Getting bigger muscles is the top priority of anyone working out with weights. Lets look at how your muscles get bigger and then you can figure out what it will take for you to increase your muscle gains.

Muscle hypertrophy

Muscle hypertrophy is when your muscles cells get thicker. You muscle cells will thicken but not lengthen and it is still up in the air as to whether your muscles cell will actually split or divide to get larger. The best way to cause muscle hypertrophy is to put pressure on your muscles so that they expect to need to push more weight.

Another form of muscle building is Muscle Hyperplasia and this is the actual splitting of muscle cells. Anyone that has seen a giant bodybuilder has to wonder if we all have the same number of cells

Resistance training

Resistance training is doing weights. It is just about that simple. What you really want is to make yourself stronger by making your body more able to handle heavier and heavier weight for at least four reps. Power lifters as you have probably seen in the Olympics are not the biggest guys and that is because their goal is to lift the most weight for exactly one rep. To fool your muscles into thinking that they have to be able to lift more weight they will need to do a few reps at the higher weight. Your body will then get used to this higher weight by increading the strength of the individual muscle cells

How big should your workout be?

There are many strategies to get stronger and the idea behind all of these strategies is to be able to lift more weight for a few reps a month from now then your are doing now. You have a few options and they are these

• Number of reps per set
• Number of sets per exercise
• Number of exercises per muscle group
• Amount of rest between workouts

All of these parameters are a little too much to cover in this article so I will cover them later but for now just think about how you are structuring your workouts and frequency of workouts.

I hope that this info helps you understand how to get bigger and better at working out I hope you that if you have any questions then you can of course leave comments here as well.

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If you are trying to gain muscle there are a few things that people do to sabotage themselves. I have done a few of these things in the past and just wanted to drop these here to let you know as I have nowhere else to put it.

Don’t drink booze. Alcohol is very bad for your metabolism and it will stop you from making any gains at all in the gym as well as punishing your body with dehydration, one thing you really do not need.

Although I did once write a bit on how great beer was for you, this is one of the worst things for your muscles as that old dehydration and lack of metabolism will really sap your gains. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the years I have seen a lot of flimsy ideas of how to get a set of six pack abs. The most common scams are special machines that will do it and sometimes some kind of drink. I remember at one point Slim Fast seemed to be showing chubby people suddenly spawning a set of six pack abs.

Anyway I wanted to put this notion to rest that there is some magic to getting a six pack. Sure there is some genetics involved in sculpting perfect abs but the two most important factors are diet and exercise.

What? Did you think there was a shortcut?

Six Pack Abs Diet

The diet part is fairly simple; you need to drop any extra fat. You have probably heard this before but there is no such thing as spot reduction when you are losing weight. You will lose weight proportionately, generally, as you lose weight. What you may find is that you have a large stomach and if that is the case of course you will lose that fat faster than you lose the fat on your legs but that is just because that is where the fat deposits will be easiest for your body to use.
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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 »