Who doesn’t want to have a lean and muscular physique like that of the ones we see in body building competitions? If you want to learn how to get lean muscle fast, though; you must first understand there is no shortcut to having such an amazing body. Body building requires you to set goals and stick to very intense physical exercises to achieve those goals – it requires dedication

Many bodybuilders want to get massive because it is a signature of successful bodybuilding. If you are not fully aware of the procedures needed to be followed in order to get massive you will end up spending a lot of time in the gym. That is the reason why many bodybuilders end up using steroids. They hope that when they use steroids they will be able to increase there muscle mass fast.

The first step in how to get muscular fast is most definitely the most important one, especially for skinny hardgainers who struggle to gain weight and muscle. Proper nutrition is the key to gaining muscle mass, and the reason why many folks fail. To get muscular you’ll need to up your calorie intake – to at least 3,500 calories per day for an average male.
This may seem like a lot, but split over 6 meals per day it is achievable. It goes without saying that the best way is to get as much of this protein from natural sources like lean meats, fish, egg whites, nuts, beans and pulses. Using a good quality protein shake like a 100% Whey isolate, is a great way to give yourself the extra protein boost you need, particularly when used as a post-workout drink.

In gyms everywhere, you will see people doing bicep curls after bicep curls. If someone were to ask them to show their muscles, they will most likely flex their biceps. How about you? Well, since you are reading this article, then you must have known that to own huge muscular arms, you must build huge triceps.

Sure, it has been a year or several months and you have been training like mad, taking supplements eating right and you still have only marginal gains and plenty of surprised faces when you tell people how long you have been going to the gym.

rain like it’s the last workout you are ever going to do. That means moving swiftly from exercise to exercise, giving it your all for every set and rep, timing your rest periods and making sure you commit to them. This will increase the intensity of the workout making it more beneficial and it will also decrease the amount of time spent in the gym. There are so many people who go to the gym 3-4 times a week, but don’t put in 100% effort when they are there, and so they see very little results. Create a hard working attitude and you will get muscular very quickly.

If you want to go from skinny to muscle man you may find it more difficult than you imagine as many skinny guys get their gym memberships, throw back a few protein shakes, eat lots of tuna & chicken, read the bodybuilding magazines and train one body part a day … then find themselves exhausted, out of money and hardly any real muscle mass to show for it!

This ‘traditional’ approach to bodybuilding may work for guys with great muscle building genes but if you are naturally skinny you are going to need a different approach; these 3 simple tips can show you how.

Dead lifts and Squats

Dead lifts & squats are arguably THE best exercises for building muscle and power in your body. Just doing these two exercises alone work out nearly 75% of the muscles in your body as they are not isolated exercises. They will primarily work on your traps, shoulders, arms, back. Gluts, hams, calves and core muscles.

The intensity of these exercises will also spike your growth hormones which are essential to growing muscles not just in one part of your body but all parts which is essential for the skinny guy that needs muscular mass everywhere.

Just do Compound Exercises

Forget working on muscles in isolation! If you just exercise the smallest muscles like your biceps or calves you will end up with just that … small muscles!

Stay with exercises that activate multiple muscle groups and have multiple limb movements because the more effort and muscles you bring in the bigger the benefit for your whole body and overall muscle growth.

Be Honest with Rest Periods

This is a crucial but often overlooked aspect of bodybuilding and to go from skinny to muscle bound you really need to pay attention to this.

The body requires more recovery time after doing a heavier weight set than a lighter weight set. This means that if you are training for strength you need to give your body a good three to five minutes rest between sets but if you are training for muscle size then you require a shorter period of about 60-90 seconds. This means that if you do not have the appropriate rest times for your exercises you do not give the body and nervous system and honest workout.

This also means you can monitor your strength gains if you time your rest periods because if you have the same rest periods but start lifting heavier weights you can see an increase but if you are lax in your rest periods it might mean you think you are lifting heavier weights more but end up just resting more skewing your perceived increase dishonestly.

These three simple skinny to muscle bodybuilding steps will have you putting on rapid muscle growth and strength increases all over your body just like a certain skinny guy once did who became a champion bodybuilder and fitness coach.

Click below to find out how he did it and how he can help YOU.

http://www.skinnytomuscle.net

Can you think of anything more torturous than spending an hour pedaling away on a bike or plodding along on the treadmill? You’re not alone. Most exercise enthusiasts dread conventional cardio – why?

Because it’s b-o-r-i-n-g.

So why do it at all? The goal of a cardio workout is to lose the unwanted inches and to develop the efficiency of your heart and lungs. But new studies are out that show our slow-go cardio sessions may not be as effective for burning off that holiday bulge as we thought.

When you plod along on the treadmill at an even pace, your body enters what is called a steady state. This means that your body has adjusted to the pace and is now trying to conserve energy.

Conserve energy? But I thought the point was to burn energy?

And so your dilemma goes: You can’t stand the monotony of traditional cardio and it leaves you with less than satisfactory results. So what should you do?

The answer is HIIT, a new training technique that blasts both boredom and fat.

“In research, HIIT has been shown to burn adipose (fat) tissue more effectively than low-intensity exercise – up to 50% more efficiently.”

“HIIT speeds up your metabolism and keeps it revved up for some time after your workout. The bottom line is that HIIT training burns a greater number of total calories than low-intensity training, and more calories burned equals less fat on your body.”

What is HIIT?

High-Intensity Interval Training: is an exercise strategy that improves performance with short training sessions. These sessions involve a warm up period, several short, maximum-intensity efforts that are separated by moderate recovery intervals, and a cool down period.

In other words, your 60 minutes of low-intensity cardio is replaced with more effective, High Intensity Interval Training for as little as 15 minutes. The addition of explosions of speed into your comfortable pace will increase your power, muscle tone, speed, strength, endurance and best of all will melt the inches off.

Here is an example of a HIIT program – this can be done on any form of cardio equipment or even jogging outside or swimming laps:

* Start with an easy 4 minute warm up, casually increasing your pace to the one that you usually maintain for your workout.

* Once you are sufficiently warm, sky rocket your intensity for 30 seconds.

* Return to your normal pace for the next 30 seconds and then sky rocket again.

* Repeat this 30-30 interval for 6 minutes and then gradually decrease your intensity as you enter a cooling off pace.

After your HIIT session you can expect to burn more calories due to an increase in your metabolism – sounds good, right? If you aren’t ready to jump into a full-fledged HIIT session, try on of the following modified HIIT workouts:

Modified HIIT 1:

* Start with at least a 5 minute warm up, casually increasing your pace to the one that you usually maintain for your workout.

* Once you are sufficiently warm, increase your intensity for a full minute.

* Return to your normal pace and remain here until you have recovered enough to go again.

* Repeat this 1 minute interval with full recovery time between each one for the full extent of your workout and then gradually decrease your intensity as you enter a cooling off pace.

Modified HIIT 2:

* Start with at least a 5 minute warm up, casually increasing your pace to the one that you usually maintain for your workout.

* Once you are sufficiently warm, change your speed and intensity for 2 minutes.

* Return to your normal pace for 2 minutes and then change your intensity and speed again. The key is to keep your body guessing – you aren’t doing full intensity work, but you also aren’t staying at the same pace for the entire length of the workout.

* Repeat this 2 minute interval for the full extent of your workout and then gradually decrease your intensity as you enter a cooling off pace.

There you have it – all you need to take your cardio workout to the next level.

The more work you put into something, the better results you will achieve. This has always been a widely accepted truth that applies to many areas of life. The harder you study, the better grades you will achieve. The more time you spend fine-tuning your athletic skills, the better athlete you will become. The longer you spend learning to play an instrument, the better musician you will become. Therefore, it only makes sense that the more time you spend in the gym, the stronger and more muscular your physique will become, correct? Contrary to what you might think, the answer to this question is a gigantic, definite, absolute no! It is in this area of bodybuilding that conventional wisdom goes straight out the window, down the street and around the corner.

I know what you might be asking yourself…

“What? Spending less time in the gym will actually make me bigger and stronger?”

Yes! It really will, and when we examine the muscle-growth process from its most basic roots, it becomes quite clear why this is the case.

Every single process that occurs within the human body is centered around keeping you alive and healthy. Through thousands of years of evolution the human body has become quite a fine-tuned organism that can adapt well to the specific conditions that are placed upon it. We become uncomfortable when we are hungry or thirsty, we acquire a suntan when high amounts of UV rays are present, we build calluses to protect our skin, etc. So what happens when we break down muscle tissue in the gym? If you answered something to the effect of “the muscles get bigger and stronger”, then congratulations! You are absolutely correct. By battling against resistance beyond the muscle’s present capacity we have posed a threat to the musculature. The body recognizes this as potentially harmful and as a natural adaptive response the muscles will hypertrophy (increase in size) to protect the body against this threat. As we consistently increase the resistance from week to week the body will continue to adapt and grow.

Sound simple? Ultimately it is, but the most important thing to realize in relation to all of this is that the muscles can only grow bigger and stronger if they are provided with sufficient recovery time. Without the proper recovery time, the muscle growth process simply cannot take place.

Your goal in the gym should be to train with the minimum amount of volume needed to yield an adaptive response. Once you have pushed your muscles beyond their present capacity and have triggered your thousand-year-old evolutionary alarm system, you have done your job. Any further stress to the body will simply increase your recovery time, weaken the immune system and send your body into catabolic overdrive.

Most people train way too often and with far more sets than they really need to. High intensity weight training is much more stressful to the body than most people think. The majority of people structure their workout programs in a manner that actually hinders their gains and prevents them from making the progress that they deserve. Here are 3 basic guidelines that you should follow if you want to achieve maximum gains:

1) Train no more than 3 days per week. 2) Do not let your workouts last for longer then 1 hour. 3) Perform 5-8 sets for large muscle groups (chest, back, thighs) and 2-4 sets for smaller muscle groups (shoulders, biceps, triceps, calves, abs).

Take all sets to the point of muscular failure and focus on progressing in either weight or reps each week. If you truly train hard and are consistent, training more often or any longer than this will be counterproductive to your gains!

2nd and last part



So what to do?

 



 



*choose weights that can properly tax your muscles

 

 

Repetitions should be in the region of 6-8.Increasing muscle mass needs hard effort and demands exceeding our limits!

 

Throw away the 5kg dumbbells which devour your most valuable resource and grab some decent stuff!

 

 

*Exercise at least 3 times/week with total body workouts.Leave split workouts for the bodybuilders.Try to involve the biggest muscle groups.Perform only compound,multi functional exercises.

 

 

*minimize or completely eliminate the breaks trying thus to impart an aerobic character to your workouts and achieve maximum fat loss.

 

 

* perform strenuous workouts but don’t omit to allow ample recovery time to avoid the very existent danger of overtraining!

 

I know many fitness enthusiasts that have fallen victims to overtraining.So much effort in vain! It’s a pity! With weight training, more in not better!

 

Let’s go now to fat reduction

 



 



 

Ceasar’s wife should be honest and look honest!!

 



 

Ok! We have developed an impressive musculature .Though, it is not well discernible.Why?

 

Because our fat percentage won’t permit it.Our muscles are hidden under a layer of subcutaneous fat.

 

 

You should do two things to reduce your body fat percentage:

 

 

*aerobic exercise

 

*adopt a sound nutritional plan

 

 

Nutrition is the most critical parameter for fat loss!

 

 

Aerobic activity

 



 

Properly done, an aerobic activity of medium to high intensity will help you shed a lot of fat and it will achieve this relatively quickly.

 

I know people with single digit body fat who will never involve in aerobics! But they are monsters of self-discipline!They are the exceptions!

 

 

Let’s see what our options are :

 

 -If you are really fit and your schedule is hectic, HIIT is unbeatable!

 

:-Another option is to run for 30-45′ at about the 80% of your MHR just below your anaerobc threshold.If you have the stamina to do this you will shed tons of fat!!

 

Personally, I would never underestimate the aerobic part of the fat loss equation.I consider this of vital importance!

 

 

When your workout includes both resistance training and aerobics,do ececute them with this order.

 

You will need your maximum strength and endurance for your weights session.

 

 

About nutrition





As far as it regards muscle definition ,a sound nutritional plan is considered to be an absolute must.

You may exercise 1hour/day but there are another 161 hours/week that you don’t !!

Put it simply:all your hard efforts will go in vain if you don’t make right nutrition a top priority!

You will never see your fetish abs!

Check about nutrition here





Essential parameters of nutrition







-If you aim at fat loss you will have to create a slight caloric deficit:burn more calories that those you consume

-While you are trying to achieve definition you will will have to exclude any type of junk food.

Give great emphasis to high quality protein.Every meal should contain a source of premium quality protein.

-You will have to reduce starchy carbs and fruits in favor of vegetables. Eat vegetables at your will. Include them in every meal.

-Only 15% of your caloric intake should come from fats.First choices: omega-3 and monounsaturated fats.

In conclusion







To achieve most coveted muscle definition you will need:

- a taxing strength training program

-to increase and intensify the aerobic part of your training regime

-and the most important:to follow an impeccable nutrition plan

Chris Strogilis



 

Many men and some women are interested in building muscle mass. Building muscle mass will not only increase our metabolism rate but also give a stronger more solid body. Whatever reasons that you have for building muscle mass, be it to look better or get fitter or even because you are in the bodybuilding business, you must know that building muscle mass is serious stuff. Building muscle mass with the wrong techniques will injure your body only. There are rules that you have to follow:

1) Form and technique – This is the most important rule! You must and i stress again, you must learn the correct form and technique. Many professionals have brought this issue to light but many people are still not listening and dismissing this important rule. Without proper form and technique you risk injuring your body and may even have to stop your training program if the injury becomes serious. One way you can do this is just ask and get advice from a personal trainer or even any bodybuilder in the gym. You can even request them to have a few sessions with you for you to understand and learn the proper form and technique.

2) Consistency – You are interested in building muscle mass but how committed are you? Many people can easily say “yes i want to build muscle” but they do not commit themselves to continue working out and some stop even after a month or less. One main ingredient to building muscle mass is consistency. You have to be consistent and stay focused till the end. Get support from your friends and family. Get a gym buddy to help you out or find a professional in the gym and nicely ask if you could join him daily in his workout. Besides training consistently, you have to ensure you eat well and sleep well consistently too.

3) Weights – Many people go to the gym and when they look at the professionals lifting heavy weights, they want to copy them as well. They think that by lifting heavy they will get bigger and stronger faster. Professionals have also state that you do not go heavy in the beginning. If you lift heavy right away, you risk injuring your body and develop poor mass. You must note that building muscle mass or bodybuilding is progressive, correct techniques and consistency.

4) Rest – One very very important rule is to recover and rest well everyday after your training. It is important not to overtrain yourself. Professionals state that you should not to train the same muscle group two days in a row. The reason why rest and recovery is important is because it allows your muscles to rebuild and as they do, they get bigger. When you work out, the muscle fibers in the muscle tissue tear through the reps you perform. When you rest, the fibers rebuild themselves but they also produce protein filaments resulting in you gaining more muscle mass.

5) Diet – Proper diet is another important rule. The kitchen is another battle you have to win. Proper diet including meal frequency, meal size and the type of food you consume affects your body greatly. Proper diet will help your you and your body to be able to train and recover efficiently everyday. It is crucial that you maintain a balanced diet and be consistent as it is just as important as exercise.

Therefore, when thinking of building muscle mass, do remember these 5 rules and you will not go wrong.

Have you ever tried doing cardio (aerobic) training to lose fat? Did you try the popular method of spending long durations (like 45 minutes to an hour) at a gentle pace so you could be in the so-called “Fat-Burning Zone?”

Me too.

And did you get the body you were after?

Me neither!

I believe this is because there’s no such thing as “The Fat-Burning Zone.” In fact, I think the whole idea is a myth. Just look around the gym at all those fat people you see plodding slowly away on their treadmills and cycling machines, month in and month out, with no results, and you’ll be forced to agree with me. I think the idea of a special “zone” sells well because it sounds scientific, especially when explained by “experts.” It also seems nice and easy – people don’t like to hear that they need to work intensely and sweat hard. But the truth is that gentle and moderate exercise is just going to give you, well, gentle and moderate results.

Because of this failure, all cardio training has unfortunately been given quite a bad name recently, with many trainers and authors rushing out to condemn it as useless. They’re often not being totally honest with you though, and have usually got something to sell you – like “Underground Four-Second Fat Blasting Functional Secrets From Russia!” or something to that effect.

Proper cardio training has always been excellent for fat loss. Here’s the thing though: Proper cardio means intense cardio. To make it work, you have to be seriously sweating. If you exercise so gently that you can read a book or watch TV or even talk on a mobile phone, then naturally you’re going to get no results. Proper cardio training also means doing it for a long enough duration. No, you don’t need to spend an hour or more doing your cardio – but you do need to spend at least 20 minutes if you want to see results.

All this, by the way, is also why I have little time or patience for people who say that all you have to do is take the stairs instead of the elevator at work, or that you can get “all the exercise you need” by doing housework and gardening. That may be good enough for the average person, but why settle for average?

If your aspirations are higher than merely “having a healthy heart” or “avoiding diabetes,” it follows that the quality – and quantity – of your workouts must be that much higher too.

Do you know what it really takes to build big muscles? Do you think it’s as simple as buying a gym membership, training each body once per week, slamming back some protein shakes and trying to eat as much chicken and tuna possible? Viola, you are big enough to enter a bodybuilding contest. Can you imagine it was that easy to build big muscles? Unfortunately, your monthly gym membership, regular weight training workouts and casual eating habits, isn’t going to cut it. Here are five simple steps to getting big muscles fast :

Squat and Deadlift

Squatting and Deadlifting are known as two of the Big Three exercises that are responsible for power and mass muscle building. Consider these two animal exercises the kings of the jungle! Without them, you do not have a chance of survival. These two exercises alone, work out about 75% of your entire musculature, including your traps, shoulders, arms, back. Glutes, hams, calves and core muscles.

Not to mention the degree of intensity, squats and dead lifts force your body to release greater volumes of growth hormone, which results in bigger muscles all over your body. This spillover effect results in strength gains in all you other lifts which translates into a more muscular you! Squatting and dead lifting are especially critical for hard gainers because of the hormonal spikes affecting the entire body.

Stick to Compound Exercises

What is going to isolate more muscle fibers? A bench press or cable cross over? A military press or lateral raise? A chin up or bicep curl? A dip or tricep kickback? If you ever hope to get big muscles than compound lifts are not optional, they are mandatory. Stick to squats, leg presses, deadlifts, bench preses, barbell rows, pull ups, chin ups, over head presses, and dips.

If all you do is concentrate on building your puny muscles like arms and calves, then you will end up with exactly what you focus on – puny muscles!

Keep Your Rest Periods Honest

When was the last time you were in the gym and you watched the average guy time his recovery with a stop watch? Stop watches are not just for endurance athletes but should be used by every person who is serious about building big muscles.

Generally, the closer you lift to your one rep max, the longer the rest period and the higher the number of reps, the shorter the rest period. This is a crucial variable, which is often overlooked, yet will determine whether you create the correct training response.

For example, if you are training for maximal strength which requires at least 3-5 minutes rest between sets and you are only taking 2 minutes, you are not giving your nervous system an honest workout. If you are training for muscle size which requires shorter 30-90 second style recoveries but are gazing at the cute girl on the elliptical letting your rest periods carry over these ranges, you are not giving your metabolic system an honest workout.

Lastly, how do you know if you are truly stronger if you do not monitor your rest period? For example, let’s say last week you bench pressed 135 pounds for four sets of ten. This week you bench pressed 145 pounds for four sets of ten. Assuming the rest period was identical for both workouts, this is a tremendous improvement and a measurable sign of improvement! However, what if you took an extra minute or two between each set on the recent workout? This means that you did not actually become stronger. You just had a longer rest period!

Conclusion

You now know that building big muscles is not easy as showing up at the gym and throwing back a few protein shakes. Apply these three simple steps in your next program and I promise that you will start building big strong muscles all over your body!

There is much advice floating around both on and offline about how to build muscle fast. As a personal trainer myself here are a few little known facts and secrets that I personally consider worth your while contemplating on your quest to build muscle mass:

I often hear that you should train each muscle group just once a week. Whilst this may be provide optimal progress for extremely hardgainers it is not true for the vast majority of people. Of course you need to avoid overtraining but in life generally you get good at things by doing them  more often not less and this is true to some extent in bodybuilding too. Muscle groups should be hit at least twice a week, no less. In fact ideally you should push your body through periods of near overtraining an then drop off into periods of undertraining. This provides times when there is a lot of stress for the body to handle and other times when the body has more time to recover and build momentum for another push. This will prevent you from hitting training plateaus.

Ensure that your training sessions don’t exceed 45 minutes. If you think that is not long enough then either your routine is too long or you don’t workout intensely enough. Focussing on intensity and quality should ensure that 45 mins is more than enough time. If your training session lasts more than this then testosterone levels fall significantly because of the increased cortisol production which actually causes the body to eat muscle tissue plus store fat. completely the opposite to what we are after.

You need to cycle your training. after a while a workout loses its ability to stimulate growth as your body has already adapted to it. You ought to alter your session before you stop making gains from the program. You need to ensure that you don’t change your training sessions to frequently either. Doing so could confuse your bodies muscles overly so and stop it working its way into a nice groove.

Big gains are unlikely to occur for you if you don’t use the correct exercises. The classic time proven muscle building exercises are the multi-joint exercises otherwise known as compound exercises. The best ones are: dead lifts, bench presses, rows, squats, pull ups, shoulder presses plus any exercise that moves your entire body through air ie, not just moving individual limbs. If you use these exercises, with a few of their variations and correct muscle building nutrition then you can’t help but stimulate muscle mass growth. With those points in mind it is time to go hit the gym and get huge.

 

The absolute number one most important factor to building muscle is to have the correct bodybuilding diet plan.  It does not matter if you are now a 98 pounder just starting out, or an experienced, ripped expert – your diet contributes is at least 60% to your success or failure when building a lean body.

You may think you understand nutrition the way you should, and you may think that a bodybuilding diet plan should be radically different that a plan that a normal person would use- nothing could be further from the truth.

Good nutrition is good nutrition, no matter what your level of physical activity.  Don’t fall into the trap that many who are working at building muscle fall into – you need a balanced diet and slow, steady progress regardless if you are working at building muscle or not.

Over use of supplements can be hard on your kidneys and liver – also be careful about your protein intake as a percentage of your total calories.  You need carbs, protein and fats in the right balance to build healthy muscle tissue.

The right bodybuilding diet plan is really the same as any good diet plan – balanced, safe and focused on long-term, steady progress.  Follow this common-sense advice and you’ll see the ultimate results you are looking for.

Disclaimer: This article is based on information freely available in the popular press and medical journals that deal with health. Nothing herein is intended to be or should be construed to be any sort of medical advice. For medical advice the reader should consult with his or her physician or other medical specialist.