If you’ve been working out and you just haven’t lost and weight, consider that you’ve lost fat but gained muscle. Weight gain of lean muscle is a very healthy weight gain. Many people do cardio exercises three times a week and muscle toning exercise three times a week also. These people do this because they know that your muscle mass makes a difference in your overall health, and also in weight loss.

So if losing weight is your goal, you need to gain some muscle weight. You’ll be a stronger, healthier person, and losing weight will become easier. Your body will become more toned and defined than ever before. You might even have a better healthier body than you did back in high school.

First, consider the physical factors of your environment. Will you be more comfortable indoors or outdoors? Will the weather remain pleasant for the duration of your ab workout if you choose an outdoor location? Consider the amount of space you will need in order to move comfortably during your ab workout. Also, does the space allow for sitting, standing, and laying comfortably? It is important not to feel cramped or inhibited in your movements.

The other important factor when choosing a location for your ab workout is how the location will affect your frame of mind and whether your surroundings serve to motivate you. Does being seen motivate you to work harder, or would you rather have a private ab workout? How will noise affect you? Can you play music, or are you looking for a more serene and silent location? Lastly, consider whether you are in search of a tranquil environment, or if you would prefer a place that has more movement and energy.

Along with endurance, bodybuilding exercises improves the oxygen utilization at the muscular level. Bodybuilding increases the fitness level by improving the cardio vascular strength in our bodies. It results in higher level of activity and makes daily tasks less stressful. Bodybuilding also helps to control weight. By increasing the caloric expenditure, bodybuilding exercises reduce the body fat level.

Regular exercise provides a natural tranquilizer that helps the body to endure the physical strain that we subject it to. If you spend a minimum of half an hour everyday on a bodybuilding regimen will help to control our weight and also keep a check on our vital systems. A well balanced diet along with bodybuilding workouts helps us to prevent many diseases and maintain a healthy body.

I have found a great way to get our children to exercise without them even knowing. By signing your child up for extracurricular activities, they will be socializing, having fun, and secretly getting a good amount of exercise. Almost any sport will do, baseball, football, soccer, dance, just name it. As long as your child is up and moving, you have accomplished your goal.

Not only will your child unknowingly be exercising, but also they will be having fun and so will you. Your child’s participation in a group will benefit them for many years to come. Sports teach children wonderful tools to use in social situations and they tend to steer away from any bad influences. Your child will also be more confident and comfortable in their own skin.

Thanks to the newest in GPS software, more and more exercise bikes are now coming preloaded with the ability to bike anywhere in the world from your machine. This new terrain mapping technology allows GPS makers to build into their devices road grade and elevation changing information, which is helping to create more accurate exercise bike simulations.

With this technology, the hope is to soon allow people to get on their exercise bikes and simulate bicycling routes around their neighborhood or from famous places and events, such as the Tour de France, allowing the average bicyclist to exercise and have the ability to endure the same trails and roads that professionals use to get their exercise and train for their cycling events.

Protein should account for 35% of overall daily calories, which is about 40-60 grams for a 200 pound man. Each meal should also include vegetables, and a smaller amount of carbohydrates and fats in order to=2 0balance one’s diet and keep energy levels from sinking. Try to eat lean proteins in order to build muscle mass such as chicken, turkey, salmon, tuna, egg whites, cottage cheese and yogurt. When coupled with intense muscle building workouts, this diet is ideal. While not necessary, depending on your workout intensity, this diet can be paired with muscle building supplements, but it is not recommended that supplements account for more than 40% of your daily intake. Whole foods, such as the proteins listed above, should be no less than 60% of your total diet.

Many bodybuilders who have tried to get more of their protein from foods have reported good success in doing so while still working out regularly and maintaining a healthy weight. Often, their proteins come from not only the typical meat sources that one would site in protein counts, but also from many of the alternatives that are used by vegetarians to get their protein - namely beans and other types of legumes. These high protein alternatives are often low calorie, and provide some proteins that you can’t get from a powder or a shake. Adding some of these to your diet can give you a natural protein boost along with meats and your supplements.

However, even that minimum amount of weight training is at least something. Sadly, according to the World Health Organization, 60 percent of the world’s population doesn’t even workout the minimum recommendation of 30 minutes of daily moderate-intensity physical activity. This so-called “physical activity” doesn’t even include working out with weights. This could even refer to jogging, a brisk walk, and other activities….yet most people don’t even get that. Wow!

Muscle building routines designed to help you gain weight fast in the form of lean tissue gains are a form of “physical activity” that must be done on a regular basis for the skinny individual looking to build muscle mass without the use of steroids or dietary supplements.

According to the magazine, researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz had athletes perform a nine week full body workout. The magazine says, “The control group performed each set and sat down to rest between sets. The cardioacceleration group first performed a twenty minute warm up to get their heart rates up to about 60 - 85 percent of their max heart rates in the target range. Researchers found that the cardioacceleration group experienced less muscle soreness in all muscle groups trained and DOMS was eliminated by the fourth week. The control group continued to experience muscle soreness”.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that when you maintain your heart rate high throughout an entire workout you’ll improve your metabolism and your body’s ability to remove toxins and bring fresh and much needed nutrients to the hard working muscle groups.

So if your involved in a workout program designed for muscle building and weight gain keep that heart pumping, not just your pecs!

In the column, in part, he writes, “Animal researchers years ago showed that clenbuterol had the rather odd action of working as a calorie nutrient-partitioning agent — in pigs! Without exercising activity, clen shifted calorie intake into more (preferential) muscle tissue, versus fat, in porcine and other livestock. But those of you raised on farms know that pigs grow huge muscle mass on corn, curds, whey and well…slop. Humans are not farm animals”.

Thank you Jeff Everson for telling like it is, and not simply being a “monkey see, monkey do” type of writer and bodybuilder. It’s amazing how because a handful of individuals took the results from some animal study, which in this case would really have no relevance to humans, ran with it, went above and beyond the truth, and recommended it as a huge weapon in holding on to hard earned muscle you’ve built through the use of weights on intense workout routines, while burning body fat fast…..and from there most bodybuilders followed along and used it without any further thought.

This quote is an excellent quote in which I agree with completely.

Read my latest article to find out the truth about Red Bull:
Red Bull Doesn’t Boost Workout Energy

Other than quickly reaching for you bottle of aspirin or Advil, two things you can do to help relieve some of that muscular soreness is:

1) Weight training (the blood flow the brain signals to the working muscles helps take in nutrients, such as vitamins, minerals, calories, hormones, etc., but also takes away or removes toxins).

2) Drink caffeine (some studies claim that it can reduce pain by up to half).

Again, you have to be training hard enough to every now and then induce soreness within the muscle, not to be confused the pain that comes from an actual injury. All of these things will make your muscle building and weight gaining experience much more pleasant.

Read the latest article concerning this:
Study On Core Muscle Activity Lacking

They suggest to wait at least 2 hours after you’ve finished your muscle building workout program before laying onto the massage table to have your knots flattened out to help speed up the recovery, repair, and growth process of gaining muscular weight.

Getting a regular massage will help you out in this area and will reduce your need to rely off of pain medications to deal with the soreness and stiffness that can result from intense weight training.

MuscleMag reports on a study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that regular workout routines will protect the brain and keep it young. The author’s wrote, “Physical and aerobic training can lower your risk of developing some undesirable age-related changes in cognitive and brain function and also help the brain maintain its ability to recover one function if another starts failing later in life”.

The intense focus and concentration that’s required to perform your workout program properly to stimulate muscle building and weight gain no doubts keeps the cob webs out of your brain as long as you continue to train.

Supplement Ripoff: Vitamin-Enriched Drinks

Bravo to this study because it’s one of the few that actually demonstrates the worthless-ness of most nutritional and dietary supplements out on the market.  So many people these days want to fix everything with a pill instead of looking at their lifestyle…….including goals such as wanting to build more muscle and gain weight.

According to Brian Wansink focusing on the food left on your plate and not what’s in your stomach influences you to keep eating…..which instead of muscle building can lead to a lot of fat building!

Dumbbell Presses Build More Pec Muscles

Low Carbs Are Not A Magic Wand

Well, Becky Holman reports in IronMan that brown sugar is not more healthful that white sugar. Your body processes both the same way. Molasses makes brown sugar brown, but the calories and carbs are the same.

I love this observation by Becky because it just goes to show even further just how ridiculous diet experts have gotten in what they suggest to eat and what to avoid. Like I’ve said a million times, whether you are trying to build muscle or to burn body fat it will always, at the end of the day, come down to straight up calories, regardless of the color of the food!!!!

Lars Nybo from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark concluded that excessive increases in body temperature from working out intensely in the heat causes fatigue. Metabolism during exercise works by taking energy from food and converting it to energy the cells use to contract muscles, send signals, control fluids, and build muscle tissue, amongst others. However, the metabolism becomes inefficient as temperature increases, so the body attempts to cool itself by diverting blood to the skin and sweating. Unfortunately, the magazine goes on to report, this blood is no longer available to deliver oxygen to the exercising muscles, which results in fatigue.

High temperatures over longer periods in the brain disturb the capacity to contract muscles…..al which affect muscle building.

DHEA Found Not To Build Muscle

Don’t take my word for it: Here’s a quote from Markus Ruhl, one of the biggest IFBB professional bodybuilders ever, from a Flex interview: “The biggest mistake I see people make in chest training is assuming that flyes and cable crossovers are for definition and not mass building. Definition comes from diet and cardio; weight training is to gain mass. I never do an exercise that does not build mass, and that includes flyes and crossovers. I do them with full power….”

Markus, you have just made one of the most intelligent observations I’ve read a bodybuilder make. How refreshing!

Gain Weight - Problem With Knee Wraps

Just so you can appreciate how many mgs that actually is, green tea, which now-a-days everyone seems to be praising the skies out of, only has about 50 mgs. Red wine only has about 160 mgs (unless, of course, you’re one of those that can’t seem to stop drinking after the first glass…..lol).

homas, the first figure connected to the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative case to go to trial, shouted at the jury after being found guilty of three counts of perjury and a count of obstruction of justice. She was acquitted of two counts of perjury.

“I already had one career taken away from me,” she yelled, referencing her lifetime ban from cycling. “Look me in the eye. You can’t do it.”

Her father, who has sat in the front row of court during the two week trial, also raised his voice and said, “They can’t do it.”

Thomas then shouted and gestured at prosecutors: “Look me in the eye …. You like to destroy people’s lives.”

Thomas, prosecutors and jurors all had no comment.

Outside the courthouse, Thomas’ lawyer Ethan Balogh said he was disappointed.

“It is difficult for all of us who went through this trial,” Balogh said.

Legal experts said Thomas faces a prison sentence of between six months and several years. She is scheduled to be sentenced July 18.

The federal government steroids probe has ensnared a number of elite athletes, including home run king Barry Bonds, track star Marion Jones and former San Francisco 49ers player Dana Stubblefield. Investigators are also looking into whether pitcher Roger Clemens lied when he told Congress he never used performance-enhancing drugs.

Bonds is charged with perjury for allegedly lying to the same grand jury about never knowingly using performance-enhancing drugs.

Legal experts said Thomas’ trial offered Bonds’ lawyers a preview of what kind of evidence the slugger will face if his case goes to trial as expected. Two of Bonds’ attorneys, for instance, watched the government’s lead steroids investigator testify.

The investigator, IRS agent Jeff Novitzky, is expected to play a starring role for the government during Bonds’ trial, which isn’t expected to begin until next year.

Novitzky testified that Thomas’ lies hindered the federal investigation of drug maker Patrick Arnold, who prosecutors wanted to indict in 2003 but had to wait another three years to amass more evidence because of the cyclist’s perjured testimony.

The jury found Thomas guilty of falsely telling the grand jury that she had never taken steroids and had never received any performance-enhancing drugs from Arnold, who pleaded guilty in 2006 to making two undetectable steroids.

Thomas made her denials even though she was banned from cycling for life in August 2002 after the performance-enhancing drug Norbolethone was detected in her urine.

The drug, once an obscure steroid used in human tests in the 1960s, was rediscovered by Arnold, who supplied the Burlingame-based BALCO with undetectable performance-enhancing drugs.

Prosecutors also showed jurors Thomas medical records that showed she grew a full beard and underwent dramatic voice changes that a doctor diagnosed as side effects of heavy steroid use. Arnold also testified that he sent Thomas the steroids THG he invented at least once.

Thomas is the ninth BALCO figure to suffer convictions. Eight others, including Jones and BALCO founder Victor Conte, have pleaded guilty to various charges of perjury, drug and money laundering charges.

In addition, track coach Trevor Graham has pleaded not guilty to lying to federal agents about giving steroids to athletes. Graham’s trial in San Francisco federal court is scheduled to begin May 19. Graham helped spur the original BALCO investigation when he mailed a vial of Arnold’s designer drug also called “the clear” to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.

MY TAKE: Once again we have another big time athlete being accused of taking steroids that are usually taken for muscle building / endurance purposes. As always, innocent until proven guilty.

Build Muscle - Avoid Fasts

In my opinion, isometric holds are very effective at not only muscular performance, but also at stimulating muscle building and gains in body weight (with the addition of proper caloric intake).

Fast or Slow Reps To Build Muscle & Gain Weight?

The official list as to who the Gladiators will be has not been released, but as soon as it is made public you’ll be able to check it out here.

It’s been known for 20 years now that people with high blood pressure who don’t want to lower their salt intake can simply more potassium-containing foods, since they keep each other balanced out. Dutch researchers determined that a low potassium intake has the same impact on your blood pressure as high salt consumption.

Good sources of potassium are fruits, vegetables, and legumes….such as bananas, white potatoes, spinach, and broccoli.

This is why the University of California at Davis, continues to report the column, scientists determined fructose intakes from both HFCS and table sugar. The truth is, there’s no evidence to show any differences in these two types of sugar. Both will cause you to blur your muscular definition and will result in weight gain when consumed in excess, but of the bad kind.

Just watch what you drink, such as soft drinks, sweetened fruit juices, and prepackaged desserts (unless, of course, it’s your higher calorie days….yum).

Water Can Enhance Muscle Definition

Again, even though muscle building is your main goal, you still have to keep body fat in check…..this is one way how you can accomplish this.

Later…………

Microwaving preserves more than 90% of the vegetable’s Vitamin C, an important cancer fighting nutrient, continues to report MuscleMag. Microwave your veggies without adding water so that they cook in their own juices. To ensure they cook evenly, stir halfway through.

The more vitamins you’re body can utilize, the more muscle building and weight gain you’ll grab a hold of.

The more agile your muscles are the easier it will be to create a good pump and burn needed to build muscle mass naturally and gain weight fast.

However, what was found in some of these cases was that these trainers took bodybuilding supplements contaminated (known as “spiking”) with small amounts of nandrolone. The Food and Drug Administration, also known as the FDA, announced that it plans to step up efforts to eliminate illegal ingredients in food supplements and enforce regulations against supplement makers who make unsubstantiated health claims for their products.

According to a column in Mens Health, water is a powerful lifting aid. University of Connecticut researchers discovered that men who hydrated with water before lifting completed 17% more reps per set during a lower body workout than thirsty exercisers.

Turns out, your nervous system slows your muscle activation when you’re not adequately hydrated, continues to report the column.

My take: I completely agree with the fact that the majority of us do not drink enough water. The advantages that water provides are way too many not to drink it. I mean, c’mon, it’s free (unless you’re foolish enough to shell out $2.00 for tap water just because it comes in some fancy looking water with a beautiful water fall on the label). Water is one of the few substances that can actually make a difference in your muscle building / weight gain goals.

Read the new article here:
Get Rid of Chronic Pain By Weight Lifting

The downside of a garlic-rich diet, continues to report MuscleMag, is that to take advantage of all of its benefits, you’d have to consume 8-12 cloves every day. You could simply add garlic to every meal you eat throughout the day, but you’d have to deal with the bad breath that comes with eating it. Maximize garlic’s health benefits when cooking with it by crushing the cloves at room temperature and letting them sit for about 15 minutes to allow the trigger of an enzyme reaction that boosts garlic’s healthy compounds.

Hey, even though your primary objective may be muscle building or gaining weight naturally, you must have healthy heart that will pump nutrient-rich blood to the working muscles.

Read my latest article to have more light shed on this matter:
Latest muscle building article

Olive oil’s high level of polyphenols is credited for the results.

My take: hey, anything that keeps your digestive system and internals organs running smoothly is always going to bode well for your muscle building / weight gaining goals.