October 30, 2008
While kettleballs have been used for over 100 years in places like Russia, their use was not widespread until recent years. In America, kettleball training is virtually exploding, thanks to some very unique results that you can achieve with kettleballs. For anyone looking for muscle weight gain, kettleballs make a compelling entry in your workout routine.
Kettleballs look like miniature bowling balls with thick, large handles. They come in diverse weights from around 2 kilos to 35 kilos, but the heavier weights aren’t used often, as kettleball training focuses more on conditioning, explosive strength, and movement, rather than sheer strength.
The incredible aspect of kettleball training is their versatility. In one quick workout you can accomplish a number of goals. Some of the numerous benefits you’ll gain from kettleball training include:
And I’ve saved the best for last: kettleball training can boost your metabolism for almost a full day after your workout is complete, making kettleballs ideal candidates to help you build muscle up and shed fat.
Kettleballs do have drawbacks, however, but they can be overcome. The one cited most frequently is that kettleballs only work for upper body and core conditioning, and not your lower body. To supplement you’ll need to pair your kettleball routine with a good lower body session, or maybe even a quick interval training routine.
Keep in mind that ketteballs will work most effectively in interval-based workouts, so traditional body building workouts aren’t the best fit. However, if your goal is to build muscle up and you stay abreast of advances in exercise science, you’re probably already aware that traditional body building exercises aren’t the most appropriate option.
With the many advantages that kettleballs offer, they should be added to your workout session, provided that it already emphasizes recent discoveries in fitness science and is a good fit for your body type and goals.
October 30, 2008
If your goal is to get 100% better at something, how would you approach it? I can think of two primary approaches. The approach you select will be somewhere along this continuum: performing one activity twice as well (or 100 percent better), or doing 100 things 1 percent better. I think that most people try the former approach, but the latter is much easier to implement.
Taken a step further, to make each of these small building blocks more effective, you could also focus on things that occur outside of your workouts. So you concentrate on changing your habits and making tiny improvements in many areas that will stack on top of one another to bring you huge benefits.
So here are 5 minor lifestyle changes you can make to help you build muscle up.
1) Replace Aerobics with High Intensity Interval Trainign
Aerobic activities have a negative impact on mass building because it burns branched chain amino acids (BCAA) and glycogen. Instead, focus on interval training for fat burning, for example a 400-meter sprint followed by a 400-meter recovery jog, repeated for a total of four times.
2) Increase Total Time Under Load (TTL)
Rather than concentrating on the quantity of reps, focus on the total time your muscles are under load. Try spending 2 seconds on the negative contraction, 1 second at a neutral contraction (bottom of the exercise), and 1 second on the positive contraction. Lengthening the negative is an easy method to overload muscles and promote muscle weight gain.
3) Increase your Sodium Intake
Sodium increases amino acid absorption and carbohydrate storage while also improving the muscle’s receptiveness to insulin. Just do in it moderation!
4) Recovery
Your body will only build muscle up by repairing it in response to your workouts. When your muscles are repaired, they are made stronger than before to respond to the higher stress levels put on them. If you don’t allow your muscles time to recover, they can never rebuild.
5) Cheat on your Diet
If you haven’t yet read the Cheat to Lose Diet, you should. It’s a pretty interesting theory into how the body metabolizes food. The short story is that your body burns fat when a hormone is present in your body, and that hormone appears as a direct result of overeating! So once a week, cheat, and follow your cheat day with two very low-carbohydrate, high protein days. You’ll enjoy the cheat day and burn more fat to boot.
October 29, 2008
I bet you’ve been told a hundred times: it’s impossible to build muscle up and burn fat at the same time. They say that building mass requires an increase in calories, while fat burning requires a decrease in calories. This old school wisdom is based partially in fact, but the concepts are being tossed on their ears with insights into interval workouts. The truth is, you can achieve muscle weight gain at the same time as you burn fat if you add intervals to your sessions.
Interval training isn’t new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and practiced as of late. Whereas standard aerobic activities were looked at as the only efficient ways to shed weight, and the only acceptable workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has been shown to be advantageous to athletes of all kinds, and for folks with many different goals.
Old school aerobic activity is referred to as “steady state,” which essentially means that you build up to a fixed intensity level and continue working out at that level throughout the training session. During the session, your body obtains 50 percent of its fuel by burning fat, and gets the remainder through oxygen intake, and by tapping into your muscle and glycogen stores.
HIIT sessions, on the other hand, consist of brief maximum intensity intervals followed by lower intensity rest periods. HIIT sessions are muscle sparing and are quick, but pack a wallop. A fifteen-minute HIIT session can raise your base metabolism for almost 24 hours, enabling you to continue burning higher levels of fat for up to a day.
On top of this, because your muscles burn calories during every minute of the day, the more lean mass you have, the more fat you burn, even while you’re inactive. Because HIIT not only spares your muscle, but also helps you build muscle up, your future fat burning ability is increased.
The bottom line is that regardless of your fitness goals, HIIT workouts can help you improve your overall fitness level with very short sessions. Even better, if your goals include mass gain and fat shedding, adding HIIT to your workout schedule is a no-brainer.
October 29, 2008
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Free Weights vs. Machines
A lot of people debate about which one is effective when it comes to exercise and physical fitness and gain muscle mass. These people often debate whether machines are more effective for building muscles or free weights. Basically, barbells and free weights are classified as free weights. On the other hand exercises that have pulleys or cables to help you lift the weight are machines.
In order to build muscle mass, you need to focus more on free weight exercises. For all machine enthusiasts out there, you might rethink about which one is more effective. Free weights are indeed more effective for gaining muscle growth. Although the exercises here are a lot more difficult to execute because nothing is actually assisting you to employ the correct execution, this fact alone is why free weight exercise is much more effective.
When doing free weight exercises you are able to stimulate most of the muscle fibers as possible. This is impossible to do with a machine. Why?
Basically, machines lack in promoting stabilizers and synergist muscle development. Basically, these two muscles are what support the main muscles when you are performing a complex lift. For example, if you need to do bench presses, you need to be able to make use of the stabilizers and the synergist muscles in order for you to achieve lift. And, you need lots of it. If you bench press using a machine, it will not really need any assistance from the stabilizers as the machine itself is already supporting your main muscles.
Machines basically fail to stimulate the muscles around the area you are working on, which are the stabilizers. Just remember that in order for your main muscles to grow, the stabilizers should be strong. And, there’s only way to do this which is by doing as much free weight exercises as you possibly can.
Free weight exercises, such as squats, dumbbell presses, dumbbell fly, bench presses, bent over dumbbell row, and others put a lot of stress in the supporting muscle groups, which is why you get tired really fast doing free weight exercises. However, even if you do get tired really fast, you will gain more muscles and you will become a lot stronger at a very fast rate.
You can include machine exercises in your program but you need to do it after you execute all the free weight exercises. This way, you will be able to take advantage of the strength you have on free weight exercises and not deplete it on machine exercises.
If you are a beginner, concentrate on lighter weights. Your primary goal is not muscle gain yet. You first need to properly execute the free weight exercises you have in your program in order for you to move on to heavier weights.
Concentrate on strengthening the supporting muscles first and when it is able to support the weight you are lifting and that you are able to execute the free weight exercises properly, then it’s time for you to concentrate on the primary muscles.
Also, in order to gain muscle mass, you need to lift heavier weights. What heavy means is that weights that are challenging for you and weights that you will be able to lift with 8 to 12 repetitions for at least 3 sets. If you can do more than 15 repetitions before temporary failure sets in, then it will be considered as light weight.
Remember these tips and you can be sure that you will be able to gain muscles fast. Always remember that one of the keys to muscle gain is to strengthen the supporting muscles. And, only doing free weight exercises will be able to do this efficiently.
