Once confined to bodybuilders with huge muscular physiques, weight training is now gaining acceptance from men who want to bulk up their body and women who want toned muscles and stronger bones. People who go to the gym or work out at home find it beneficial to add weight training exercises to their fitness regimen.

While fitness experts recognize the importance of cardio workouts, the consensus in physical fitness these days is to include strength training for overall fitness. Cardio workouts increase the oxygen levels in the body and helps burn fat.

However, weight training exercises are also important if you want to firm up your abdomen, thighs, arms, and hips. Cardiovascular exercises can cause your body to sag, but when accompanied by weight training exercises you will have a wonderfully toned and firm body. Strength training exercises offer the following benefits:

* Improve your muscular strength and endurance- Weight training exercises will make you stronger and help your muscles work longer.

* Improve functional capacity and ability- Working out with weights will improve your coordination and balance and help you avoid injuries. For example, you’ll find it easier to climb stairs and reduce the risk of falling.

* Lower blood pressure- People who lift weights experience normal blood pressure levels.

* Prevent osteoporosis- Studies show that strength training exercises lower the risk of osteoporosis especially in women. Lifting weights will help make your bones stronger.

* Increase your resting metabolic rate- Weight training exercises help raise your metabolism. Because muscles burn more calories than fat, if you have more muscles your body will burn more calories throughout the day.

* Improve psychological wellbeing- When you exercise, you will feel good about yourself. This will increase your confidence and self-esteem.

* Reduce lower back pain- People who exercise have less body fat and stronger core muscles. This helps minimize the risk of lower back pain.

Choosing a Weight Training Exercise Routine

For all-around physical fitness, your workout program should include exercises for cardiovascular endurance, strength training, and muscular endurance. You should also include routines to enhance your body’s flexibility.

Weight training exercises for men and women differ slightly. Women usually work out with lighter weights and lesser sets. Also, men go through weight training exercises to bulk up while women prefer to tone their muscles without putting on too much bulk.

You can do weight training exercises at home if you do not have access to a gym. When working out at home, you will need basic exercise equipment such as dumbbells, weight bench, resistance bands, etc. Some weight training exercises like leg extensions and lateral pull-ups require exercise machines that you can find in a gym. You may want to buy some exercise equipment for your home gym, or do other weight training exercises that will work out the same muscles without the use of an exercise machine.

Sleep, rest and relaxation are a very important part of your daily ritual. I know that in the past I have gotten reved up with many projects and before long something has to be let go and it is usually the sleep that I need for a while. Don’t do it! As your sleep and rest start dropping you lose focus and can be lured into bad habits, sugar, coffee, and bad food. The worst thing about a lack of rest is that your body will not have a chance to heal from your earlier workouts, this can be very bad as you not only will feel sore longer but it will also suck your optimism for your new lifestyle.

How Much Sleep to Get

How much rest is enough? You probably already know this. I myself do not wake up with an alarm clock or clock radio anymore. I am fortunate to have a flexible start time and know that I will not sleep in past 8:00 in the morning. Try going to be earlier in the evening for a few nights and see when you wake up. In the fall and winter I always tape the TV shows that I watch so that I can get a chance to watch them when it is convenient to me not when it is convenient for the TV networks.

Another thing that pro bodybuilders do is have a nap in the afternoon, a nap can be great in cleansing your mind and letting you learn to relax better but you will probably find as I do that it si almost impossible to do except maybe on the weekends.

You can probably see from the tone of this information that I am delivering here that you must stop treating sleep and rest as something that takes away from something and instead learn to treat it as your own personal time, something a little more sacred than just something unavoidable that has to be done.

The Effects of Sleep

According to leading sleep researchers, there are techniques to combat common sleep problems:

• Keep a regular sleep/wake schedule
• Don’t drink or eat caffeine four to six hours before bed and minimize daytime use
• Don’t smoke, especially near bedtime or if you awake in the night
• Avoid alcohol and heavy meals before sleep
• Get regular exercise
• Minimize noise, light and excessive hot and cold temperatures where you sleep
• Develop a regular bed time and go to bed at the same time each night
• Try and wake up without an alarm clock
• Attempt to go to bed earlier every night for certain period; this will ensure that you’re getting enough sleep

According to sleep researchers, a night’s sleep is divided into five continually shifting stages, defined by types of brain waves that reflect either lighter or deeper sleep. Toward morning, there is an increase in rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, when the muscles are relaxed and dreaming occurs, and recent memories may be consolidated in the brain.

No Hitting the Snooze Button

The experts say that hitting a snooze alarm over and over again to wake up is not the best way to feel rested. ‘The restorative value of rest is diminished, especially when the increments are short,’ said psychologist Edward Stepanski, PhD who has studied sleep fragmentation at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. This on and off again effect of dozing and waking causes shifts in the brain-wave patterns. Sleep-deprived snooze-button addicts are likely to shorten their quota of REM sleep, impairing their mental functioning during the day. (New York Times, October 12, 2004)

Certain therapies, like cognitive behavioral therapy teach people how to recognize and change patterns of thought and behavior to solve their problems. Recently this type of therapy has been shown to be very effective in getting people to fall asleep and conquer insomnia.

According to a study published in the October 2004 issue of The Archives of Internal Medicine, cognitive behavior therapy is more effec

Protein is one of the basic building blocks of the body so it is an essential part of your diet and can influence your strength but probably not your energy. Your muscles are built with protein and in fact protein is made up of 20 amino acids. Amino acids are the building blocks of protein and 9 are essential, they cannot be created and must be eaten meaning the other 11 amino acids can be created by our body.

Many times we hear that you need to eat steak for energy but in actual fact as we learned earlier carbohydrates are the body’s favored energy source. I always think of muscles as being made out of protein but really muscles are mostly water and protein so if you think about how people tend to diet they will cut out things like steak and carbohydrates so the body is not getting as much protein and carbohydrates as it needs to burn for energy so it will tend to burn protein and fat in equal parts to get energy. This is great for losing weight and good for losing fat but it is really bad to lose muscle. One of the ways to stop your body from burning muscle for energy is to do a fair amount of exercise, especially weight training to increase your muscle mass on a consistent basis.

So what kind of foods contain protein and how much do we need? Full proteins are found in steak chicken and fish and non-full proteins (those without all of the essential amino acids) are contained in lentils, beans, corn, peanuts. A can of Tuna has 20-25 grams of protein and if you look around you can probably get about 80 grams of protein a day comfortably.

One critical thing to look out for is the amount of protein that you eat at each meal. Your body can only metabolize about 25-30 grams of protein at a meal which is only about 4 ounces of steak or chicken. In the past I had taken digestive enzymes with my main meals to help to metabolize more but I now think that this may be a bit of shaky science behind it.

Some bodybuilders will eat 250-500 grams of protein a day but realistically if you have protein in a couple or three of your meals you are doing pretty good. One of the things to concentrate on is drinking a lot more water when you are eating a lot of protein, a lot of water is needed for your body to break down protein so if you are increasing your protein intake drink more water to help take the load off of your kidneys.

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The most important thing you need for a successful bodybuilding workout is to be consistent. There is no getting around this: if you do not plan your training and do it at the right times, you will not be able to build muscle mass half so effectively.

Of course that does not mean training 24/7. Rest and recovery is vital: the muscles must have a chance to grow and build between gym sessions. However, you do need to decide how many days you will train and what you will do during each session.

If your bodybuilding workout sessions are too frequent, you will simply be frustrated by not seeing results. That is, unless you are very careful in planning which muscle groups you will work each time. If you truly want to train every day then it is possible to figure out something that will work: you would just need to work on fewer muscles in each session.

But there is another risk with working out too often and that is what happens when you cannot get to the gym for some reason. Maybe you go on vacation or you take a few days sick. It can be very difficult to get back into a seven day a week routine after a break. Training four or five days is easier to pick up again, at least for most people.

Four days could be enough for a beginner. In that case you could hit each muscle group once a week, or a maximum of twice. You would not end up with an elaborate bodybuilding workout routine but that can be all the better. Simple is often best when it comes to any kind of fitness or bodybuilding routine.

Keep in mind that bodybuilding has different requirements from strength training. While both bodybuilders and strength trainers can lift more weight than the average guy on the street, the strength trainer will be more concerned with numbers and the bodybuilder more concerned with muscle size and appearance.

You need to be clear about your goals because there are differences in how you train. For a bodybuilding workout you are going to be doing more reps with shorter breaks between series.

Do not compare yourself with others. This is almost never a useful thing to do in life. Track your own progress of course but only look at how far you have come, do not look at how much better or worse you are doing than some other guy at the gym. Especially, if you are bodybuilding, do not get hung up on how much weight you are lifting. That is not the important question, as we said above.

Anytime that you cannot make it to the gym, have some backup exercises that you can do at home. Pushups, squats, chair dips, crunches and similar floor exercises are very easy to do at home. It is a good idea to have dumbbells in the house and maybe a barbell if you have the space.

When you are following a bodybuilding workout at home, remember that it is still important to plan your routine and not to over train any muscle group.

There are plenty of beginner bodybuilding workouts available online but which is the best? The answer depends on your situation – not just your current state of body fitness, but what you want to achieve.

Most beginner bodybuilders are impatient to get started and skip the most important step – setting goals. As a result, they soon lose focus and motivation. The first burst of energy that starts us on the road to building a great body soon fades away, especially since most beginners quickly wear themselves thin by overtraining. If you do not have clear goals to keep up your motivation at this point, you can easily lose your way.

So take some time right now to write down your goals. Like any goals that you might set in work or life, your goals in bodybuilding should be S.M.A.R.T. – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely. Let’s look at what each of these means in terms of bodybuilding workouts.

1. Specific

A specific goal is one that clearly says what you want to accomplish, along with how, when and where you will do it. ‘Get a great body’ is not a specific goal. ‘Go to the gym 4 days a week after work and train to build muscle mass’ is a more specific goal.

Even better, say exactly which muscles you will work on which days, and note down your routine. The routine for your bodybuilding workouts will change as you make progress but the overall goal of going to the gym 4 days a week to build muscle mass will remain the same.

2. Measurable

When you are working toward goals, it is very important to have some way to measure your progress.

If your goal is going to the gym for bodybuilding workouts 4 days a week, you can easily track that in a diary. But with a goal like ‘get a great body’, there is nothing to measure. So if you want to set goals in terms of the physical result, do it in terms of inches gained or weight that you can lift.

3. Attainable

It is important to know when you have reached your goal. That way you can plan a reward or celebration, have a sense of achievement and start thinking about your next bodybuilding workouts goal.

This means that the goal itself, as well as your progress toward it, must be something that you can measure and know whether or not you have achieved. So your goal is to go to the gym 4 days a week – but for how long? The rest of your life? If you think that way, you will never be able to congratulate yourself on having achieved the goal. A month would be good for a beginner. Then set a new goal.

4. Realistic

Your goal needs to be something that it is possible for you to attain in a reasonable period of time. Remember that goals can change. You do not need to start out with the goal of winning the Mr. Universe contest. If contests are your thing, start with winning your division in a local contest. However, if you believe you can win Mr. Universe, then go for that. It is all a matter of believing you can do it.

5. Timely

Whatever type of goal you set, it is good to give it a timeframe. Are you going for this year’s contest, next year’s or two years from now? Be specific about how much time you have to achieve your goal, and you will be set for success in any of the beginner bodybuilding workouts that you choose.

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How to build upper body V – that V-shape taper from huge shoulders to a small waist – is the first thing that many bodybuilders want to know. It is often what sets bodybuilders apart from others in the gym and makes them stand out on the beach or even in the street. It is what makes a guy look like a comic book superhero about to save the world!

There are three main muscle groups that you need to consider when you are planning how to build upper body to an impressive degree. Let’s take them one by one.

1. Lats

The lats (latissimus dorsi) are the muscles that cover the sides of the middle back, reaching up to the armpit. As a bodybuilder, you will always want to keep building bigger and wider lats.

There are two types of exercise that you need to use if you want to work and build the lats. The first involves chin-ups and pulldown moves. These build width. The second is rows (e.g. cable rows and barbell rows) and deadlifts, which build thickness. You will need to cover both.

2. Deltoids

The deltoids are the muscles that cover the shoulder joint, forming the rounded shape of the shoulder. Your aim when you are considering how to build upper body V will be to build a strong, round ball shape on the shoulder. This gives the shoulders that massive, wide look.

The way to build deltoids is to use both a heavy pressing action and leverage raise exercises. Take as much weight as you can without sacrificing form. Raises should always be performed with full control, never by swinging the weights.

Exercises that you might want to include are: seated press, dumbbell lateral raises, bent over lateral raises, and cable lateral raises both in front and behind the back.

3. Abdominals

While they might seem out of place in an article on how to build upper body, the abs are just as important as the other two muscle groups. Having a tight midsection sets off the shoulders and contributes to the appearance of width at the top.

If you are interested in how to build upper body V shape, you will want to tighten rather than build the abs so that you do not develop a thick waist. For this reason, some experts recommend that you avoid using weights in your abs workout and do not do side bends. This may go against what others tell you but give it a try if you want to increase the contrast between weights and shoulders.

Exercises to concentrate on here include crunches, leg raises, sit-ups and hanging knee raises. For the hanging knee raise, hang from the chin-up bar and bring the knees up as high as possible toward the chest. Lower and repeat.

Of course, you also need to follow a good bodybuilding diet with plenty of protein and complex carbs at the right times. Drink plenty of water too. Soon it will be very clear when you hit the beach that you know how to build upper body!

Finding a body building routine that works is not as easy as many beginner bodybuilders think. First, there is such a huge number of possible routines. This is not surprising when you consider how many muscle groups there are to work and how many possible exercises there are for each one. When you think about all the combinations you could make, you can see that the number of possible workout routines for body building is almost infinite.

Copying somebody else’s routine is not usually the best way to go. You are not going to develop the same body as the current Mr. Universe by reading up on his routine and doing the same thing yourself. It is very unlikely that your body is ready for exactly the same workout that he does right now.

A Starting Body Building Routine

Starting Body Building Routine

So what do you do? If you are just starting out, then probably any standard beginner body building routine will do fine. It is true that what works for one person will not necessarily work for anybody else but in the beginning it is okay to figure out your best plan by trial and error.

However, you do need to be sure that your workout routine covers all of the bases. Check it out against the following scheme. And if you want to plan your own body building routine, this is a good way to go.

First, note down all the muscle groups that you need to work. That is pretty much all the muscles in the body. Do not forget the core and especially the muscles of the back. It is dangerous to overdevelop the chest, shoulders and abs while neglecting the back because you can so easily cause an injury there.

Then choose an exercise that works each group. This could involve dumbbells, a barbell, or gym machines such as the bench press. Some exercises will work out more than one muscle group.

Now you are ready to plan your body building routine so that each muscle group is worked around twice a week with at least one full day of rest between. It is good to give yourself a couple of days of complete rest from working out, too.

Watch Your Results – Is your Body Building Routine Working?

What if nothing seems to be working? First, consider whether you are giving your muscles enough rest. Bodybuilders who do not get the results they expect are often guilty of overtraining. Remember that the muscles are broken down during your workout. The time that they build mass is during the recovery time. So do not be tempted to overtrain.

Second, look at other factors such as your diet. Are you getting the right amount of protein and carbs at the right times? Have you looked into possible supplements that you might take?

Lastly, keep in mind that it is good practice to change your routine around from time to time. This counters boredom and more importantly, works the muscles a little differently than what they may be used to. You will often find that changing out one ab exercise for another or using a different press at the gym will be the catalyst that you need to start gaining muscle mass again. All of these tips will help you figure out a body building routine that works.

Today, I am going to share with you my Burn the Fat, Feed the muscle review. This weight loss guide was written by Tom Venuto, a well-known personal trainer and bodybuilder.

Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle is one of the top selling ebooks on weight loss and muscle building ever. Before doing my Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle review, I was a bit concerned that this product was just going to be for bodybuilders who were looking to build physiques that were not natural. This was based on the not only the title but the background of the author. But my Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle review found that this was not the case at all. See, it is important that EVERYONE build muscle in order to lose fat, because the more muscle that you have, the more fat you are going to burn when you are at rest. So women, you do not have to worry about getting too muscular on this plan, because that will only happen if you take weight gaining supplements.

My Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle review also found that this product will help you achieve real, sustainable fat loss. On a lot of diet programs, you are only losing water weight, which you will easily put back on once you stop dieting. This is not the case with BTFFTM. The diet plan is easy to follow and gives you a variety of foods. There is also a section on setting goals, which was very helpful.

Did I find any negatives when doing my Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle review? Only that the book is REALLY long (340 pages). It can take a while to sift through all the information inside.

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I have just started working out again with weights. I haven’t for about 7 years now. I worked out with my dad from the time I was 15 until I was 19. I loved it and I have started back up again. The great thing is I haven’t lost my muscle. It is still there, and still pretty firm. I have lost some of my of strength though. The bad thing is I have put on some weight. I have a layer of fat over my nice firm muscles. I am wanting to get rid of the fat, but I don’t need to bulk up anymore. I just want to see the muscle tone I already have, and improve on it a bit. I bought the Weider Total Body 5000 which is awesome! I love it! I want to use a good supplement to help feed my muscles and burn up the fat. Any suggestions? Maybe a good protein shake for dinner before or after my work out?

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I was reading Tom Venuto’s “Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle”. its a highly respected book among all bodybuilders and nutritionists. but here is what it says about fat and health matters that alcohol makes worse.
1. Alcohol has the second highest calorie density of all food types
2. Alcohol suppresses the body’s ability to burn body fat
3. Alcohol provides little or no nutritional value
4. Alcohol interferes with the absorption of nutrients
5. Alcohol is a poison
6. Alcohol dehydrates you
7. Alcohol has been associated with the development of numerous health problems,
and degenerative diseases including heart disease
8. Alcohol decreases natural testosterone production
i mean if these are the reasons why Islam has forbidden them to drink then God’s really smart.

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