Recommended Reading
Military Fat Burning Tips
Guaranteed To Banish Ugly Belly Fat Once & For All
And Get You In The Best Shape Of Your Life!
The answer is simple, but because the market is flooded with so much garbage all you hear or read about is either the latest supplement or "advanced" exercises. If real, solid, steel-like muscles are what you want then anytime you are introduced to a "new" or "advanced" way of performing an exercise, you'll do yourself a world of good by throwing it out the window.
Too many times do I see curious skinny gym members look over at the "gym buff" doing some funky exercise upside down on an exercise ball with one leg up flailing a pair of light dumbbells around thinking that if they learned how to perform that exercise they can look like him. Forget about it. Whether it works for him or not is irrelevant, the bottom line is that this type of exercise or anything like it will NOT work for hardgainers.
If an exercise is "new" I can almost guarantee it is far less effective then the simple, basic muscle mass building exercises. Why? Because all of the best exercises for maximum muscle growth have already been accounted for years ago. They have and always will be the number one exercises for the single purpose of how to gain muscle weight fast. Nothing compares and they will never be bested.
Basic or compound exercises allow you to lift more weight, and the heavier weight you can lift, the bigger you will be. With that in mind, what are compound exercises and which are the best for maximum muscle mass? Compound lifts, or multi-joint lifts, are weightlifting exercises that force you to use more then one muscle group, preferably 3 or more.
For example, the bench press is a compound lift because although the primary muscle used is the chest muscle, your shoulders and triceps are also helping to lift the weight. Tricep pushdowns, however, are what's called an isolation or single-joint exercise. Since this exercise just isolates a single muscle, your triceps, it doesn't stimulate nearly as much muscle growth as a compound lift would. Though there are many different compound exercises, you must focus only on those that stimulate the most amount of muscle and allow you to lift the heaviest amount of weight.
Here are the granddaddy of all compound muscle mass building exercises that you MUST include in your workout if you expect to build maximum muscle mass in the least amount of time:
1) Squats (quads, hamstrings, calves, and also has an effect on most of the upper body)
2) Deadlifts (hamstrings, quads, traps, lower back)
3) Bench Press (chest, triceps, and shoulders)
4) Shoulder Press or Military Press (shoulders and triceps)
5) Bent-Over Rows (back, biceps, lats)
6) Pull-Ups (back, biceps, lats)
7) Bar Dips (chest, triceps, shoulders)
If your workout programs to gain muscle don't include any of these exercises, then don't expect to grow very much, and don't expect to grow at all if you are a hardgainer. Try starting your workouts out with one of these exercises first, before you do any other exercises for that same muscle. This will ensure you exert most of your energy into the most important exercises, the ones that will be most responsible for your growth. For example, if you are training your shoulders, start off with the barbell shoulder press before you do any laterals, shrugs, or any other isolation exercise.
A couple of months ago, a friend asked me why he wasn't gaining any weight and getting any bigger. So I asked him to tell me about his workout. You can probably guess what it was. Sure enough, he was doing about five exercises for each muscle group, mostly isolation exercises. He wasn't doing any lower body exercises whatsoever, and the only compound exercise he was doing was everybody's favorite: the bench press.
So here is what I did: I gave him a simple but proven workout program for fast results that consisted of ONLY compound exercises, which in fact doesn't look too much different from the list of muscle mass building exercises above. I told him to just do a few sets of each exercise a few times a week and to focus on just adding weight to the bar every week. Did he grow? About five weeks later he e-mailed me back and told me of his improvements. He weighed 18 pounds heavier and added around 20 to 30 pounds to each of the compound exercises I told him to do.
Is this a common result? Those who are willing to work hard on just a few compound exercises can expect results like this, even hardgainers. Was it easy? No. He worked hard, just like everyone else who got results like this. No fancy supplements or advanced exercises, just hard work on the key muscle mass building exercises, lots of clean food and plenty of rest.
Now that you know the key muscle mass building exercises for maximum muscle growth in record time, I want you to use them! If you haven't tried any of them before then you will be in for a treat. They're tough, they're demanding, they take sweat and grit and everything you got. They're not the type of exercises you can do while you hung-over or on 3 hours of sleep. You have to have lots of energy, be properly warmed up, and fully concentrated if you want to get the most out of them.
But they will bring you more results then all of the other exercises put together.
Derek Manuel is the author of the best-selling How to Gain Weight and Build Muscle for Hardgainers. If you want to learn how you too can gain 20 to 30 pounds of solid muscle in as short as 8 weeks, or if you just want more quality information on how to gain weight and build muscle, please visit http://www.hardgainers-weight-tips.com
Military Fat Burning Tips
Guaranteed To Banish Ugly Belly Fat Once & For All
And Get You In The Best Shape Of Your Life!
If you're frustrated with your muscle gain or fat loss goals,
I sympathize with you completely, and understand exactly what
you are going through. I worked out for years before finally
figuring out the correct ways to build muscle and lose fat.
I finally figured ou that the routines and body building tips
touted by professional bodybuilders and the muscle magazines
just aren't going to work for most people. But take heart,
you can reach your muscle mass and fat burning goals.
Putting together a program that incorporates the following
body building tips will point you in the right direction and
get you making gains you hadn't thought were possible.
Tried and True Body Building Tips
Train Intensely - You must work each set until you can't do
another repetition in good form. There is no point in
stopping at a set number of reps (such as 8), if you are
capable of doing 12. Your body needs to be challenged or it
will not adapt by building new muscle or burning off body fat.
Cycle Your Intensity - In order to prevent burnout and overtraining
from training intensely, it's important to take a week off from
training every 8 - 12 weeks. If, like me, you can't stay out
of the gym that long, you should train for a week at a very low
intensity level.
Train Briefly - Your workouts need to be short. This is
a very important weight lifting tip. You should never need
to do a weight lifting routine that takes over an hour. If
you are in the gym that long, you aren't working intensely
enough. You can workout hard or long, but you can not do
both. And to succeed in building muscle, you need to workout hard.
Train Infrequently - Your body needs time to recover
from your weight training routine, so that in can adapt and
grow. If you train with weights before your body is completey
recovered, you won't add new muscle and will eventually over
train, a big no no.
These are extremely important body building tips. It seems
that your body's potential for strength increases far outweighs
your body's ability to recover. What this means is that as you
grow stronger, your body needs more time between weight training
sessions in order to recover.
Bench pressing 300 pounds is a far greater stress on your body
than bench pressing 50 pounds, even if both were maximum attempts
at the time.
Train Progressively - You need to constantly challenge
what your body can do by continuing to add more weight and/or
repetitions to your previous best effort as often as possible.
Following is a sample weight training routine that incorporates
the above weight lifting tips. If you put the other pieces in
place, such as your nutrition plan and supplementation plan,
you'll be well on your way to great gains and transforming your
physique.
1 - Squats
2 - Deadlifts
3 - Chin Ups
4 - Dips
5 - Bench Press
6 - Military Press
Here's another weight lifting tip - break in to this routine.
For the first few weeks, try working out 3 times per week on
nonconsecutive days, performing 2 working sets of each exercise,
doing 12 - 15 reps per set.
Don't train to failure.
After about a month, you can lower the reps on everthing but
Squats and Deadlifts, to the 8 - 10 rep range. Start training
to failure on some sets.
After another month, begin training to failure on all working
sets and consider only weight training two times per week to
accomodate the higher level of intensity and strengh that you've
developed.
Gregg Gillies is the founder of http://www.buildleanmuscle.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
Recommended Reading
Military Fat Burning Tips
Guaranteed To Banish Ugly Belly Fat Once & For All
And Get You In The Best Shape Of Your Life!
By Craig Ballantyne
You know the world has changed when the average lifter wants a baseball player’s physique. A big chest, a thick back, and jacked arms pretty much completes the wish list for most. Now whether or not all of these players achieved their results with steroids, I don’t know. The fact is, they sure as heck didn’t get those arms by training with kickbacks and concentration curls.
If your arms haven’t grown since you thought baseball was drug-free, then it’s time to make a change to your workouts. And I’m going to show you how to use efficient and effective exercises in a scientifically-designed plan that will add more size to your arms a week at BALCO labs.
Unlike the average gym member, the lifter that gets results trains with a plan (even on arm day). While my sets and reps scheme might be “out in left field” compared to what you are doing now, believe me, it’s guaranteed to improve on most arm training programs. But if you insist on playing in the 10-15 rep range for every exercise then you are bound to plateau and have minor-league arms. Research shows that a wide range of repetitions (from 3 reps per set to 12 reps per set) can lead to big-time gains in muscle size.
Using low reps and heavy weights for your arm exercises might go against the grain, but the following outline will work for arms and all other body parts. But for now, this is all you need to know.
In the first exercise of this workout, you’ll do 3 sets of 5 reps with a heavy weight (that allows you to complete all reps according to the guidelines below). The goal is to build absolute (“maximal”) strength and muscle mass (obviously). Increasing your absolute strength will help you lift more weight in all exercises. And if you can lift more weight, then you can train the muscles harder. In response, the muscle will get bigger to keep up to the demands of the heavy weights.
In the second exercise of the workout, you’ll use 4 sets of 8 reps. It just might be the optimal combination of intensity and volume for muscle growth and will work extremely well for lifters that have been stalled on higher rep sets.
In the third and final exercise of the workout for the arms, you’ll do 3 sets of 12 reps to add more volume to the workout and to fatigue the muscle and deplete muscle glycogen (glycogen is the name for carbohydrate stored in the muscles). High-volume training and fatigue cause the muscles to “stock up” on carbohydrate stores in preparation for the next training session. And when your muscles stock up on glycogen, they get bigger and future training sessions can be more intense. At the end of the 6 week program you’ll be blasting through these workouts with more intensity and strength than you’ve had in months.
One the trademarks of my strength-training programs, as you will see in the months to come, is to use supersets as often as possible (although there will be exceptions to the rule). With supersets, we pair two non-competing exercises together to get more work done in less time, without sacrificing strength or mass. Muscle size is not associated with how long you spend in the gym. The training goal is to get in, work hard, get out, pound a post-workout shake, get home, eat and grow.
Another way to increase the effectiveness of the training program is to focus on the tempo of the exercise. Tempo just means the speed of the exercise. For example and for our purposes, a 3-1-1 tempo means you’ll take 3 seconds to lower the weight, then you’ll pause for 1 second, and then you’ll lift the weight back up in 1 second. A slow eccentric (lowering) tempo and a fast concentric (lifting) tempo will work your Type II muscle fibers the hardest – these are fibers that have the greatest potential for muscle growth. So you’ll get your best strength and mass gains by using that general tempo arrangement.
You may have gone through a tempo phase in the past for a couple of weeks and then due to human nature you probably got lazy and forgot about using it. But for the next 6 arm workouts, I want you to stick to the prescribed tempo. You’ll see and feel the benefits after the first workout.
Now all that remains is to choose the best exercises for building big arms. With the help of scientific research, experience, and some recommendations from Charles Poliquin, I’ve put together some of the most efficient and effective arm exercises for mass and strength.
After the 4-week arm assault I want you to cut back on your arm training for 1 week to allow your muscles to grow (and adapt to the training). If you regularly include an off-week in your training plan, take it here. Otherwise, skip your arm workout in week 5. You can return in week 6 with a new variation of this program. By the end of the program your results should be strikingly obvious and you might even be getting calls from major league sluggers for training tips.
Training Recommendations
Note: This program is for advanced lifters only. If you are a beginner, you’ll need only 1 set per exercise for the first two weeks and only two sets in weeks 3 & 4.
Do this workout 6 times in 4 weeks.
Week 1 – Wednesday & Saturday
Week 2 – Wednesday
Week 3 – Wednesday & Saturday
Week 4 – Wednesday
Week 5 – Recovery week
Reduce the amount of direct shoulder training you do in the 4 week arm training phase.
Exercise descriptions: See the bottom of the article.
Warm-up: For a specific warm-up, perform 2 sets of each exercise in the first Superset. Start with 50% and then 75% of the weight you will use in your first “real set”. Perform 8 repetitions for each warm-up set.
Each pair of exercises constitutes a “Superset”. In each Superset, do one set of the first exercise (1A) followed immediately by the next exercise (1B). Rest 1 minute and repeat.
Use a proper weight for each exercise that allows you to get all repetitions completed with perfect form and the recommended tempo. It will require you to decrease the weights by at least 10% on most exercises.
Superset #1
Sets: 3
Reps: 5
Tempo: 5-0-1
1A) Close-grip Rack Lockout Bench Press
1B) Close-grip EZ-Bar Preacher Curl
Superset #2
Sets: 4
Reps: 8
Tempo: 3-1-1
2A) Decline DB Triceps Extensions
2B) DB Incline Curls
Superset #3
Sets: 3
Reps: 12
Tempo: 3-0-1
3A) Lying EZ-Bar Triceps Extension
3B) Seated DB Zottman Curls
Exercise Descriptions
Close-grip Rack Lockout Bench Press
• Move a flat bench into the middle of the squat rack.
• Set the pins 6-inches above your chest. You’ll perform only the top half of a close-grip bench press.
• Keep your feet flat on the floor, legs bent, and upper back flat against the bench.
• Grip the bar using a shoulder-width grip & have your spotter help you take the bar from the rack.
• Keep your elbows close to your sides, lower the bar straight down to the pins according to the tempo.
• Pause briefly and then press the bar up in a straight line.
• Poliquin recommends that you keep a very small bend in your elbows at the top of triceps exercises in order to keep the muscles working at all times.
Decline DB Triceps Extensions
• Lie on the decline bench with your feet anchored appropriately.
• Press the dumbbells over your chest to the start position and turn your palms in so that they face one another.
• Start the movement by bending the elbow and lower the dumbbells down and beside your head.
• Pause and hold for one second and then contract your triceps to extend your arms and move the dumbbells back to the start position.
Lying EZ-Bar Triceps Extension
• Lie flat on a bench with dumbbells in each hand. Hold the dumbbells at arms length over your chest, with your palms facing each other.
• Bend the elbows and lower the dumbbells behind your head.
• Pause briefly at the bottom, and then contract the triceps and extend your arms back up to the starting position.
Close-grip EZ-Bar Preacher Curl
• Sit at the preacher curl bench with a narrow, palms-up grip on the EZ-Bar.
• Poliquin recommends that you set the height of the seat so the tops of your thighs are parallel to the floor.
• Lean forward so that your armpits are at in contact with the top of the preacher bench and as you lower the bar your triceps are in contact with the padding of the bench.
• Lower the bar until your arms are stretched.
• Pause briefly and then contract your biceps to curl the bar back up to the top position.
• Poliquin also recommends that you keep your wrists cocked back throughout the full range of motion.
Seated DB Incline Curls
• Set the incline of the bench at 80 degrees (in an almost upright position).
• Sit on the bench with a dumbbell in each hand and your palms turned up.
• Lean back and keep your back and head against the bench at all times throughout the exercise.
• Perform alternating dumbbell curls with each hand. Keep the palm up throughout the entire exercise.
Seated DB Zottman Curls
• The Zottman curl is simply a dumbbell curl performed with a “palms down” grip as you lower the dumbbell and a “palms-up” grip as your lift the dumbbell. It’s like doing a curl followed by a reverse curl.
• Set an adjustable bench so that the back is upright. Sit down and hold a dumbbell in each hand at arms length with your palm turned up.
• Contract the biceps and curl the dumbbell up to shoulder height.
• At the top of the movement, turn your palm down and lower the dumbbell back to the start position.
• Poliquin recommends that you keep your elbows glued to your sides throughout the lifting and lowering portion of the exercise.
Craig Ballantyne is a Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist and writes for Men's Fitness, Maximum Fitness, Muscle and Fitness Hers, and Oxygen magazines. His trademarked Turbulence Training fat loss workouts have been featured multiple times in Men’s Fitness and Maximum Fitness magazines, and have helped thousands of men and women around the world lose fat, gain muscle, and get lean in less than 45 minutes three times per week. For more information on the Turbulence Training workouts that will help you burn fat without long, slow cardio sessions or fancy equipment, visit http://www.TurbulenceTraining.com
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