Welcome to Westy's Workouts » muscle building tip

BUILDING MUSCLE TIPS #2 – WHAT AND WHEN TO EAT TO BUILD MUSCLE FAST

Scrampy — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 05:27:39 +0000

Building Muscle Tips #2

Eat To Build Muscle

I’ve heard it said that building muscle is as easy as lifting heavy and eating. This may be an over simplification but it’s fairly accurate. There’s a bit more to it than just lifting weights and eating food suggests, but it pretty much sums it up.

Lets get into a little more detail though.

We mentioned in Building Muscle Tip #1 that the body experiences tiny tears and fractures in the muscles while you work out lifting heavy weights. This is a good thing because you’re teaching your body to grow and adapt to the increased workload. The important thing is to keep increasing the workload so you keep growing. So how does your body actually grow?

That’s the other half… Nutrition! Your body feeds on the foods you put in it to re-build the muscle fibers and make your body stronger. Therefore you MUST eat good wholesome food to nourish your body. Otherwise you will not achieve the gains you’re aiming for.

This step is as important (or almost MORE important) than actually lifting the weights. We’ve all seen someone who practically lives on KFC and McDonald’s without exercising. They’re fat and greasy, just like the food. Is that the way you want to feed your body?

Now don’t get me wrong, if you like a bit of take away food, go for it, now and then. It’s good to take a break once in a while. You’ll actually teach your body to “expect anything!” when it comes to food as well as lifting weights. A healthy “non-healthy” day is good for you.

However, if you want to make consistent gains then only good fresh and nutrient rich foods must be consumed the majority of the time.

Building Muscle Tips Eating For Muscle Gain Guidelines

Get a Good Source Of Whey Protein Supplement and keep your protein intake high

Eat 5-7 meals spread out through the day

Drink Plenty Of Water (If you’re thirsty, you’re already dehydrated!)

Avoid Saturated Fats, chemicals and preservatives

These guidelines will keep you in an ANABOLIC state. This is a state of metabolism where your body is constantly repairing your muscles and you’re actually growing. You’ll see that the actual growth occurs not during the workout, but during the hours and hours after and between your workouts.

All your doing during your workout is stimulating your body to adapt and repair itself. You do a good job (i.e. you work hard!) and your body will be craving all sorts of foods and good nutrients to nourish your new bigger, stronger muscles. Get used to being a big eater!

Some of my favorite meals for keeping my appetite at bay are:

Building Muscle Tips For Main Meal Ideas

Brown Rice and Fish (whatever looks tasty at the market!) with a leafy green salad

Scrambled Eggs on Toast (this is great any time but it’s obviously great as a breakfast meal any day of the week)

Steak and Potatoes/Sweet potatoes + Broccoli or Spinach (great for dinner!)

Wholemeal Pasta (or brown rice) Salad with Boiled Eggs, kidney beans and loads of fresh summer vegetables

There are so many variations of food available to you. Many people will find that the best place to shop for these ingredients are not the supermarket but your local fresh food market. If you live near an Asian part of town, go there and you’ll get some of the best seafood and fresh vegetables you’re likely to find anywhere.

As a bit of an in between meal I will often snack on either a protein shake or one of many easy protein sources.

Building Muscle Tips For Muscle Building Snacks

Canned Tuna (a staple food for bodybuilders for more than 50 years!)

Canned baked beans (yep… high in protein)

Protein Snack bar (these often have good multivitamin supplements to boost your nutrient levels too)

Mixed Raw Nuts and Seeds (Great source of UN-Saturated Fats and great to help you stay in an anabolic state)

Vita Wheats / Other High Fiber Cerial + Whey Protein Powder Sprinkled on top

Eating regularly the highest quality foods will provide you with the nutrition your body needs to build muscle mass fast. Your body will look as good as the food you put into it. So feed it well, and stay strong.

Where did I get my muscle building nutrition ideas? Sean Nalewanyj. He’s the former skinny guy and successful author of The Truth About Building Muscle. The best and most informative resource for building muscle ever published.

BUILDING MUSCLE TIPS #4 ~ HOW TO STRIP THAT FAT AND REVEAL YOUR LEAN, TONED MUSCLES

Scrampy — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 05:26:21 +0000

Building Muscle Tips #4

How To Strip That Fat and Reveal Your Lean, Toned Muscles

What good is a muscular body if you can’t see it under layers of fat?

Take a look around next time you go to the mall or out to work. Look at the physiques of the people you work with, the people next to you at the supermarket, the people at the newsagent and the local take away. What is the standard these days? Do people look fit and strong? Well, unless you live in a community where hard physical exercise is the standard then you’ll see fat people.

I’m not talking overweight whales, or massive obese people, I’m just saying people, in general are not as “skinny” as they used to be. It’s got a lot to do with their diets, and the lack of exercise NEEDED to get along in daily life now days. Not a bad thing! I, for one, wouldn’t like to have to be hunting my food and chopping wood for a fire to cook it on. Way too much effort!

So how does one overcome the tendency our body’s have to put on a few extra pounds? Now that we’ve got it so good, we’ve got to come up with a way to stay healthy and lean without popping pills and getting liposuction!

Building Muscle Tips #4
How To Strip That Fat and Reveal Your Lean Toned Muscles

So You’re ready to strip that fat? OK, here’s how it’s done:

Step 1. You need to be following some kind of weight training program. Don’t worry, you’re not going to become the next Arnold Schwarzenegger by lifting weights. But muscles do consume twice as much energy as fat so they’re an advantage. Get started lifting weights 2-3 times a week and you’ll start noticing that you’re not only getting stronger, but your metabolism is speeding up too. You’ll start to get hungry. This is good, because you need to feed your muscles so they become fat burning assets.

Step 2. Don’t do aerobic exercise. Yep, you heard me DON’T do it. You’ve got to be mad right? Everyone says do aerobic exercise so you’ll burn fat, so it must be true. Nope. Well, it is, sort of. But it’s not the most effective way so lets get to it.

What do you do instead? Well, you know how muscle burns more energy than fat right? Well, you can also put your body into a fat burning mode by doing Short and intense cardio exercises. This is similar to say going for a jog, or riding a bike for an hour, except you take all that effort, and put it into 15 minutes! This is commonly called interval training or High Intensity Training.

Here’s how it works:

HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training), or Interval Training is a training session divided into 2 parts. One intense, and the other less intense.

Here’s an example of a HIIT training session:

Stretches
5 min warmup
1 min walk/jog
20 second sprint
1 min walk/jog
20 second sprint
1 min walk/jog
20 second sprint
1 min walk/jog
20 second sprint
1 min walk/jog
20 second sprint
1 min walk/jog
20 second sprint
1 min walk/jog
20 second sprint
1 min walk/jog
20 second sprint
5 min cooldown

Stretches

The beautiful thing about this kind of training is that you’ll speed up your metabolism so much that you’ll be burning calories for days! And it only takes 15 minutes!

It’s seriously the BEST way to strip that fat from your body with the least amount of work.

If you’re already training 3 days a week, do this cardio training on your OFF days only. The reason why is because your body simply does not know how to burn fat and build muscle at the same time. Alternate between the 2 so you can get the best of both worlds. And remember, take a day off. Nothing worse than burn out when you’re doing so well.

Is that it? Nope… one last thing:

Step 3. Eat Fresh High Water Content Food.

I’m not going to get into the whole calorie argument and talk about how confusing it is to have to read all the food labels. Let’s just be serious for a second. If you want to get the fat from your body it’s not going to happen eating burgers and fries. You know it. So what do you eat? Well, your best option is to eat food that’s got plenty of nutritional value and helps keep your body and metabolism moving. What’s the best food to do that? Fruit and vegetables.

Yeah, I know, what a drag. Your mama always told you to eat your vegies. Turns out she was right eh. Well, I won’t tell her if you don’t!

But seriously, eat your vegies, and eat them often. Keep your protein levels high by snacking on RAW nuts (not the salty kind, they deep fry them!) and protein shakes / snacks. And supplement your carb intake with mostly fruits and vegetables. You’ll find that you need to work a little harder to eat them. But if you can, eat them raw to provide your body with the best chance to get nutrients out of them.

And eat as much as you like. Yep, I said eat as many fruits and vegetables as you like. At first you’ll probably feel a little bit bloated, but keep at it, and your body will adjust to the higher water content of the food and you’ll balance out. This is what you want. While your metabolism is working quickly, consume good vitamin rich foods and clean out all the crap. (literally!)

If you’re feeling a little uncomfortable and you’re not in a major hurry, then adjust to adding more fruits and vegetables to your diet while cutting out the heavy carbohydrates like fries and burgers and that morning muffin with your coffee etc.

As you start to see results you’ll become more motivated to change your diet. But trust me, if you

1. Work out with weights
2. Do Intense Cardio
3. Replace Junk Food With Fruit and Vegetables

You’ll be stripping the fat faster than ever.

Take some advice from someone who’s done it all before: Sean Nalewanyj.
He’s the former skinny guy and successful author of The Truth About Building Muscle. He’s not only one of the best muscle building experts around today, but he’s got fat burning down to a fine art. Learn from a pro and do something today to be proud of your body.

BUILDING MUSCLE TIPS #5 ~ GET A TRAINING PARTNER TO DOUBLE YOUR GAINS!

Scrampy — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 05:25:32 +0000

Building Muscle Tips #5

Get a Training Partner To Double Your Gains!

You’ve heard the saying “2 heads are better than 1″ Well, this is certainly true in the field of building muscle.

Tips 1 and 3 described the exercises you need to do and why you should do them, and Building Muscle Tips #5 is all about who to do them with (if anyone at all!)

So why workout with a partner?

Firstly, you’ll be less likely to slack off. Yeah, you heard me. You’ve been slacking off in the gym. Let’s say you had a training partner who you’ve agreed to train with. You’ve agreed to train hard and make a commitment to do 100%. Do you think you could just say “oh, hey, it’s getting a bit hard now, I think I’ll just do 4 reps instead of going to 5″… NO WAY! If you’ve chosen a good training partner this guy will be busting your balls to get that weight out to 7 reps! NO SLACKING OFF!

This is the first reason you should choose a committed training partner. You need to be sure your training partner is as motivated as you and about the same physical strength as you (although this is less important it does make it easy to do sets together)

The second reason is that with a training partner you can physically lift more weight. It’s safe now for you to really test your strength because you’ve got someone you trust to save you when your muscles truly fail.

Having a spotter is one of the best ways to truly take your muscles to total failure. You’ll know exactly how much you can lift, and when to increase the weight. Often it’s good to have someone there just to stabilize the weight as you lift.

Building Muscle Tips #5 BONUS!

How do you choose a good training partner?

You must find someone committed to training the same days as you. If you’re not able to train on the same days, you’ll find reasons to avoid training. You’ve got to look out for each other, and if you’re feeling like skipping a day, you want your partner to kick your ass back into the gym and make you work harder. Likewise the other way round, if he’s slacking, you want to kick his ass too. Ideally, you don’t want to be chasing each other all over the place just to get there. You want to be spending the efforts while you’re at the gym. It’s better that way.

You must find someone with the same goals as you. You’ll never get a massive muscular body if all your training partner wants to do is do cardio on the step machine. Don’t go to the gym with your girlfriend and expect to be benching 50kg warm ups guys. It’s never going to happen. Get someone who’s going to challenge you to get to where you want to go, and go there with you.

You must find someone who’s actually motivated! Yep, there are many people who “say” they want to train, but many just want to talk about it. Going to the gym is not a social visit, it’s not a place to check out the chicks (maybe after the workout though!). It’s a place to get fuckin serious about changing your body. If your partner is not interested in working hard, then ditch him, just like you’d ditch a slacking employee. You’re not getting your investment back and you’re better off doing it alone.

If you’re really serious about changing your body for the better you’ve got to check out Sean Nalewanyj. He’s the former skinny guy and successful author of The Truth About Building Muscle.
You won’t find a better building muscle success coach or training partner. (get the audio program and plug it into your ipod while you train!)