to understand is that you want to stress the muscle but if you are not a competitive bodybuilder taking steroids or other body motivating substances then you can not recover from these incredibly grueling workouts.

The best number of sets for an exercise to really gain muscle is one warm-up and three heavier sets. With this number you can do three exercises per muscle group without overtraining the muscle and therefore ruining your workout.. If you feel this is not enough than you are not taking advantage enough of the sets you are doing. You should finish each set after your warm-up without being able to do another rep. One way to decrease the number of sets is to do your sets to more exhaustion. You over exert a set you can finish to exhaustion and then wait 10-15 seconds and try to get another rep or two in, if you can�t get a spot to get those extra reps in.
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Gaining muscle can be difficult once you have hit a plateau, this is a state where no matter what you seem to be doing you are not getting any stronger and therefore you are not gaining any muscle. This is something that really sucks and I will try to address this is three different posts. First I will deal with your sets themselves, secondly deal with your workouts and thirdly deal with the stuff going on outside the gym.

So what can you do to gain muscle and break through the plateau? Shock your muscles in entirely new ways! There are a few ways within your sets. One thing to remember when you are doing sets is the intensity of the set itself.

Your muscles are very rarely using more than a few percent of the total number of muscle fibers to do an activity. Think of how your muscles are going to work if you are doing a marathon compared to how your muscles are going to work when you are running a 100 meter sprint, a big difference.

What we want to do when lifting weights is to push our muscle fibers all as hard as possible and use as many as possible. You will likely be more interested in having legs like a sprinter not legs like a marathon runner. A sprinter uses lots of muscle fibers per step, as many as possible while a marathon runner is using very few and the muscle alternates using them so that the person can run for a far longer time. simplistic example, but hey it works! Read the rest of this entry »

Weight workouts can be tough and you may be wondering what you can do so that you can get the most out of your weight workouts. The last thing that you want after working so hard is to not get all of that last bit of muscle from the workout.

When doing weight training it is very important to make sure you are doing the following 10 things to get the most out of your workout.

Before Your Weight Workout

1. Eat a big meal 2-3 hours before your workout.. It is important for you to make sure that your eating is right, this includes a good sized meal before your evening workout. You want your meal to be high in complex carbs (grains, potatoes or rice instead of sugar) so that you will have the glycogen that you need in your muscles in time for your workout.

As soon as your workout ends your body will need to recover and if you are expecting that pre workout drink to heal you then you will be very disappointed. Read the rest of this entry »