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Weight Gaining Tips |
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Weight gaining tip # 7 - Eat More Often.
To gain weight, you will be eating a large amount of calories. Unfortunately, your body can only assimilate a certain number of calories at each meal. For our purposes, eating three meals per day is not beneficial. If you had to eat 3,000 calories per day, then you would end up eating 1,000 calories at each meal. The average person can only use a portion of those calories. The excess will be stored as fat or removed from the body.
To enable your body to actually assimilate and use the 3,000 calories you will ingest, you have to reduce your meal size and increase your meal frequency. Splitting your calories into smaller, more frequent portions will enable food absorption and utilization of nutrients . I always eat six meals each day, evenly spaced out at three-hour intervals.
My goal is to provide my body with constant nourishment throughout the day. So if it typically takes about 2.5 hours to digest most meals, want to be eating another meal just as my last meal is leaving my stomach. I do this because my body is constantly in need of nutrients to repair itself. I do a lot of damage during my workouts and completely stress my system. My body is trying to "adapt to the stress," but in order to do this, it needs consistent fuel.
If I ate only three meals per day, then my body would be without nutrients for about six hours between each of those meals! This is unacceptable for skinny guys. Without food, your body will quickly begin to breakdown muscle tissue for energy.
Weight gaining tip # 8 - Only protein can build muscle tissue!
To make sure I was eating enough, I had to learn to measure and calculate my daily food intake. If you don't do this, you will never know what you are actually eating. I used to guess, but judging by my previous failure, I was guessing incorrectly.
In addition to eating more calories, I also had to eat more often. Eating three meals per day did not cut it! It did not provide my body with the constant flow of nutrients and energy it needs to grow. So, I increased my meal intake to 6 per day - eating every three hours. Yes, six meals per day.
Eating six meals per day takes planning, and this is where nutritional supplements have helped me the most. Now, I know that this is a very sensitive subject with many people. Some say that they are a waste of money, that they don't work, and that you don't need them. Well, they are partly correct.
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Weight gaining tip # 9 - Perform optimum reps.
Chris Cornier likes to train heavy and perform many repetitions. He can curl 45 pounds ten times and considers it medium to lightweight. The point here is to always pump up the muscles until they can't move an inch more.
Weight gaining tip # 10 - Experiment to find your best mass building exercises.
With experience, you will learn to find exercises that work best on your muscles. Therefore, if you want to build mass, try different exercises and see which ones pump you up best. Once again, emphasize movements with dumbbells and free weights since they are the best for building mass.
Weight gaining tip # 11 - Drink More Water.
To make sure that your muscles stay hydrated, you must drink plenty of water. Dehydration can happen easily if you train hard. A dehydrated muscle, takes longer to repair itself than one sufficiently hydrated.
Drinking a sufficient amount of water not only increases your vascularity (more visible veins), but it will also help to quickly remove toxins from the body. Protein generates metabolic waste products that must be dissolved in water. Without enough water, the kidneys cannot efficiently remove these wastes.
Weight gaining tip # 12 - Avoid injury.
The combination of an intense workout and heavy weights will increase the risk of injuries. Many bodybuilding careers ended because of torn pecs, slipped discs or strained erectors. Simply be careful and be sure to warm-up, gradually increasing to maximum lifting weight.
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Weight gaining tip # 13 - Eat More Fat.
If you want to gain muscle mass, you must eat enough dietary fat. Dietary fats play an essential role in hormone production, which in turn is responsible for growth and strength increases. I have never gained muscle on a low fat diet, though many people still believe that eating fat makes you fat. This is absolutely false. In fact, there is a very popular muscle gain diet that been around for years, called the "Anabolic Diet" that requires you to eat only fat! Butter, bacon, and heavy cream are all on the menu. Though quite extreme, this diet does work.
Most people are overweight because of a diet high in simple carbohydrates, not from eating fats. If your diet is too low in fat, your body will actually make a point to store any fat it gets, because it doesn't know when it will get more. A low-fat diet will also lower testosterone levels, something we do not want when trying to gain weight. Studies have shown that dietary fat has a direct relationship with testosterone production. An increase in dietary fat intake seems to bring on an increase in testosterone levels. The inverse is also true. A decrease in dietary fat intake is usually accompanied by a decrease in free testosterone levels.
However, you don't want to increase your intake of saturated fats. Saturated fats are what cause disease and coronary problems. Though you will always have some saturated fats in your diet, your main focus should be to increase your intake of Essential Fatty Acids (EFA's).
EFA's are unsaturated fats that are necessary for thousands of biological functions throughout the body. Because they cannot be manufactured by the body, the must be provided by your diet. These fatty acids not only help increase testosterone production, but they also aid in the prevention of muscle breakdown, help to increase your HDL level (good cholesterol) and assist in hormone production. To get your recommended amount of EFA's, I recommend supplementing your diet with either Udo's Perfect Oil Blend (which combines omega- and omega-6), or Cold-Pressed Flaxseed oil (which is mostly omega-3).
Weight gaining tip # 14 - Utilize optimum sets.
Cornier suggests using a range of 16 to 20 sets per body part. I suggest that if you are not a competing bodybuilder, use a range of 12 to 16 sets, per muscle group. Each set should be completed to exhaustion; this will maximize the benefit of your workout. Try not to train more then 2 body parts in a single day or you will over work your body, and it might stop you from growing.
Weight gaining tip # 15 - Take a Multi-Vitamin.
There are many supplements and specific muscle gain enhancing products that I recommend using in my book, but I have to remember that this is only the 10 most important elements of a successful mass program. So, I have to keep this brief and to the point. All of the other products will help, but they are not essential. So, I will only touch on two vitamins supplements. Multi-Vitamins and Antioxidants.
If you want to gain muscle, you must make sure that you are not deficient in any vitamin, mineral or trace element that your body needs. I know many people are going to disagree with me, but I believe that in this day, we absolutely need to supplement our diet with vitamins and minerals. I know that those who are against using vitamins are going to say that if we "just eat a balanced diet. . . ", You know the rest.
Well first, eating a balanced diet is easier said than done. America is the most overweight country in the world. Most people don't even know what a "balanced" diet is. Balanced with what? Experts will continue to spout, "eat a balanced diet," while Americans feast on nutrition less fast food and sugar.
Second, not only do our bodies have to deal with the ever-increasing external stresses of everyday life, they also have to combat nutrient-depleting exercise. Food today is, for the most part, nutrition less - almost totally void of the body strengthening vitamins and minerals it contained one hundred years earlier. Instead, we now ingest over-processed, fiber less meals, and under-ripened vegetables grown in barren, over-farmed soil, laden with pesticides.
How healthy can that be? If you want to ignore the facts and continue on about "balanced diets," fine. It's your decision. But I, for one, eat a balanced diet, and I still take a multi-vitamin supplements.
Many multivitamin manufacturers try to put "everything" in their product, but it's not necessary. At minimum, your multi-vitamin should contain the USRDA (recommended daily allowance) of vitamins A, B-complex, C, D, E, K and the minerals calcium, magnesium, zinc, iodine, selenium, and possibly iron (for women). Men should find a multi-vitamin without iron. You typically get more than enough iron from your food. Extra iron is needed only for menstruating women.
It should also contain other essential nutrients like biotin, chromium, copper, manganese, molybdenum and pantothenic acid.
There are some vitamins and minerals that are best taken separately. Vitamin E, vitamin C, folic acid and calcium are best taken at higher dosages. Many proponents of multi-vitamins cite that taking that many vitamins and vitamins together causes negative interactions because they compete with each other for absorption. For example: magnesium, zinc, and calcium compete for absorption; copper and zinc also compete for absorption.
But think about this for a minute. This is no different than eating different foods at the same time, as most people do. The vitamins and minerals in the foods compete also. Competition is expected and the body is designed to handle that. Here is a good multi-vitamin that I use.
Weight gaining tip # 16 - Don't count exercises.
There is no optimum number of exercises. Most bodybuilders recommend four sets of four or five different exercises per body part. As mentioned above, this depends on how serious you are in building a massive body. Professional bodybuilders usually use supplements, which gives them greater endurance and strength for muscle growth.
Weight gaining tip # 17 - Rest More Often.
Rest is the most overlooked "skinny-guy secret". If you don't rest, you won't grow. Simple as that. Your body does not build muscle in the gym, it builds muscle while resting!
The key to successfully gaining weight is eating enough calories, training hard and then resting. No diet adjustments will make up for lack of rest. If you train hard in the gym, then you should be resting your muscles as much as possible. If you do not give them time to rest and repair, you will not grow. Period.
Weight gaining tip # 18 - Flirt with maximums.
Check out your strength levels every so often by maximizing one or two reps. Remember that whenever you pound your muscles with maximum weight, the danger of over-training and injury increases. Therefore, gradually increase the weight until you can perform only one repetition. For example, when trying your maximum bench press weight, start with a realistic weight and gradually increase until you can no longer add on more weight.
Weight gaining tip # 19 - Be Consistent.
O. K., so you want the secret to gaining muscle mass fast? Well, here it is: CONSISTENCY.
You can have the best diet, the best training schedule, join the best gym that has the best equipment, but without consistency it's all worthless.
Over the past 3 years, I've talked to hundreds of people who have successfully transformed their physique. Though most of them trained in totally different ways, there was one common denominator that appeared throughout each success story:
Day in and day out, they followed their pre-determined plan, consistently, without fail.
You must find the determination and drive within yourself to consistently put one foot in front of the other and see this through. If not now, then when?
"You never know what you can do, until you try to do more than you can''.
Weight gaining tip # 20 - Eat your meat.
You need protein for your muscles to grow: the more, the better. Include lean red meats in your daily diet, as they contain the right nutrients to make muscles grow. It is actually quite simple: the combination of a high protein diet and the right kind of workout will make your muscles grow like you never thought possible.
Find out more at the next page - It is all about weight gaining tetimonials. Read what others are saying and how much have they gained in so less time reading our weight gaining tips.
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