by: Chris Chew

Five times a week, two hours each visit. You’ve been more faithful to your gym schedule than you’ve ever been to any girlfriend you’ve had. And for a while it paid off: those muscles started rippling and the girls started paying attention.

But then, like a bad dream you wake up from, your muscles suddenly wasn’t growing like what it used to do. Your muscles stop responding to your heavy workout no matter how intensely you’ve been training. So you said to yourself, now I will train harder. So now you put in three hours a session and but even as you upped your gym dosage, horrors of horrors, your muscles are actually shrinking.

Ahhhhh, the Gym Plateau. It afflicts all of us and few of us ever gotten out of it. In fact, most people don’t even know that they have hit the dreaded plateau and thought that their muscles can only grow so much due to inherent genetic factors. Not to worry though, if you read the following fitness tips, and follow these tips to the latter, I can assure you that your muscles will start growing again and grow bigger they will.

Here are your free fitness tips:

Fitness Tip #1 Take A Break

This tip is easy to comply for most of us but very difficult for some gym rats. Simply take a break from your workout. Do not step into the gym or do any workout for 2 weeks. Its time to let your body recover from the punishments you are dishing out to your muscles. Some bodybuilders may find this difficult to do because working out is addictive. You produce endorphin when you workout and endorphin is also known as happy hormone. The same hormone you produce when having sex.

Professional bodybuilders take a break after every 4-5 months of hard training and when they are back in the gym, they shock their well rested but complacent muscles back into massive muscle gain.

Fitness Tip #2 Are you training too often?

If your exercises are intense enough, you need only to train each muscle group once or twice a week. Your training schedule shouldn’t repeat muscle groups in the same week. Every time you train, you do your muscles damage. Muscles need time to repair and it does so in the after your training when you are resting. This means that if you lift weights on consecutive days, there isn’t sufficient time for the body to recover. Try to have one day rest between each weight lifting day.

If your routine requires intensive weight training, remember not to prolong your gym time longer than an hour. This is because your cortisol, a muscle eating hormone level will be elevated and thus will be counter productive to your efforts. It eats your muscles.

Most of all, you must sleep! Eight hours or even better, go for ten hours. Muscles do not grow in the gym; they grow when you sleep. When you sleep, you are secreting growth hormones for many bodily functions and one of those functions is to build muscles. That is why they called it beauty sleep!

Fitness Tip #3 Are you using the correct weight lifting techniques?

If your technique or form is incorrect, not only is your training retarded, you are also inviting injury. Don’t laugh. But when you exercise you must think and focus, instead of mindlessly repeating the motions, do take note of how you perform each exercise and rep. Do so with deliberation and at the beginning and end of every lift, pause and squeeze the muscles you are exercising. Mind and muscle must connect! Never never use momentum of the swing to lift the weights and let gravity pull the weight down. That is why you must lift slowly and lower slowly feeling the tension in your muscles and resisting the load all the time.

In order for muscles to want to grow, you have to stress them to the maximum, and then further. Do enough repetitions until you feel you cannot go any further using good form. You must then either increase the weight or the number of repetitions at the next session. This is called progressive overload, and progressive overload is what forces your muscles to grow. As a general guide, if you can lift more than 12 reps the weight is probably too light and it is too heavy if your muscles fail you in less than 5 reps. You may wish to consult your physical fitness trainer on the correct form and technique for each exercise.

Fitness Tip #4 Are you using free weights?

Most machines do not involve as much of the synergistic muscles (supporting muscles) as free weights do. And, therefore, do not build as much muscle mass. Synergistic muscles are the smaller muscles that aid the main muscles in balance and strength in each lift. Machines has its uses, but for beginners and for smashing plateaus, use free weights.

Fitness Tip#5 Workout with compound exercises

Compound exercises are exercises that involve 2 or more joint movements and thereby employing bigger muscles and more synergistic muscles . Bench presses, dead lifts, squats, and barbell curls amongst others are fantastic compound exercises . For example, when you squat , all the muscles in your lower body get a workout and that alone is about 60 percent of your overall musculature . Squat also works your back and abs too. Using more muscles at one go means that you get a better overall workout. To add icing to the cake, because of the massive utilization of your muscles , you will pant, huff and sweat more. That means your routine also has a cardio effect and you will burn calories even hours after you stepped out of the gym .

Fitness Tip#6 Are you working out your legs?

Your body is programmed to grow proportionately with only slight variations. If you do not train your legs, your upper body mass will stop growing before it becomes large. Surely, you’ve heard of chicken legs! Just because leg training can be brutal, it doesn’t give you reason to hide your legs in your pants. To get that super hero X-frame, pepper your routine with squats . A word of caution though: compound exercises such as dead lifts, squats, and bench presses must be done in excellent form and a spotter is highly recommended. This is where your physical fitness trainer will come in handy as your spotter. If not, injuries are bound to happen and that may put you permanently out of the gym.

Fitness Tip#7 What are you eating?

Muscle building requires protein – the more, the better. Meat, especially red meats and fish, are the best source. It is in your food that your body will draw nutrients from, for strength and necessary fats for joint and organ protection.

To have massive muscle gain and help in muscle preservation , you need about 2-3 grams of good protein per kilogram of your body weight . If you want to get serious about muscles , you may need to supplement them with protein shakes . Eating a meal and having a protein shake immediately after your workout also maximizes the window for rapid absorption of nutrients. This is important as you need to feed the muscles now that you have damaged them. You should also 6 small meals a day so your muscles are constantly fed throughout the day. This will help rev up your metabolism to burn fat too. This will tremendously help you in your build muscle lose weight program. Remember to take your protein shake half an hour before you workout too.

Fitness Tip#8 How about Carbs?

Glycogen is the main energy source for any muscle-building exercise. The body stores whatever carbohydrates you eat as glycogen and muscles use it to give you energy during your workout. After an intense workout, do consume carbohydrates immediately to replace the used glycogen. You can even indulge in high glycemic carbs such as ice creams and white bread as these will turn into insulin and shuttles nutrients such as protein to your muscle cells quickly.

Fitness Tip #9 And Fats?

Yes, your body do need do need fats . But try to avoid saturated fats such as animal fats or worse, trans fats which are artificial fats found in pastries, confectionaries and preserved food. Consume healthy unsaturated fats such as olive oil, canola oil, fish oils, flax seed oil.

Fitness Tip#10 Water Water is essential

Water is essential. It is the most underrated macronutrient. You need at least eight glasses of water every day but when you exercise , you lose even more water because of the sweating. So drink before, during and after your workout. Weigh yourself before and after the workout, and compensate for the loss by drinking at least 16 ounces of fluid for every pound or half a kg lost.

Fitness Tip#11 Creatine

While meats are the best source for creatine, which is a nutrient that helps speed up muscle gain and power you up during workouts, those who do not get enough from their regular diet must be supplemented. Creatine puts volume into your muscle cells and gives you that muscle pump thus your muscles feels tighter, look bigger and overall illusion of superb muscularity . It also helps to prevent muscle breakdown.

Fitness Tip#12 Glutamine

When supplemented, it may help bodybuilders reduce the amount of muscle wasting away or used up as energy. It also helps in muscle recovery.

Fitness Tip #13 Do you change your routine?
The human body is fantastic at adaptation. So whatever routine you are on, your body will get used to it. So do change your routine every 6-8 weeks. For example, instead of working out your chest muscles at the start of your workout, work your back muscles instead. You can reverse your whole routine or change the variations of your exercises or add new ones and take away some old ones. By changing your routines, you not only shock your muscles to new growth, it will also prevent boredom by doing the same thing all the time.

About the author:
Chris Chew is a personal trainer and count actors, pageant winners, models and other celebrities as his clients. He runs a fitness training school in Singapore at http://www.sgfitnessonline.com and is the author of “Burn Fat Build Muscles Fast.” See his books at http://www.sgfitness.com

Does this sound familiar to you?
You have goals for your muscle building workouts. You follow a regime that allows you to achieve those goals. You’re doing everything right. But, you fall on your butt.

Then you find that you get back up and start the whole process working on your muscle building workouts all over again. Only to find that you keep falling down, getting back up again and repeating this over and over.

You do this until you think that you are never going to achieve anything here. You think that this training lark isn’t for you. So what do you do?
Yep, you give up.

Why does this happen and what can I do about it?
You’ve probably asked yourself that question many times. But you may have found that you never came up with a real answer. You blame the muscle building workouts and everything that led you to it.

So what is the real problem?
It seems that you have the right muscle building workouts. You may have goals in mind of what you would like to achieve with that training routine.

Maybe you’re doing one, or more, of the following:
* Having bad, or no, warm up sessions.
* Not eating enough.
* Not taking enough fluids.
* Training too much.
* Lifting excessive weights.
* Not getting enough sleep.

These are all very common to all muscle and fitness workouts, no matter what sport you do.

These are easily identified and remedied. Just go through each one of these and see if they apply to you. If so, then identify why this is the case. Having done that, you need to find the right solution to fix it. You do this in a systematical manner, until you have fully identified what is wrong, the reason for it going wrong and the appropriate solution for it.

For example:
Lets say that you not experiencing any growth in your biceps. Ask yourself some questions of your muscle and fitness workouts:

Question: What is wrong?
Answer: My biceps are not growing.

Question: What are the possible causes, and why?
Answer: The exercise may be done too quickly, or maybe I’m cheating in my training, or maybe there isn’t enough weight on the barbell.

Question: What can be done to remedy this?
Answer: Improve my form when doing this exercise.
Reduce the weight so that I don’t cheat and to keep me more strict. Or increase the weight on the barbell to promote more growth in this area.

So you see, you need to identify the problem first. If you don’t do this, you cannot fix it up. Then you must identify what the possible causes are so that you can offer up appropriate solutions to remedy the situation. Just go through each solution, one at a time, until you are satisfied with the results.

This requires patience and dedication. Most people will not put in the time to find out why they’re going wrong. Instead they spend a lot of money and waste a lot of time trying out different solutions. Whereas, what they should have done first was to seek the answer within themselves. Then seek the appropriate solution elsewhere suitable for their muscle building workouts — only if that solution is outside of their grasp.

by: Greg Ryan

Twenty two years ago I feel into the world of bodybuilding by accident. I had absolutely no discipline, determination or confidence in myself. After many championships, Television shows, movie star clients and successful businesses here are a few training tips that have kept me going all these years.
1. MORE THAN JUST LOOKS: Realize exercise is more than just having a great physique. It is about strengthening the mind and heart and soul.
2. KEEP THE BIG PICTURE IN MIND: You will have good days and bad days. One day at a time attitude.
3. BE SOLD OUT! No matter if you are a competitive bodybuilder or just one who does it for a hobby, be sold out for life to exercise.

4. LEAVE YOUR EGO AT THE DOOR. This one will be hard for most of you to do. But to be a champion, you have to get rid of your ego. Your mind is your biggest competitor. In order to improve on your health you need to not be self serving.
5. KNOWLEDGE IS POWER: If you think you know everything, forget, stop right now. You never will. Continue to learn all the time. Most importantly, share your knowledge.
6. HAVE FUN: Most people in bodybuilding are wound way to tight. Loosen up a little.
7. ASK FOR HELP: If you do not know something, ask someone who does.
8. MORE IS NOT BETTER: Put time limits on your workouts.

9. HAVE VARIETY: Never be afraid to change your exercise routine around.
10. HAVE SYNERGY: Incorporate all areas of fitness. Low body fat levels are more important than the size of your biceps.

What every your goals are remember the big picture. You are in this for life, even when the body is not were you want it to be.

About the author:
Greg Ryan is a best selling author, former employee of Kathy Smith, and high profile fitness expert. LOSE WEIGHT IMMEDIATELY! Discover the common sense way to lose weight with out dieting that the doctor’s DON’T want you to know. FREE MINI COURSE click here www.resolutions.bz

by: Jasdeep Singh

These type of Exercises generally makes your body strong and firm. No matter, you are Exercising or Muscle Building or Body Building, these exercises are quite handy and help a lot.

Here are few Anytime and Anywhere Exercises:-

a) Crunch Exercise

Lie down on the floor on your back with your feet up on the couch or something. Give support to your neck with the help of cushion. Place your buttocks as near as possible to the couch. Lock your elbows. Now slowly raise your head off the ground just a few inches. Hold on to the raised position for 2 secs and then slowly come down.

Repeat this exercise 20 times to make one set.It will really build your abs and you will feel it.

b) Raising your Toes and then coming down.

Stand on a floor flatfooted with toes pointing straight.Hold onto something to balance yourself. Now VERY SLOWLY, raise your toes as high as possible. Hold on for 2 secs and come down very gently and slowly. Repeat it 20 times to make one set.

c) Push ups Exercise

Lie down on the floor facing towards the floor with your body weight on your palms.Now slowly , push your body up keeping your back straight and facing right ahead. Hold onto 2 secs and then slowly bring your body back to the starting position.

Repeat it 5-10 times in the beginning and then try to practice this exercise 20 times per set.

d) Wall Squat Exercise

Stand straight with your back against the wall. Now, gently move your body down to the sitting position. Make sure your back is still against the wall.Hold on to 15 secs and then gently move up keeping your back against the wall again. Repeat it 5-10 times in the beginning and then try to practice this exercise 20 times per set. Treadmill is one other important option which works for you 24/7 and 12 months a year even in rains, winter, snow, sun. Know more about treadmills and how to make optimum use of it here before buying it.

You can always try Yoga or Aerobics if you seriously want to shed off some weight .Muscle Building is one great way to keep yourself in shape and burn those extra calories. Get valuable Muscle Building Tips at http://www.weightloss-health.com/muscle_building_tips.htm

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jasdeep : for http://weightloss-health.com/ your complete and most comprehensive family guide on Health. Also get free tips and tricks on weight loss, perfect treadmills and a chance to go through other informative articles targetting various health issues at http://weightloss-health.com/

by: Charlene J. Nuble

Now is a good season for the health conscious to check up on the latest in gym exercise equipment. A wide variety of gym exercise equipment is available in the market each designed to tone the specific part of the body. So for that lasting impression as you stride down the beach and flaunt it, here are some of the important aspects in choosing the right gym exercise equipment for you. Know your body: whether you want to sport the firm and fit type or something as insanely huge as the Hulk, gamma radiation included, everyone has their own preference. For a first-timer, choosing the right gym exercise equipment can be attained in two ways: purchasing it from a sports store or to sign up in one of hundreds of gym establishments in the city.

One advantage in using the gym exercise equipment in a gym is the selection of commercial models that will help you get in shape, if not faster then better. Commercial gym exercise equipment are a little more complicated to use, often with digital readouts and other computerized systems attached, but the outcome after using the machine does show fantastic results after a few weeks. In addition to commercial gym exercise equipment, trainers are available to help you draw up a program to achieve that attention-grabbing body you always wanted. Be it in a posh place like Gold’s Gym, or a neighborhood one that offers fifty bucks per session, these establishments hold the upper hand when it comes to quality gym exercise equipment.

Home gym exercise equipment is something a little more easy to use and compact enough that you can stow it away in your closet after two hours of working out. Convenience is all about the home gym exercise equipment, especially if they are the shy type who could not stand to flaunt themselves in public, even in a gym. They can be as attractive to look at like their commercial counterparts, but with a price tag that is a bit easy on the pocket. They require little effort when adjusting the setting to get out its maximum exercise performance. A first-timer can acquire and use the home exercise equipment without too much flub. But as he or she gains experience, and not to mention a greater body, they go for more body specific machines that will bring out the best in (and out of) them. All they have to do is to draw a layout of his or her personalized body building program from books and go from there.

Know your self, as well as your body. Whether you purchased it in a store, or holding a gleaming member’s card, gym exercise equipment is the next best thing since the home-made dumbbells and barbells out of cement on a pair of large milk cans and a metal water pipe.

About the Author:

Charlene J. Nuble 2005. For up to date links and information about fitness equipments, please go to: http://fitness-equipments.besthealthlink.net/ or for updated links and information on all health related topics, go to: http://www.besthealthlink.net/