Build Muscle
The worst thing that you can do if you want to build muscle is to either do too much of anything, or to do it inconsistently. Both diet, weight lifting, sleep and lifestyle need to have a consistent regular pattern for ongoing results.
Diet
You need to eat a meal at least every four hours. Forget about eating junk. You must only eat for your health, so learn as much about nutrition as possible. It's quite simple really, eat what natives eat, and avoid processed food. There are some exceptions to this. For example tomato paste is actually healthier than tomatoes, and can prevent heart disease and cancer. This is simply because the the red stuff is the powerful antioxidant lycopene. Even though 15% is lost during processing, it is now much more concentrated and available, especially when cooked with some oily foods, as it is fat soluble. This is just a tiny fraction of what nature has to offer in terms of health benefits. It doesn't matter whether you want to build muscle, lose weight or fight cancer, good nutrition is a powerful healer which restores mental calm and acuity, emotional stability and better sleep, and a fit, healthy functional body.
Food quality varies enormously, and if you are just eating what your friends eat, you just won't build muscle.
Weight Lifting
If you want to build muscle and strength then it is best to stick to the dead lift, squat and some presses. What you should be doing is pushing one part of your body to maximum endurance no more than 10 times, and that's once a week only. Recovery is important. If you are still sore then delay your next workout.
Every three months have a couple of weeks of complete break.
Sleep
Some research has been done into the impact of the modern lifetstyle on sleep. Before artificial lighting people people used to sleep more, and probably had better sex too. You know that some ambitious truck drivers and the like get by on only 5 hours of sleep a night. However statistics show that sleep deprivation produces symptoms similar to mental illness. Also the number of work related accidents and level of stress, heart attacks, obesity and cancers increases with sleep deprivation. But you want to build muscle, so you should avoid stress and get your eight hours of sleep every night.
Overload
In order to progress and build muscle and strength you need to continue to overload beyond your accustomed intensity. This can either be done by increasing your weights or the number of repetitions. But remember my suggestion earlier that you limit your exercise for any one body part to 10 times once a week, so the best way to overload is to continually increase your weights every week. Of course the more you increase the weight the less reptitions you will be able to complete. That's where you need to be at. and just remember plenty of sleep and rest from training.
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