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Glutamine is an essential amino acid and has been very much in the news over the last couple of years. Out of all the amino acids, glutamine is probably the most important for people that workout regularly and anyone that is trying to lose weight will want to consider supplementing with glutamine.

Glutamine is highly in demand throughout the body. It is used by the immune system to maintain optimal performance. most of the free-form amino acids floating in skeletal muscles is glutamine. Glutamine plays a very important role in protein metabolism, and it is a very important nutrient for body builders. When supplemented, glutamine may help anyone that exercises to reduce the amount of muscle deterioration that occurs because other tissues that need glutamine will not rob the glutamine stored in the muscle cells. One of the problems that people have when trying to lose weight through exercise is that when you run out of carbs for your body to use (glycogen) then your body will use protein and fat for energy. Using Glutamine will lower the amount of protein used and instead your body will use your fat for energy. Read the rest of this entry »

As a hardgainer you know how hard it is to put on muscle. The hours in the gym, the eating, the constant weighting yourself on the scale, it is all very difficult to take but you keep trying to gain muscle anyway.
There are a few things that you can do to try to gain more muscle and I believe that if you have a plan even the toughest of hardgainers can still gain a few pounds in a couple of months. As you know most bodybuilders not on roids can only gain about two pounds a month but if you make radical changes then you can gain weight rather quickly for a short amount of time.

So here are some tips to get better gains in the gym:

1.    The key to gaining muscle is to conserve your energy in an almost slothlike style. When as a hardgainer you are doing your workout try to get the most muscle fibers working in the least number of sets and reps.

2.    Skip the cardio. Even though you know that you are trying to get yourself in better shape you still want to keep the cardio out of your workout. As you do cardio workouts your hard earned muscle is going to disappear as you lose your  fat…but you do not have any fat to speak of do you?

3.    Hardgainers need to mix up the workouts still to confuse your muscles into jumping in strength and mass.

So now I am going to get into some detail. What kind of workouts should you try in order to gain some more muscle? The key I believe in making gains is to break up your workouts and do high weight – low rep workouts that will really shock your muscles.

What you need to do is go to a two day split where you work chest, shoulders and triceps in one workout and legs, back and biceps on another day with two cycles of this a week. A total of four workouts a week is all that you really need.

One of the real problems that Muscle and Fitness as well as other magazines has is the idea that you need to do 20 sets per muscle group. This may be true for a steroid using pro but for normal mortals we can only get away with four to six sets per muscle group. Here is a sample of how you should do a chest workout.

1 set of 12 reps of light flat bench to warm up
2 sets of 6 reps of bench press at as close to max as possible
2 sets of 6 reps of cable crossovers at max weight
2 sets of 6 reps of incline flyes at max weight.

A few things to note about this is that after the workout you should feel sick from the amount of weight that you have lifted but at the same time you should not be exhausted as you did only a few reps. This kind of workout will tax your muscles with the minimum really of number of reps for muscle gain while at the same time you should stay away from overtraining with only a few reps and sets.