Muscles
- Thread starter TurdDrive
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It's important to realize that it's not just about how many calories you take in. I used to weigh about 120, and could never gain any weight. However, after a focused diet I was able to increase to about 130. My goal was 140-150, but then school hit me. Now that I'm graduating I'm going to give it another go.
For instance I was just eating a bowl of cereal for breakfast. I quickly realized that this just didn't give me everything my body needed. I focused on adding 3 things to my diet. Complex carbohydrates, protein, and healthy fats.
Cereal is mostly just carbohydrates, but the problem is the body can break them down so easily it doesn't help you as much. So I tried to move away from the more processed stuff. I'd have a fruit at almost every meal. Usually an apple or a banana since I'm not big on most other fruits. Wheat bread also helps a ton. For dinner I'd almost always have an extra helping of rice or pasta. Yogurt and hard granola bars were great for snacks.
As already mentioned the powder you get at the store can really help. One thing that really helped me was trying to eat 5-6 times a day instead of just 2-3. Having a shake you can mix up in less than a minute at work really helps. I would just keep a thing of milk in the work freezer and got a nice bottle to shake it up in. You need a certain amount of protein, but it's easy to go overboard. My goal was 1g of protein for every pound I wanted to weigh. Two protein shakes a day and a piece of meat for dinner was just about right.
The hardest part for me was getting healthy fat. We're talking about the kinds of fats and oil that are liquid at room temperature. You just have to find ways to stick it in here and there. When I cook eggs in the morning I always use some olive oil. However, my favorite in this category was avocados. You can do all sorts of great stuff with them. I particularly like avocado sandwiches, but they're not very good sitting in your lunch sack all day. Plus you don't want to go overboard. One or two avocados a week is plenty. Hence this is what I'd usually eat for lunch on Sat/Sun.
Beyond that it's all about just adding that extra little thing to everything you eat. For instance if you're going to eat some yogurt then why not put some wheat germ in it as well. Cook with olive oil, or add diced avocado to your salad. The little things here and there add up.
Finally I'd like to add that this wasn't just something you do casually. It took a real effort to be able to pull off my diet. I had to spend more time preparing, and plan every meal. Otherwise I would end up spending more cash at the grocery store than I could afford.
A couple things to remember:
*Dont use Creatine or anything like that. You don't really need it to build muscle. It helps, but building muscles naturally is the best way to go. Any personal trainer worth his or her salt will tell you this.
*Stretch all of your muscles before working out, not just the ones you intend to work on that day. This helps body-wide flexibility and agility, as well as making the muscles you intend to work that day less prone to damage. For some good pre-weight stretches just Google.
*The best way to build muscle is to work out with weights. Do each area two or three times a week and rotate out the days. For example, you can do your bench presses on Mondays and Thursdays, you can do leg presses on Tuesdays and Fridays, and you can do crunches and some variations on Wednesdays and Saturdays. This will build those three key areas evenly (upper body, lower body, and core) and will give you Sunday to rest all of your muscles. Remember that muscles don't build unless you give them time to rest. If you are constantly tearing them (i.e. constantly working out) then they will never grow and they will in fact get permanently damaged if you constantly overwork them.
*Don't forget cardio. Cardio is very important to your muscle building workout. It not only helps increase your endurance and burn off all the fat, it also strengthens your heart and general cardiovascular system. Lifting weights will not do much without endurance; remember, you've got to stress your muscles to build them. It's easy to add a cardio regiment to your strength training workout - just jog or run on a treadmill for 15 minutes. Do your cardio BEFORE doing your weight training. It helps you get warmed up.
*Keep at it. This is the most important part. Don't give up because you don't see any huge gains or improvements after only a few weeks. It takes time. Depending on your body's current shape it could take several months or even a year to see any noticeable gains or improvements. But I'm willing to bet that if you stick to the plan you'll see noticeable gains in a month or two; most people do.
*Dont use Creatine or anything like that. You don't really need it to build muscle. It helps, but building muscles naturally is the best way to go. Any personal trainer worth his or her salt will tell you this.
*Stretch all of your muscles before working out, not just the ones you intend to work on that day. This helps body-wide flexibility and agility, as well as making the muscles you intend to work that day less prone to damage. For some good pre-weight stretches just Google.
*The best way to build muscle is to work out with weights. Do each area two or three times a week and rotate out the days. For example, you can do your bench presses on Mondays and Thursdays, you can do leg presses on Tuesdays and Fridays, and you can do crunches and some variations on Wednesdays and Saturdays. This will build those three key areas evenly (upper body, lower body, and core) and will give you Sunday to rest all of your muscles. Remember that muscles don't build unless you give them time to rest. If you are constantly tearing them (i.e. constantly working out) then they will never grow and they will in fact get permanently damaged if you constantly overwork them.
*Don't forget cardio. Cardio is very important to your muscle building workout. It not only helps increase your endurance and burn off all the fat, it also strengthens your heart and general cardiovascular system. Lifting weights will not do much without endurance; remember, you've got to stress your muscles to build them. It's easy to add a cardio regiment to your strength training workout - just jog or run on a treadmill for 15 minutes. Do your cardio BEFORE doing your weight training. It helps you get warmed up.
*Keep at it. This is the most important part. Don't give up because you don't see any huge gains or improvements after only a few weeks. It takes time. Depending on your body's current shape it could take several months or even a year to see any noticeable gains or improvements. But I'm willing to bet that if you stick to the plan you'll see noticeable gains in a month or two; most people do.
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If you want to build muscle, you have to push your limits. When you're not tired after working out, you simply didn't work out hard enough. There's no muscle fairy that just zaps you another few pounds on your arms for every day of training.
Simply put, you damage your muscle with the training and then it builds up stronger than it was before to be able to cope with the weights. This does not mean that you need to train until your muscles are sore, but it is a good indicator that you trained enough to make your muscles grow.
Train hard, but correct. Means train slow, with weights that allow you to do about 10 repetitions, few more or less won't matter.
If you don't train correctly, which means you use weights that are too much or train wrong, it's quite likely that you will hurt yourself.
Also, you need to rest to give your muscles the time to recover.
Ah, and don't expect to see results after some weeks. Bulking up needs time.
Some of my friends told me that they got about 20 pounds heavier after training for three months or so, which is not possible without some serious roids or a growth spurt. If that happens to you, you simply eat too much.
@Creatine: well, it's hard not to use it, as it is a natural part of muscle activity. You just shouldn't add extra amounts of it.
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