Regardless of sex, age or fitness level, weight lifting is one of the best ways to improve fitness and overall health. This article includes many tips on maximizing the benefits from your workouts for an effective program in muscle building. Continue on to learn more.
When attempting to put on muscle, you’ll have to ensure you are consuming enough calories. Eat the amount that you need to gain a weekly pound. Try to find ways to increase your caloric intake. After a few weeks, if you do not notice a weight change you may want to start consuming more calories.
Warming up correctly is vital when it comes to increasing your muscle mass. As muscles strengthen, they are under additional stress, which may make them more prone to injury. You can avoid this injury by warming up properly. Always warm up before your lifting with 5 to 10 minutes of light exercise and some lighter than normal sets.
Rewards for setting and achieving short-term goals are a great way to maintain your focus and motivation. Since gaining muscle involves a long-term commitment, it is important to stay motivated constantly. Why not pick rewards that will help your muscle building efforts? Investing in a new piece of fitness equipment will prevent your workout from becoming boring and help you achieve your goal.
If you are currently training to do a marathon, or doing any type of extreme cardio work, now is not a good time to try to build up your muscles. Although a certain amount of cardio is beneficial for everyone, bulking up at the same time that you are doing really intense cardiovascular work will be difficult, if not impossible. For building muscle, focus on your strength-training efforts.
Compound exercises will help you obtain the best possible muscle growth. These exercises work multiple muscle groups simultaneously. For example, a bench press will utilize shoulder, tricep and chest muscles all at once.
Sixty Minutes
Don’t work out for more than sixty minutes. Once passing the 60 minute mark, the body starts making more cortisol, which is the stress hormone. Cortisol blocks testosterone, which causes less efficiency during workouts. If you keep your workouts under sixty minutes, you will reap the rewards of your efforts faster and enjoy the benefits of your hard work.
Work opposing muscles at the same time by performing exercises that work the chest and back or quads and hamstrings. This gives one muscle group a break while you work the opposite and also ensures that you don’t train unevenly and create muscle imbalances. This method is also more efficient and allows you to increase your intensity since your workout is shorter.
Know your limits, and push yourself in an exercise to the point at which you hit that limit. When doing your sets, keep going until you literally cannot go any further. If you start getting tired, shorten the lengths of the sets.
Plyometric Exercises
Try doing plyometric exercises. Plyometric exercises help your body have better fast twitch fibers that also help muscles grow. Plyometrics require lots of quick moves and acceleration. For example, during plyometric push-ups, you would pull your hands off the floor and lift your body as high as possible.
You can always cheat a bit as you lift weights. Using your body just a little bit in order to get a few extra reps is a great way to increase the amount of your workout. But, it is important to keep cheating to a minimum. Have a rep speed that’s controlled. Don’t let your reps get sloppy.
Your muscle building goals should be difficult but attainable. Your best results are achieved gradually over time, through working out hundreds of times. Attempting to quickly build muscle by using steroids, stimulants, or other bad substances can harm your body and possibly cause serious health consequences.
Set goals which are both realistic and short term. While you may want to squat three hundred pounds in the first month, this is a pipe dream and going too fast is a major cause of injury. Try aiming for small amounts of progress after every workout. You may surprise yourself and improve over the goal you set for yourself. This can provide the motivational boost you need to get through your next workout.
Do not abandon your cardiovascular workout when try to gain muscle mass. Even though cardiovascular regimens may seem like they won’t help you build muscle, it’s imperative to maintain the health of your heart. Exercising three times at twenty minutes each per week will increase heart health without stifling your muscle growth.
Fitness is important regardless of your age and so too are strong muscles. You should have learned a lot from this article so that you can use muscle building to build strength and stamina and help develop good habits that will keep you healthy.