I am continually shocked by the fact by the fact that so few people incorporate weight training into their exercise regimen. The best that I’ve been able to determine, this is because of a very common misunderstanding regarding the benefits of weight training. I say this because, if you ask someone why they don’t weight train, they tend to tell you that they don’t want to be a bodybuilder and/or they don’t want get “big and bulky.”

Now, the reality of the situation is that weight training is extremely beneficial for everyone, regardless of their ambitions in health or life. Also, consistent weight training doesn’t have to develop “big and bulky” muscles. The reasons that everyone should weight train are the same reasons why everyone should exercise.

The first and most obvious answer is staring you in the face every time you look in the mirror. Muscle is generally more attractive than fat. While it would be nice if everyone went to the gym and worked out because they truly wanted to be healthy, the fact is that many people simply want to look better. Toned muscle seems to be almost universally accepted as better looking on both men and women.

Regarding appearance, women tend to be the ones who object to getting too “big and bulky” with muscles and, therefore, avoid weight training. It’s actually much easier to weight train and not get large. By working with medium weights and more repetitions, you won’t bulk up; instead, you’ll tone your existing muscles and build them in a leaner way.

Having strong and toned muscles, regardless of their size, is important in preventing injuries. For instance, back injuries are extremely common and the main reason for this is weak back muscles. Research is also indicating that building and strengthening your muscles improves your immune system and will help keep you safe from illness and disease as well.

Increasing muscle mass is also one of the greatest possible ways to lose weight. Muscles require more calories than fat does for its survival. As I’m sure you are aware, the only way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you consume. You’re actually burning calories while you sit there, reading this because our bodies are constantly burning calories. Muscle is an extremely active part of our body and, on average, a pound of muscle burns 35 calories a day just by existing.

A pound of fat burns…no calories.

So even if your sole goal for exercising is to lose weight, you will still be better off incorporating weight training because the muscle you build will help you lose weight 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If you’re not working to build and maintain your muscles, you run the risk of burning off muscle tissue while you burn off fat. This will reduce your ongoing ability to burn calories on a daily basis which will make you put on more weight in the future and…I think you see the cycle here. This is one of the reasons that crash diets don’t work and the dieter ends up bouncing back up to their original weight and, usually, higher. They decrease caloric intake, but don’t exercise properly, and therefore burn muscle. When they inevitably come off the diet, their metabolism is lower and they have less muscle to burn calories. And, snap, they bounce up.

The act of weight training isn’t going to turn you into the next Mr. or Ms. Universe (much to the displeasure of thousands who are trying to do just that). Proper weight training will simply make you a healthier, stronger, sexier calorie burning machine.

So, why aren’t you weight training again?

Weight training is exercising with the specific aim of developing strength and muscle tone. If you’re ready to make a commitment to seriously weight train, then it makes sense to make an equally serious commitment to doing it the right way, every time. Weight training is difficult enough when done the right way; do not make it any more difficult by doing it the wrong way!

The first step has to be developing an actual, definable and measurable goal. You need a destination before you can plot a course. Decide exactly what you want to achieve, why you want to achieve it and give yourself a realistic time frame for doing so.

People develop a weight training regimen, generally, for one of the following reasons:
To increase strength;
To increase endurance;
To increase and/or tone muscles; or
Some combination of the previous three goals.

Decide what it is you want to accomplish and then write it down. Writing it down is incredibly important. Writing it down makes it more real and makes you more likely to accomplish it. Refer to this regularly, to check your progress and make any adjustments that are necessary. You will probably find that your goals were too easy to achieve or too difficult. Either way, adjust your schedule accordingly.

Keep in mind that you are adjusting your schedule, not your goal. You can never have a goal that is too lofty though you can have a schedule that is unrealistic. Never lose sight of your goal and never compromise your goal, just allow yourself to be realistic.

The schedule of weight training is probably the biggest mistake people make. Far too often, people set out a schedule of weight training that is simply too intense. Weight training, when done properly, is going to be intense enough. If you push yourself too hard and too fast, too often you will give up and burn out or injure yourself.

Plan to set aside no less than 30 minutes for each session and no more than 60 minutes, which should be your absolute limit. The number of sessions a week depends, somewhat, on the intensity of each workout and the overall goal you have in mind. Just keep in mind that, if you’re going to be doing a fully maximized regimen, you should have a fully maximized recuperation regimen as well.

Just to define two important terms: a repetition is the act of lifting and lowering a weight one time utilizing proper form and a set consists of a given number of repetitions done repeatedly, with no break.

As you schedule out your weight training, you need to base your sets and reps on the overall goal of your regimen. The following guidelines are loosely defined suggestions for developing a schedule that will lead you to your goal.

If you want to focus purely on strength, do sets of one to five repetitions. This provides the greatest focus on strength with some muscle building benefit but nearly no endurance training.

If you want to focus on endurance, do sets of thirteen to twenty repetitions. Following this schedule will increase your endurance and provide some muscle building benefit but will have a minimal impact on strength.

If you want to focus on building muscle, do sets of ten to twelve repetitions at maximum weight loads. Following this schedule will increase your muscle mass, with some benefit on endurance and strength.

Finally, if you want a schedule for balanced training of strength, endurance and muscle size, do sets of six to twelve repetitions.

Regardless of your schedule, the determining factor of your success is going to be your consistency. Make this commitment to yourself, for your reasons and don’t let anything take you off of the path.

There is an ongoing controversial debate going on with regards to the proper way to train with weights. The aim of this article is to give you some information on both sides so that you can make a determination for yourself.

The concept of training to failure is a fairly simple one: you continue doing repetitions of a particular exercise until you cannot do another repetition properly. This doesn’t mean that you continue repetitions until you don’t think you can do another repetition; you continue until you don’t have adequate muscle strength to actually complete another repetition.

To effectively weight train, it’s understood that you must push yourself. If you want to see increased improvement, then you have to operate under increased opposition. If you never read anything but first-grade level books, you’ll never learn to read at a level beyond the first grade. This is obviously common sense and there is no argument against it.

It’s the implementation of this concept that causes controversy. For ongoing improvement in weight training, you’re going to increase the number of repetitions you do or increase the amount of weight you use at the same number of repetitions. Increased repetitions are advocated for developing a leaner, more toned physique while increased weight is advocated for developing increased muscle mass.

Some people advocate a schedule of increases of either the number of repetitions and/or the amount of weight used. Following this train of thought, for example, you plan to increase the amount of weight you use by five pounds every two weeks. Or you plan to add five repetitions of the same weight every two weeks.

The key to this plan is that you determine the number of repetitions in advance, knowing that you could go further but opting not to push yourself. The ongoing increase in either weight or reps ensures that you will continue to develop your strength and muscles.

On the other side of the camp, we have the folks who endorse training to failure. Following this method, you generally still have an incremental schedule for increasing the amount of weight used, but the number of reps varies. You do it until you can’t do it any longer.

The controversy ensues, obviously, because training to failure increases the chance of overtraining and injury. Various studies have been done, showing that training to failure does not substantially improve muscle development, but many thousands of hardcore weight trainers disagree based on their experience.

For many weight trainers, they compromise in some way. If they are doing three sets of a particular exercise during their workout, they only train to failure on the final set. In some ways, this compromise is a bit illogical. If training to failure is worth doing, why only do it once? If training to failure isn’t worth doing, why do it at all?

Ultimately it’s a personal decision that each weight trainer must decide for him or herself.

With that in mind, I offer only two suggestions, one for each camp:

If you’re training to failure, ensure that you are doing so as safely as possible. Failure should be defined as the time when you cannot do another rep properly. If you know you can squeeze out another few reps, but only by sacrificing proper stance, grip or movement…don’t do it!

If you’re not training to failure, ensure that you have set up a schedule that is sufficiently challenging. An increase of two pounds every three weeks certainly keeps you safe from overtraining, but you’re not going to see much of a benefit. You still need to push yourself and challenge yourself consistently.

In relation to getting into shape, the terms high intensity and low intensity are used a lot but aren’t defined with nearly the same frequency. I suppose that’s because we’re all supposed to know the difference…but many don’t really understand the difference at all.

In general, low intensity exercises work your heart rate at around 60 percent of your maximum heart rate. A high intensity exercise works your heart rate at around 75 percent or more of your maximum heart rate. I suppose this means that anything working your heart at between 60 percent and 75 percent of your maximum heart rate is a moderate intensity exercise, but they must have a bad public relations firm because you don’t hear much about them.

You can determine your maximum heart rate by taking your current age from 220. So, for example, if you’re 50 at the moment, then your maximum heart rate is 170 beats per minute. Don’t let the term “maximum heart rate” fool or scare you. It isn’t referred to as such because it’s the maximum rate your heart can beat before damage occurs; it’s simply the absolute maximum rate your heart will beat.

The 220-age formula is only an estimate and, depending on your individual physiology, you may find yourself exceeding that number. That’s fine, you shouldn’t panic because it’s nearly impossible to damage a healthy heart with exercise.

High intensity exercises are simply much more beneficial for your overall health. Aside from burning calories, these exercises help increase muscle mass; low intensity exercises don’t do this. Even if you’re not looking to become a bodybuilder, building muscle is always a good idea for your overall health and prevention of accidental injuries during everyday life.

Low intensity exercises also don’t do very much to increase your overall metabolism while high intensity exercises do. This increase in metabolism is crucial to overall weight loss and general health.

With the exception of the injured, ill, out-of-shape or elderly, there is no reason for anyone to stick solely to a low intensity workout. If you do happen to be in poor shape, then you should begin exercising with a low intensity workout for a little while as you build up to high intensity exercises.

So why do people stick to low intensity workouts? The main reasons are because low intensity exercises are easier and a trainer may have recommended it.

Wait…If high intensity is better, why would a trainer recommend low intensity? The two main reasons are personal liability and a misunderstanding of the numbers involved. Basically, you are much less likely to injure yourself during a low intensity workout, so a trainer is protecting themselves by recommending a safe exercise plan. This is easy enough to understand, although a proper trainer will do their job and train you not to injure yourself during high intensity exercises.

The second reason, a misunderstanding, requires a bit more explanation. You see, low intensity exercises burn a higher percentage of calories from fat than high intensity exercises. Low intensity exercises burn approximately 50 percent fat for energy while high intensity exercises burn approximately 40 percent fat for energy. This difference is not great enough to justify the tradeoffs. Besides, it doesn’t actually mean you burn more fat with low intensity exercises.

Confused? This is where the misunderstanding comes in. Hypothetically speaking, let’s say that you burn 100 calories by walking for 20 minutes. Walking is a low impact exercise, so you burned 50 fat calories (50 percent of one hundred).

Ten minutes of high intensity exercise, however, can easily burn 160 calories. Since high intensity exercises burn 40 percent fat for energy, you just burned 64 fat calories. You burned 14 more fat calories, but only spent 10 minutes doing it. Basically, the percentage is technically smaller, but you burn more total calories in less time with high intensity exercises. A smaller percentage of a bigger number is better than a bigger percentage of a smaller number.

In addition to this, low intensity workouts only burn fat calories while you’re actually doing them. High intensity workouts, because they increase your metabolism, continue burning fat for hours after you’re done working out. And, because muscle burns more calories than fat, the increased muscle mass means you’ll be burning more calories every second of the day because of your high intensity workout.

As you can see, there really isn’t any reason to stick with a low intensity workout when you can step up to a high intensity workout and get a greater benefit in less time.

You want to build up your muscles quickly, eh? Most people feel the same way and, we’ll discuss a wonderful method for doing just that, but you need to keep in mind that the word “quick” in reference to bodybuilding isn’t quite as quick as it in other areas. Supersets will help you build muscles quicker than most other methods, but it’s still not going to happen immediately.

First, let’s talk about your diet. To build muscle, you need to eat more than you are right now. Eat 5 to 7 smaller meals a day, as opposed to 3 big ones, and make sure you’re getting a lot of protein. You’re going to be burning more calories because you’re going to be working out harder and, to gain muscle, you need to bring in more calories than you burn…We’re talking about a lot of calories. Take your current weight, multiply it by 18 and you’ll get the approximate number of healthy calories you need to take into your body to start really building muscle.

Now, onto the superset secret!

A superset is really just nothing but doing two different exercises, back to back, with no rest period in between. We’re going to build your muscles up fast using three types of supersets:

Pre-Exhaustion supersets work on one muscle group with two different exercises: an isolation exercise and a compound exercise. For example, you would do leg extensions for your thighs and then immediately follow up with squats. The point being that you work one muscle (your quadriceps in our example) to “exhaustion” but then continue working them with an exercise allowing other muscles to help (glutes, hamstrings, etc. in our example).

It is imperative that you keep in mind the fact that you cannot do the compound exercise at the same weight you normally would. You’ve exhausted the muscle you focused on during your isolation phase and it’s just not going to give you the same amount of strength you’re used to. In fact, it may give out on you all together. I say you need to keep this in mind because you don’t really want to have your muscle give out on you while doing a bench press, do you?

Post-Exhaustion supersets work on one muscle group, just like before, but they are the reverse of pre-exhaustion supersets. You’re going to work with more weight on the compound exercise, which is done first, and less weight on the isolation exercise, which is done second. This method is safer than the pre-exhaustion method, because the results of dropping the weight during an isolation exercise don’t tend to be as…well, potentially disfiguring.

Finally, antagonistic supersets are completely different than these previous two types. They utilize two opposing muscles groups, instead of focusing on one muscle group. Even though the opposing muscle groups aren’t directly related, the do come into play during each exercise. This allows both groups to receive more exercise than they would during a straight set. Examples of antagonistic supersets include pairing your chest and back, biceps and triceps or hamstrings and quadriceps.

Work supersets into your straight sets gradually, but as quickly as you are comfortable with. Hardcore iron-warriors will do nothing but supersets when they want to pump up very quickly, though they go back to a mixture of straight sets after a month or so.

Simply put, there is no real muscle building program that is going to be best for everyone. The nature of humanity is that everyone is a different person and, despite our similarities, we are all different. So, let’s examine the basic structure of a successful program for building up your muscles so that you’ll have a strong foundation to build your individual program from.

Develop a Plan

The old adage says that failing to plan is planning to fail and it’s very true. You need to know what goal you are pursuing, specifically. You need to know why you want to achieve this goal. You need to know what you need to do to achieve that goal, in terms of eating habits and specific exercises. Finally, you need to know when you are going to do each of these things.

Obviously, you can do these things however you want. The important thing is to ask and answer these questions. I have found that I have more success when my answers are extremely specific and when I write them down.

Use Your Brain As Much As Your Body

Working out consistently and intensely cannot be accomplished and sustained without mental focus. You’ve got to get your brain in the game! The first part of this is to keep your eye focused on why you’re doing this. This is why it’s so important that, as part of your planning, you figure out why you want to achieve your goal: that why will keep you going when you feel like you can’t.

The second part to this is to fix your self-talk. The way you talk to yourself, in your mind, has a profound impact on the way your body responds to and deals with life. If your brain is filled with negative self-talk, if you’re constantly putting yourself down and referring to yourself in negative ways, you’re not alone. Most people do. If you want your program to be as effective as possible, you need to eradicate this negative thinking as much as possible.

The third, and final, part of this is the use of creative visualization. The subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between an experience you are actually having and an experience that you are vividly imagining. Your body will respond to this as if you’re actually doing it as well. Many professional athletes attribute a lot of their success to imaginary practice. At least once a day, you should close your eyes and go through your workout as vividly as possible in your mind.

Focus on Nutrition With Equal Passion

So many people are incredibly passionate about working out and yet a surprisingly small percentage of them are as passionate about their diet. As I alluded to in the first step, you should plan the changes in your eating habits the same way you plan the changes in your exercise plan. If you want to build muscles, you need to take in more calories. You’re going to burn more of them and you’re going to need some leftover for your body to use in building your new muscles.

Incorporate Increasing Resistance Into Your Plan

While this seems obvious to many people, you’d be surprised how many folks stroll down to the gym every other day and do the exact same workout they did last time…last week…last month…last year. Obviously, if you workout with fifty pound weights every time you work out, and do the same number of reps every time you work out, you will see some benefit. However, that benefit will stall at a certain point and you won’t proceed past it.

You need to increase the amount of resistance in your workout, either by increasing the weight or by increasing the number of reps. Be realistic so that you don’t burn yourself out, but be certain you challenge yourself as well.

These are the first four principles that should form the foundation of your program. In the second part, I’ll round out your foundation with four more principles:

Utilize Free Weights and Focus on Compound Exercises;
Ensure That Your Workout Is Balanced;
Rotate Your Workout Regimen; and
Recuperate as Passionately as You Work Out.

Utilizing these principles, you can start with a foundation that will allow you to develop your own, personalized program for achieving your goals.

Part 2

There are eight principles upon which to build the foundation for your program to ensure you have the best chance of success. It part one we covered the first four:

Develop a Plan
Use Your Brain As Much As Your Body
Focus on Nutrition With Equal Passion; and
Incorporate Increasing Resistance Into Your Plan

Now, we’re going to cover the other four principles, so that you develop your program for building your muscular physique and have it optimized for success.

Utilize Free Weights and Focus on Compound Exercises

Since your intention is to build muscles, you should utilize free weights for either all or most of your workouts. While the exercise machines that have been created over the last 50 years have their use, building muscles is not their optimal use. One of the biggest reasons is most of them limit your ability to do compound exercises, or those exercises which utilize more than one muscle group at a time.

Focusing on compound exercises gives you the most “bang for your buck” and will help you get to your goals faster than doing machine based exercises that only utilize one muscle group at a time.

Ensure That Your Work Out Is Balanced

We all have some areas of our body we want to focus on more than others. We all have some exercises we enjoy more than others. However, for optimum health and the best overall physique, you should focus on your entire body. This means tackling your least favorite exercise with as much passion as you approach your favorite exercise.

Doing this goes back to step 2, utilizing your brain. Keep in mind that you are striving to be in the best shape possible, to be the healthiest person you can be. This will help you avoid injury and illness in your life as well as providing you with an optimal state of existence.

Rotate Your Workout Regimen

Because we all operate at a unique biorhythm, we are naturally inclined to workout in different ways on different days. Our maximum passion on Monday is not the same as our maximum passion on Wednesday. This is natural and sociological and, to a certain extent, beyond your control. Well, it’s not beyond your control, but it’s beyond the scope of this article.

So, let’s say you have exercise routines A, B and C – each with focuses on different muscle groups. You start by doing A on Monday, B on Wednesday and C on Friday. After four weeks, rotate so that you do C on Monday, A on Wednesday and B on Friday. Four weeks later, rotate so that you do B on Monday, C on Wednesday and A on Friday. Four weeks later, rotate back to the original schedule. Doing this will allow each group of muscles to benefit from your unique biorhythm.

Recuperate as Passionately as You Work Out

Your body needs time to recover from your workout. It’s during the recuperation period that your muscles actually increase in size and strength not during the actual work out. In step 7, my example included 3 days of working out, each day focused on a different muscle group. This means that out of 7 days, four days are total recuperation days and each muscle group has 6 days of recuperation between work outs.

In working out, as in so many other things, the law of diminishing returns applies at some point – more work start to actually equal less results. Don’t push yourself to that point by assuming that more is always better, because it’s not.

Take these eight guidelines and develop your muscle building program around them. You’ll find that by developing the program accordingly and sticking to it consistently, the body of your dreams isn’t as far away as you think it is.

There is only one way to gain weight, and that is by taking in more calories than you burn. When done with intelligence and attention to exercise, this process will make you more muscular; when done without intelligence and attention to exercise, this process will make you fat. If you’re reading this article, you’re obviously interested in gaining weight and I’m going to operate on the assumption that you aren’t looking to gain weight by getting fat. So, we’ll look at putting on some pounds by building and developing your muscles.

First, let’s do a little bit of math…and yes, you can use a calculator, but you need to write the numbers down! Take your current weight and multiply that by 18. The result will be the total number of calories you should aim for, on a daily basis, to enable your body to build new muscles. Now, take your current weight and multiply it by 1.5. This result will be the approximate amount of protein, in grams, that you need to put into you body daily for muscle growth.

You’ve got your two target numbers, so now you need to do some menu preparation. You don’t have to turn into a rapid calorie counter, but you do need to start paying a lot more attention to the calories and protein in the food you eat.

Now, depending on your point of view and awareness of nutrition, these numbers may be very intimidating to you. You’re probably looking at an intense increase in the amount of food you eat and it may seem impossible to do that.

In fact, it may actually be impossible to do that if you’re only eating three meals a day. The “three meals a day” lifestyle isn’t actually optimum for healthy living and it’s far from optimum for muscle building. As you go about your meal planning, you need to plan on eating five to seven smaller meals a day, instead of three bigger meals. It should also go without saying that you should be planning healthy meals.

All calories are not created equally. Just because the local junk-fast-food joint sells a greasy burger with 800 calories doesn’t mean you should eat three of them a day to reach your calorie goal. Empty and fattening calories, such as those in sweets, junk food, fast food, or soda aren’t going to help you gain healthy weight. Foods which are highly processed or high in sugar and saturated fat should be avoided as well.

Moving from food to exercise, there are some ways to exercise which help you lose weight and some ways which will help you gain weight. While you’re focused on gaining weight, it only makes sense to limit your exercises to those which help you gain weight by building muscles. So this isn’t the time to enroll in an aerobics class.

You should focus on a workout regimen of three or four weekly routines which are short and intense. Stay away from the plethora of machines available to you at the gym and workout using free weights.

Start with a weight that is heavy for you; ignore what everyone else is doing. If ten pounds is heavy for you, then it’s heavy for you and you should use it. To effectively gain weight in the shortest time period possible, you’re looking to stimulate the specific muscle fibers which promote the most muscle growth. This is best done by lifting heavy weights.

You’ll know that some weights are too light just by picking them up but, once you get closer to your limit you’ll need to do some testing. Start by adding five pounds to what you think is heavy enough and try to do a set of ten repetitions. If you get to ten, then on your next set add five more pounds. When you find a weight that you physically can’t get to ten repetitions with, you’ve found your starting weight.

Aim for six or eight repetitions in each set you do and increase either the amount of weight or the number of repetitions every week or two; you want to constantly challenge yourself so that you put on the muscle as fast as possible.

If you want to increase your muscle mass, you need to eat more and work out. Thanks for coming, have a safe drive home!

Alright, so there’s a bit more to it than that. Realistically, however, that is the simple truth. There is no miracle to be purchased at a health food store or off of an infomercial that will build your muscle mass without consistent and intelligent adherence to those two concepts: eat more and work out.

For people who need to lose weight but also want to gain muscle mass, you need to make a choice. The way you eat and the way you work out are very different for both of these objectives. While not impossible to do both at the same time, it is much more effective for most people to focus on one or the other.

We’re going to look at these two concepts individually so that you can actually put them into consistent and intelligent practice.

Working Out
The bad news is that, to achieve maximum gain in your muscle mass building, you’re going to need equipment. The good news, however, is that you don’t need the equipment you’re probably picturing right now.

You’re just not going to build significant amounts of muscle mass without equipment. You can lose weight or tone muscles without much equipment, but for actually and substantially increasing your muscle mass it’s just not going to happen.

We all know that over the last century a dizzying array of machines have been designed to “help” people build muscle mass and stay healthy. The problem most people have is in determining which pieces of equipment are correct for them.

I’ll make it very easy for you. Two simple words: free weights.

Workout machines have been designed to work muscles in a specific way, in a specific range of motion, period. And, for achieving that goal, they are very good at it. However, that’s exceptionally limiting. Most of this equipment has been designed for general use, meaning that it needs to help as many different people achieve as many different goals as possible, because that maximizes profit by appealing to a wider audience.

Free weights, however, allow you to do things machines can’t. With free weights, you can stimulate larger groupings of muscles at once, which is the most effective way to build muscles. Speaking of weight, use a lot of it. For maximum impact, you are going to be working yourself to muscle failure every time, in every set. Muscle failure is defined as the point at which you can no longer properly do another repetition. If you’re looking to build up your muscle mass, working with light weights isn’t going to do it. If you can do more than 15 repetitions before failing, the weight is too light. As you get stronger, you’ll naturally need to increase the amount of weight.

There are six exercises you should focus on at the beginning, all of which are most effectively done with free weights:

Bar Dips for working your shoulders, chest and arms;
Dead Lifts for working your legs, shoulders and back;
Overhead Presses for working your shoulders and triceps;
Bench Presses for working your chest, shoulders, and triceps;
Squats for working your legs and lower back; and
Pull Ups and/or Barbell Rows for working your back and biceps.

While you can certainly move on to more advanced workout regimens, you shouldn’t even begin considering it until you have a solid foundation of these six exercises. In reality, most people don’t need the advanced regimens and would do perfectly well if they did nothing but these six exercises consistently and with ever increasing amounts of weight.

Weight training is a very intense workout and you shouldn’t do it more than 3 or 4 times a week. Your muscles need time to recuperate because it’s during that recuperation that the actual growth takes place. Limit your workouts to 30 – 45 minutes, 3 or 4 times a week and stick to it religiously. You’ll be amazed with the results.

If you want to increase your muscle mass, you need to eat more and work out.

Thanks for coming, have a safe drive home!

Alright, so there’s a bit more to it than that. Realistically, however, that is the simple truth. There is no miracle to be purchased at a health food store or off of an infomercial that will build your muscle mass without consistent and intelligent adherence to those two concepts: eat more and work out.

For people who need to lose weight but also want to gain muscle mass, you need to make a choice. The way you eat and the way you work out are very different for both of these objectives. While not impossible to do both at the same time, it is much more effective for most people to focus on one or the other.

We’re going to look at these two concepts individually so that you can actually put them into that consistent and intelligent practice.

Eat More
You’re not going to get bigger unless you increase the number of calories you put into your body. When it comes to mass, your body works in a very simple manner: if you take in more calories than you burn you will gain weight and if you take in fewer calories than you burn you will lose weight. Ninety percent of the other people in gym are there because of this fact; they’ve just allowed it to run rampant in their life unchecked. You’re not going to do that, you’re going to be intelligent.

Being intelligent about it means that you’re not going to stuff your face with anything and everything you want whenever you want it. Doing that leads to being one of that 90%. You’re going to be taking in greater quantities of proteins, carbohydrates and fats so that your body can utilize them for muscle building. You’re not going to get the proper forms of those nutrients from junk food or fast food (oh, wait, is there a difference?)

One method of determining the number of calories you need to bring into your body for building muscle mass is to multiply your current weight by 18. The number you get on your calculator will probably shock you. It’s going to be a big number. When you’re paying attention to the number of calories you take in every day, this number may seem overwhelming, in fact.

The secret is almost paradoxical: you’ll get to that number by eating less food…but you’re going to be eating it more often. We’ve all been raised with the concept of “three square meals a day,” which isn’t actually the optimum eating schedule for human beings. If you’re trying to lose weight, eating that much food at once is a serious impediment but, if you’re trying to intelligently gain weight, it’s nearly impossible to do it in three sittings a day.

So, you’re going to be eating five to seven smaller meals a day. Work to make certain that each of those meals contains a good mix of nutrients and plenty of protein. Protein is incredibly critical to building muscle mass, as this nutrient is used by your body in the actual act of building new muscles. Fish, chicken, eggs and red meat are excellent protein sources. If you can afford it, you should try to get these from an organic producer because it’s simply better for your overall health.

Finally, in addition to increasing the total amount of calories you take into your body, make sure you drink enough water. In fact, strive to drink more than enough water because your body actually needs more water than you think it does. Water is another critical component to muscle building and you won’t experience maximum gain if you’re not taking in enough water.

It’s ironic that the icon for both the peak in muscle conditioning and the pit of laziness is a six-pack. For the former it’s on your stomach and for the latter it’s poured into your stomach. Of course, it’s a lot easier to pour it into your stomach which explains why many more people drink six-packs than develop them.

If you’re serious about getting your abdomen into six-pack condition, you need to know and keep in mind that there is no magic bullet and that it’s going to take a sincere commitment to succeed. Realistically, developing the muscles for the six-pack appearance isn’t actually the most difficult part of the process. Removing the layer of fat hiding your six-pack is the hard part.

This is the reason that you see guys doing crunches for what seems like eternity, doing it religiously every day and still not developing that six-pack they are so desperately chasing. For all they know, they have developed it, they just can’t see it!

So, the first key to developing six-pack abs is fat reduction. While it’s possible to focus on a specific muscle set and develop it without really developing the rest of your body, this simply isn’t possible when it comes to weight loss. You may see advertisements for products and pills promising “spot” weight loss (i.e., reducing just your tummy fat), but those advertisements are designed for the bottom line, not the waist line.

You’re going to need to alter your diet, pure and simple. I’m not saying this because I sneak into your house while you’re sleeping and look at your fridge, I’m saying it because it’s the safe bet: most people need to alter their diets if they want to lose weight and achieve optimum health.

Burning fat is really a simple concept in theory: you need to burn more calories than you put into your body. There are two ways of burning calories and, to effectively develop your health and especially your six-pack, you should master both of them. The first is through exercise, especially aerobic and cardiovascular exercise. Get sweating and get your heart beating faster and you’ll burn through calories. The second is through speeding up your metabolism.

Contrary to popular belief, metabolism is not automatically set by genetics. You can speed up your metabolism and, by doing so, you will burn more calories on constant basis. Steps to improving your metabolism include drinking lots of water, exercising and building your muscles, eating high nutrition foods frequently and not skipping meals.

Those last two steps need a bit of explaining for you to fully benefit from them. The classic three-times-a-day meal plan is not the optimum way to eat. For maximum efficiency, you should eat five to seven smaller nutritious meals a day. Doing this ensures that your body doesn’t have a lot of excess energy sitting around waiting to be used, because you’re taking in less at a time.

Skipping meals, the most common and least successful tactic for people trying to lose weight, can wreak havoc with your metabolism. Your body is a highly adaptable machine designed, at bare minimum, to survive. It adjusts to your eating habits and then, when suddenly you skip a meal, it slows down your metabolism to ensure that you have enough energy to get to your next meal. Eating regularly is necessary to keep your metabolism up.

With your nutrition under control, exercise portion comes into play. As I recommended above, regular cardiovascular exercise is necessary for losing the fat. You also need to do weight-training exercises to shape and tone the muscles in your body and abdomen. These two exercise types need to be balanced, because overdoing either one of them is highly counterproductive.

Once you get your body fat down to six-pack level, then you can slowly reduce the cardiovascular exercise and increase the weight training if you’re interested in developing your muscles further. If you do that, however; remember to adjust your daily calorie intake accordingly to compensate for the reduced cardio exercise.