Working out is very important when it comes to building your body.  That is, getting the build that you want, including those well-toned pecs and well-defined biceps.  However, how can you make the most out of working out?  Well, here are a few tips for you to make use of.   When you start body building, it will be helpful to first sit and think about your goals.  What do you want to get out of the bodybuilding workout program?  This will be the first thing your fitness instructor or personal trainer will ask you, even before you start your workouts.  Pause and think, “What are my goals?”  It is important to remember that we all start to work out for different reasons, depending on our personal needs and wants.  Usually, we go for a workout for the following reasons: getting rid of those body bulges and trimming down the body fat, gaining more muscle, developing your muscles by increasing its striations and definition or recovering from an injury.

So, before you even start doing some workouts with your muscle and fitness instructor or personal trainer, communication is the key towards your success.  You have to tell your personal trainer exactly what results you want to achieve through your sessions.  Being specific is the key, avoid statements that are vague and generalized.  This way, you both can work together to reach your goals to your satisfaction and afterwards, you can measure your performance in relation to your goal.

Now, to the unpracticed eye, the bodybuilding workouts that are done sometimes seem random.  They all seem to blend together and do not seem to have a particular purpose.   However, these workouts are anything but random.  A good workout plan is built with a specific goal in mind, for a specific body or person.  It is composed of a set of workouts that target specified areas of the body and are put together in a certain order, with a set number of minutes per workout.  This is sometime you and your training should talk about  before starting your workout.

It is important to have a workout plan.  As the saying goes, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.  Doing exercises at random and using whatever exercise machine is available will not give you the results you want.  You may even injure yourself during your workouts.

There are so many body building workouts to choose from.  When building your workout plan, you should also try to experiment so that you are able to build a workout set that is best for you.  Again, communicating with your trainer will help yield the best result

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Is the pump necassaryfor gaining muscle? Will more muscle makes you slower?How important is perfect form?or not? all these questions and more and the truth and the myths around them are revealed in this article. enjoy

Sean’s program, The Truth About Building Muscle, is a detailed plan of attack for quickly gaining the muscle mass you want. He covers the entire body in depth, from the chest and back all the way down to the calves. It is an excellent program and highly recommended.

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4 Fatal Muscle-Building Myths Revealed

By Sean Nalewanyj

If you’re serious about making a solid commitment to a muscle-building program, you need to be very careful of who you take advice from. Bodybuilding and fitness is literally a multi-billion dollar industry with new websites popping up every single day.

Many of the so-called “experts” out there really don’t have a clue of what they’re talking about and are only motivated by pushing expensive pills, powders and “miracle programs” on you that you don’t really need.

If you don’t watch your step you may end up falling for some fatal muscle-building pitfalls that will literally destroy your gains.

In this article I’m going to expose 4 very common muscle-building myths in order to keep you on the proper path to the mind-blowing muscle and strength gains you deserve.

Myth #1: In order to build muscle, you must achieve a “pump” during your workout. The greater the pump you achieve, the more muscle you will build.

For those of you who are just starting out, a “pump” is the feeling that you get as blood becomes trapped inside the muscle tissue when you train with weights. The muscles will swell up and leave your body feeling bigger, tighter, stronger and more powerful.

While a pump does feel fantastic, it has very little, if anything to do with properly stimulating your muscles to grow.

A pump is simply the result of increased bloodflow to the muscle tissue and is certainly not indicative of a successful workout. A successful workout should only be gauged by the concept of progression. If you were able to lift more weight or perform more reps than you did in the previous week, then you did your job.

Myth #2: Building muscle will cause you to become slower and less flexible.

Contrary to what you may think, building a significant amount of lean muscle mass will actually speed you up rather than slow you down.

Muscles are responsible for every movement that your body makes, from running to jumping to throwing. The bottom line is that the stronger a muscle is, the more force it can apply.

Having stronger, more muscular legs means increased foot speed, just as having stronger and more muscular shoulders means the ability to throw farther.

Myth #3: You must always use perfect, textbook form on all exercises.

While using good form in the gym is always important, obsessing over perfect form is an entirely different matter. If you are always attempting to perform every exercise using flawless, textbook form, you will actually increase your chances of injury and simultaneously decrease the total amount of muscle stimulation you can achieve.

It’s very important that you always move naturally when you exercise. This could mean adding a very slight sway in your back when you perform bicep curls, or using a tiny bit of body momentum when executing barbell rows.

Myth #4: If you want your muscles to grow you must “feel the burn!”

This is another huge misconception in the gym. The “burning” sensation that results from intense weight training is simply the result of lactic acid (a metabolic waste product) that is secreted inside the muscle tissue as you exercise.

Increased levels of lactic acid have nothing to do with muscle growth and may actually slow down your gains rather than speed them up. You can limit lactic acid production by training in a lower rep range of 5-7, rather than the traditional range of 12 and above.

Lear more about the author Sean Nalewanyj

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You know, Most people focus so much on the big “show off” muscles like chest and biceps , that they get kind of blind to the fact that there are other “problem muscles” people struggle with.One common problem is “skinny calves“.

People tend to ignore the calves probably more than any other muscle group because most of bodybuilders are simply trying to pack on mass and let’s face it… …calf presses aren’t a big “mass builder” exercise, you know?

However, working the calves is important in order to maintain “balance” in how you look when you lean out for the summer. So whether you are gearing up for the summer like me, or you’re just cursed with “skinny calves”, here’s why it’s so hard to develop them…and how to do it the right way…

m…and how to do it the right way…

Get Instant Access to the Advanced Hypertrophy Calf Training Program and Say Bye to Your Chicken Legs

Why “traditional calf training” doesn’t work

All you really need to know is that your calves are your body’s “brakes”, and are best trained in this capacity. In other words, when your calves are going through an eccentric motion such as the “down” phase of a calf press. The problem with traditional calf exercises is that the amount of weight that you can handle during this phase is much more than what your calves can handle in the “concentric” phase, when you’re lifting the weight up. This means that the most important phase of calf exercises don’t get enough heavy weight to let them stimulate muscle fiber growth effectively.

m…and how to do it the right way…

Get Instant Access to the Advanced Hypertrophy Calf Training Program and Say Bye to Your Chicken Legs

Now, here’s the Solution to skinny calves

The secret to building your calves is to lift heavy with both legs during the concentric phases (the “up” movement”). But then when you’re lowering the weight (or your body), you want to take all of the stress off of one of your legs while the other calf handles the entire weight for a slow, steady descent through the eccentric phase. Once you’ve reached the bottom of the movement (after a 4 second descent), you use both legs again to bring the weight back up to the “up” position and let the same leg handle the weight down again. Continue for 6-8 reps on one side (until failure), and then immediately work the other calf in the same fashion. Use this method for all calf exercise options and I promise you that switching to this type of training for your calves will blow away the results you get from using both legs for these exercises.

m…and how to do it the right way…

Get Instant Access to the Advanced Hypertrophy Calf Training Program and Say Bye to Your Chicken Legs

If you like to recieve tips like this and more delevered to your e-mail inbox. just sign for our Ezine here Free bodybuilding Ezine

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Training Plateau is when you reach the point that no more progress is possible (at least it feels that way)don’t just dream about building muscle when you hit the plateau . You just need to take action to continue your progress. By that I mean the right type of effort .This Article from our expert Sean Nalewanyj will highlight the fundamental reasons for reaching the plateau and how to overcome this situation and continue your muscle building journey.

Sean’s program, The Truth About Building Muscle, is a detailed plan of attack for quickly gaining the muscle mass you want. He covers the entire body in depth, from the chest and back all the way down to the calves. It is an excellent program and highly recommended.(see our Full Muscle Gain Truth Review)

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If You’ve Hit A Training Plateau, Read This

By Sean Nalewanyj

We’ve all experienced it at one time or another…

Our training programs are running smoothly, and with each week that passes we’re successfully adding more weight to the bar, more pounds to the scale and more muscle size and thickness to our bodies. Then, all of a sudden and without warning, those gains come to a screeching halt and our muscle building and strength gaining progress is stopped dead in its tracks. In the bodybuilding world, this is referred to as a “plateau”. The very idea of this would send shivers up the spine of any serious trainee, as this plateau essentially means that despite our best efforts in the gym and in the kitchen, no additional progress can be made. What does a typical lifter do in response to this? They immediately begin haphazardly switching up their training routine in an effort to “shock” their muscles into new growth… They change their exercises and rep ranges… And they implement new “advanced techniques” such as forced reps, negatives and static holds in an effort to break through the plateau into new levels of growth. STOP! While exercise variety can sometimes be a reasonable option here, these plateaus exist as a result of far more fundamental reasons. They usually have nothing to do with the repeated use of the same workout. In the majority of cases, training plateaus are simply the result of overtraining. All we have to do is review some basic physiology in order to see why this is the case… When we train intensely in the gym, we are damaging our muscles. Each set that we perform digs a “hole” into the body’s recovery ability. When we leave the gym, the body then uses rest and nutrients in order to rebuild the damaged muscle and to fill up this hole.

Once the muscles have been remodeled back to their previous state, the body will then compensate by building additional muscle mass as an adaptive response to the stress.

So far, so good, right? Here’s the critical factor that you need to keep in mind… As you become stronger and add more and more weight to the bar on your exercises, the overall stress and resulting “hole” that is dug into the body’s recovery ability continually increases.

The advanced lifter who is bench pressing 300 pounds for 6 reps is placing his muscles and body under far more overall stress than the beginner who is benching 125 pounds.

What does this have to do with plateaus? Everything! If you are consistently adding more weight to the bar and pushing your body to higher and higher levels of stress each week, you MUST compensate for the increase in stress by reducing your training volume and frequency. If the stress from each individual set is constantly on the upward climb yet you are still performing the same number of sets and training days, your body will inevitably be pushed beyond its ability to properly recover in between workouts. Improper recovery means that the muscle is not given an adequate amount of time to remodel and to increase its size and strength further.

This is why your gains slow down and eventually stop; it’s because every time your body is about to compensate by increasing the size and strength of the muscles, you interrupt the process by placing them under more stress and digging a new hole into recovery.

If the hole never gets filled, you never progress forward, and you keep yourself on the plateau. How crystal clear and obvious is that? As you become more advanced, you must train less often and with fewer sets! Training intensity and volume are DIRECTLY related, and are part of a balanced equation that determines your progress. As one variable increases, the other MUST decrease. So to all of you out there who are “stuck” on this weight training plateau… Regulate your volume and frequency! Decrease the number of sets that you perform for each muscle group slightly, and consider inserting an additional rest day in between workouts. If by doing this you begin coming back to the gym stronger than you were before, you’ll know for sure that you were previously overtraining. A slight reduction in volume and frequency is usually all that is needed in order to make steady, uninterrupted progress in muscle size and strength.

Instead of panicking and reaching for the latest Muscle Mag for a new “ground breaking” routine, simply understand that the body has a finite amount of recovery ability and that as you grow stronger, you use up more of it on each individual set.

Reduce the volume slightly, consider inserting an additional rest day, and that is most likely all you’ll need to blast yourself through the plateau and into a new phase of growth.

Lear more about the author Sean Nalewanyj

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