Muscle Fibers | Buffing Up

Increasing Muscle Size

Jan 022010

Routine:
Let’s talk about exercises that help you get bigger muscles. Just make sure that you always aim to increase your max at each opportunity. Basically, max is the term for one rep of the highest weight you can lift. You must aim to have this increased ever time you workout.

Many people want to get big muscles fast but they don’t want to put in the hard work. Every time you step foot in the gym, you have to increase your reps or your weights if you really want results.

A training partner is also a requirement when working out. Ideally, you’ll want to work more on free weight exercises so that your body will learn how to balance and use real weights. You have no idea how many muscle fibers can be exercised when balancing free weights. Make sure to perform low reps while using heavy weight. You might want to do 8, 6 and 4 reps on a certain free weight exercise like bench press or incline bench press. For each body part you should do 3 exercises and only 2 body parts per day and per week.

Diet:
You have to stop eating all the processed foods and the sugars and the late night eating. You have to realize that you won’t get bigger muscles if you don’t faithfully watch what you eat. If you really are motivated to get bigger muscles you need to eat more protein. You might as well know that amino acids are vital when it comes to the production of protein. Proteins’ primarily function is to sew back muscles that have been torn apart. Personally, the key factor I use is MSM! You can find protein in different foods such as chicken, egg or fish.

By the way, if you’re in search of the best workout program that will give you the quickest results, you probably want to look into this Vince Delmonte Review.

Rest Time:
Keep in mind that working out without allotting time for rest is detrimental for getting bigger muscles. The reason for this is that your torn muscles should be allowed time to mend and build themselves up.

Sleep:
The amount of sleep you get every day is essential if you want to get bigger muscles. If you get enough sleep, your body will be given enough time to fix any torn muscles during your last workout. Get an early night’s sleep that should total to 8 hours straight.

Drink Lots of Liquid:
Staying hydrated is key because it increases flexibility, circulation, blood flow and muscle repair.

Most Effective Leg Exercises

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Dec 292009

Many people in the gym overlook the legs, and that’s a shame, because your legs are your locomotor unit and your foundation and you can’t build a strong body without laying the groundwork.

Your legs have essentially three main sections that all need to be trained equally, which means that you have to do lots of work to see appreciable gains in the size and strength department; those sections are — the hamstring, the quadriceps and the calves.

The topmost exercise for muscle development in the legs is the SQUAT, or at least it used to be (I’ll explain latter). Well, over 200 individual muscles get called into play when you perform squats, and because you are moving your body through space (not only the weight) you have more control of the weight that you are lifting and you activate more muscle fibers with each rep.

Squats blast your glutes, upper hamstrings and quads like no other exercise, not the leg extension or the leg press. A correct and proper form of execution is vital for you to get the best results as well as to avoid injuries.

When done correctly, you will use your hip extensors to get moving off the bottom of the stroke and then the quads will kick in at the top or lock-out portion of the exercise. Keep your shoulder blades collapsed together and your chest out and use your butt to hunt for something to sit on as you descend, stop when your thighs are at or just past parallel and then push through your heels and butt to drive yourself back up. You can vary your foot position to accent adductors or abductors.

Now that I’ve spent all that hot air telling you how to do squats, I’m going to recommend that you don’t do them, here’s why. Turns out the limiting factor on squats is your low back and in that bilateral squat position it’s not as stable as it could be, and therefore, you are more prone to injury there.

Your lumbar spine and S1 vertebrae are locked together and more stable in a one foot forward stance and therefore you can drive more work to your legs that way. So my recommendation is to sack squats in favor of split squats. This is like doing a lunge, but, you don’t come out of the lunge position until you are done with your reps and then you switch legs and do the other side.

This is also the reason it’s more functional, we are designed to walk, and that stance imitates a step. You can do this with barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells, resistance bands, sand bags and TRX suspension straps. I explain more about lunges in a little while. I will post a video on split squats in the near future.

The same with every exercise, stretches must first be performed before squats, however, it is better if you perform the stretches after every set.

Since we’re talking about squats, you must include the HACK SQUAT (using the machine) in your routine to bombard not just your quads but your abductors & adductors. Your abductors and adductors are notoriously hard at work, but the Hack Squat really targets them. You can place emphasis on your gluts and quads depending on the placement of your feet on the platform. A wide stance will emphasize your adductors, narrow will get a little more abductors. Feet forward will get more glutes and feet under you or back further will emphasize quads (careful not to hurt your knees on these).

Another quality leg exercise is the STRAIGHT-LEGGED DEADLIFT. This exercise assaults your upper hamstrings and glutes, and forces you to keep your lower back flexible and strong, too. Once again, collapse your shoulder blades together and stick your chest out.

You want to start with a comfortable, but challenging weight, and perform these by using a mixed grip on the barbell (one hand palm up and the other palm down), then lower the weight while keeping your legs and back straight.

Keep your knees bent a little. You want to push your buttocks out and keep the bar as close to your shins as possible. To feel fatigue in your upper hamstrings and glutes, you’ll have to perform either a good number of reps.

Another great exercise is the LUNGE. Your hip extensors, upper hamstrings and glutes, will be worked on by doing lunges with the proper form and posture. When lunges are done with improper posture and bad form the load is thrown onto your knee extensors, your quads.

It will be best to ask a coach to teach you proper posture, especially if you feel your lunges and deep squats in your quads. It’s very effective when you lunge with a barbell, as it requires you to utilize your balance and stabilizers as you do each rep. You can do lunges with dumbbells, too, but you can’t use as much weight.

Three other great tools to do lunges with are: 1) Resistance bands, you can use the bands for either resistance or assistance. In my humble opinion, these are the ultimate tools for doing lunges, hell, you can use a barbell and use the band at the same time. 2) TRX suspension straps. You can use the bands with this also. 3) Sandbags, due to the shape and ever shifting nature, these require different gripping and/or carrying strategies and more core stabilization. Yes, you can use bands at the same time.

We must not forget the calves as developing them will improve you vertical leap as well as balance the legs.

For calf work, the donkey press is probably the most effective for building size and strength.

Form is critical for the donkey press, make sure you keep your knees straight and plantar and dorsiflex your ankles as far as you can, this bent over position adds a prestretch to the back of your legs and especially your calves.

It’s important to note that you can injure yourself quite badly when doing any of these leg exercises. So proper form and being honest with yourself regarding how much weight you can successfully lift.

Best Chest Building

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Nov 252009

First of all when you’re looking to build your chest, you want to make sure that you target your body’s type-one muscle fibers, because they have the most potential to grow.

How do you do that? By diversifying your workout and emphasizing low-reps and heavier-weight in each of your sets. You can also do an explosive, fast movement on the concentric part of the movement. For instance, off the bottom of the pushup you can push hard and fast so that your hands come off the floor and you clap your hands together, then return to the down position slowly for a 2 or 3 count, then repeat.

I get disagreements on this one, but it works for me. The Best Chest Exercise is the WEIGHTED DIP… hands down! Why? When you do dips and pushups, you move your body through space rather than iron.

This is a important concept to understand, because, moving your body through space (instead of moving a weight through space) is more taxing to your central nervous system, which amplifies your brain-to-muscle connections and this causes you to recruit more muscle in every exercise.

Dips work a lot of triceps and shoulders along with the chest. To hang a weight on you you’ll need a dipping belt or a strap or jump rope and you’ll need to be able to perform bodyweight dips. Start out light and do full range movements, keep them smooth and controlled. You can pick up your knees and lean your body forward to emphasize the chest even more.

Push-ups are next on the agenda, and because you need to hold a plank while you’re doing them, they also work your core stability.

Also, there are so many variants of the PUSHUP that are even more explosive. One of those is the MEDICINE-BALL ARCHBISHOP PUSH-UP; a long name, but this exercise works.

What you do is put 3 to 5 medicine balls in a semicircle, then get in the push-up position and put both hands on the ball to the far right; your chest should be over the ball and your feet must stay anchored throughout this exercise.

Now, move your left hand to the ball at the left and do a push-up, then bring your right hand to that ball. You want to continue moving left, doing push ups until you get to the last ball on the left. Then work your way back across the balls. That’s one rep.

Because of the inherent instability of the medicine balls, your hips and core will have to work much harder to neutralize that unstable surface, so you turn your chest workout into an ab workout also.

Try doing supersets of weighted push-ups with lying cable flies. Have your training partner place a weight on your back for the push-ups. When you do the flies, try holding the peak contraction for 3 seconds, and then do a 5 second eccentric contraction or lowering phase.

As with every exercise, perfect form is more important than lots of weight, because you don’t want to cheat and use other muscles to stabilize you or help you move the weight.

You can also use resistance bands to do weighted pushups or dips. They don’t require a partner, travel easily and won’t ding the floor. For pushups, just put the band behind your back. you can put it on your lower back to work your core more or up around your shoulder blades. Now put your hands into the band loop and pin it to the floor and go to town. If it’s to loose at the bottom of the stroke, just put a loose overhand knot in the center of the band and you’re set.

For dips, drape the band around the back of your neck so it comes down the front of your shoulders and then place your hands in the band and grab on to the dip bar and have a field day.

The band can also be used to assist both of these exercises should you not have the strength, initially , to do them.

The last exercise that we suggest is the BENCH PRESS. And this isn’t because the bench press is a weak chest exercise, far from it. This exercise is essentially irreplaceable when it comes to chest exercises, and no man should completely eliminate the bench press from his workout routine.

Keep in mind that you can do the bench either, flat, incline or decline and you can use barbells or dumbbells.

How To Build Muscle Successfully

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Oct 262009

Ever wondered why a cave man never had to ask, “How to build muscle?” As historical pictures illustrate, cave men seem to be built with rock hard bodies. The reason for that is really simple – they had healthy diets and they led active lifestyles.

During their times, there was no need or craving for fatty and processed foods simply because it didn’t exist. Their diet consists of raw meat, fish, fruits, and vegetables. Gyms didn’t exist back then, either. And even if they did, people wouldn’t have had the time to go to gyms. They were up by sunrise and hunted until the sun set; built their own houses without the need for an electric drill; climbed big trees and conquered high mountains; fought against wild animals like lions and bears… need I say more? If you want to become a lean, mean, muscle machine like cave men were, you need to learn from them and follow their example.

Diet

Have you ever heard of the Paleo Diet? Taking inspiration from our ancestors, the cave men, Dr. Cordain wrote a book wherein he talks about what he calls a “pre-historic menu”, also known as the Paleo Diet. The theory behind it is easy to understand. He says that no cave man was ever obese or too skinny, mainly because our ancestors had the proper diet, a diet which consisted of lots of lean meat, fish, seafood, fruits, and non-starchy vegetables. He advises people to avoid cereal, legumes, dairy products, and processed food.

If adhering to the Paleo diet strictly sounds a bit too drastic, you can still get excellent results just by following the basics. Add more fruits and vegetables to your diet; avoid processed and fatty foods; and most importantly, eat more lean meat and fish. Lean protein, the building blocks of muscle fibers, can mainly be found in lean meat and fish. The more muscle fibers, the larger the muscles.

Exercise

However, no matter how much protein is stored in your body, you cannot expect to build muscles without any activity at all. The best way to increase muscle mass is to do targeted strength training. The general rule of thumb in building muscles is to stress your muscles by lifting heavy weights. The theory behind it is that lifting weights basically tears the muscle fibers. Given ample time, the fibers then heal back together stronger and larger than before. With this in mind, remember that if it seems like your muscles are no longer challenged by the weights you are carrying it is time to gradually add more. Also, always keep in mind to give your muscles sufficient time to heal.

There are endless ways to build muscles but most of them are quite tedious and difficult.

Click here to get detailed information on how to build muscle FAST with LESS effort.

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