One of the most common answers to the question “What’s your fitness goal?” is to lose weight and gain muscle. Which is perfectly normal, given the fact that everybody wants to be lean and healthy.
While losing fat is mostly associated with dieting, building muscles often confuses people. Therefore, if you embark on a muscle building journey, it’s good to know what to do or not to do and how to do it. Let’s take a look at some of the major muscle building mistakes you should avoid, in order for you to have the desired results.
Your workout program may be the best out there but, unfortunately, it won’t bring you the gains you hope for all alone. A good workout needs to be supported by a proper diet.
After training, your body transforms glucose into glycogen to enable the recovery and growth of your muscles. If you don’t provide your body with the right amount of food, you are depleting it of the calories required for the muscle growth process.
Although many overlook it when thinking about building muscles, sleep is extremely important if not crucial. After nutrition, it is the second thing that stimulates your body to recover and replenish the depleted muscle glycogen stores.
Poor sleep can determine an increase in your stress hormones, facilitating the deposit of fat, reducing your energy levels and ultimately affecting your performance and muscle growth.
Your body’s muscle cells consist of protein and water. When your body uses the protein for energy, the nitrogen in the molecule is removed so that it can be converted into glucose. This process alone requires a lot of water.
Therefore, if you want to build and gain more muscles, you should make sure you are drinking plenty of water and give your body the amount it needs to hydrate your muscle cells.
If you’re trying to match a bodybuilder’s training routine and workout six days a week, twice a day, in hopes of becoming like one, then think again. Surprising or not, training too much can seriously affect your muscles’ ability to properly recover and grow.
After training, muscles need to heal first, so putting them to even more stress is a sure way towards injuries and even immune system problems.
In the world of bodybuilding, there’s the group that advocates multi-training and the one that preaches isolation exercises. But guess what? Just like there’s black and white, there’s also grey.
Which means that the key to muscle building is a combination of the two types of movements. Therefore, you create a synergistic effect that provides you more mass from multi-joint exercises and overall symmetry and muscle growth from single-joint movements.
Every gym has its share of ginormous Hulk look alikes prancing around on spindly legs. You don’t want to be one of them, do you? In order to have a symmetry between your upper and lower body, you need to train your quads, calves and hamstrings as well.
Focusing only on biceps and triceps does not stimulate the production of testosterone and other growth hormones so that you can gain more lean muscle and bulk overall.
When you’re working out, you need energy. Nothing new here. And one way to get it in the form of glucose, is from carbohydrates. These can help your overall performance and consequently muscle building results.
Unfortunately, many people believe that when you go through the muscles-growth stage, you need to eat a lot. Including late in the evening. But the closer to bedtime you eat these carbs, the most likely they will be stored as bodyfat.
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