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Tips for Gaining Muscles  22 Essential Tips for Gaining Muscle
Want more mass, greater endurance, less fat? These timesaving, time-tested techniques will produce all three.
There's nothing worse in the pursuit of fitness than wasting your time in the gym. If you're like us, you want results fast. We have some tips to help you make your training efforts more productive, whether your goal is increased muscle mass, less fat, greater endurance or a combination of all three.
1. Run Off Fat
Expand your aerobic capacity and fat-loss potential by combining prolonged sub maximal training--that's between 60 percent and 80 percent of your maximum heart rate--with high-intensity interval training. The resulting physiological adaptations help to reduce lactate accumulation by preventing its formation and facilitating its clearance. To combine submaximal and high-intensity training into a single session, punctuate sub maximal-intensity running (30 to 45 minutes) with 100-yard sprints at every mile at least once a week.
2. Calf Secret
To maximize calf development, you should train both the soleus muscle and the gastrocnemius muscle that rides above it. Straight-leg calf raises target the gastroc, but to hit the deeper-lying soleus you must bend the knee 45 degrees, which calls for seated calf raises.
3. Optimal Protein Intake
Protein is the building block of muscle, so if you're lifting heavy you'd better be eating heavy. According to a study in the Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology, if you're interested in putting on muscle, you'll need between 1 1/2 and two grams of protein per kilogram of body weight a day. This translates into 0.68 to 0.90 grams per pound of body weight. For metric-challenged Americans, one gram of protein per pound of body weight will ensure optimum protein synthesis without risk.
4. Fastest Workout
If you're short on workout time, the most expedient approach calls for training your upper and lower body using two exercises considered the kings of resistance training: squats and bench presses. Doing both at the same workout will engage more major and ancillary muscle fibers than any other two exercises you can do. After a 10-minute warm-up to raise core temperature, do six sets of eight to 10 reps of each exercise (do the benches first), then get the heck out of the gym. This workout will heighten your body's anabolic drive, which translates to more muscle.
5. A Cycling Approach
Try creating a simple four-week training cycle in which you alternate between heavy, medium and light training sessions for each body part. Each heavy day, push your limits in order to build strength and muscle, leaving your medium and light days for developing tendon and ligament strength as well as cardio endurance. A cyclic approach such as this one will allow you to gain muscle mass and strength, while keeping your metabolism churning so you continue to get leaner. And you'll be a lot less likely to over train in the process.
6. Grow Constantly
Once you're past the beginning phase of resistance training, something along the order of three months, avoid working a body part with the same routine two times in a row. Change the routine completely, swap one movement for another from the previous workout, or change the order of exercises from your last workout. This approach will prevent your muscles from getting lazy, keeping their adaptation response at an optimal level, which means continued muscle development.
7. Fat Intake
If you eliminate all fat from your diet, you may lose that gut, but only temporarily, and at the expense of muscle gain. The great fat-acceptance cycle has been spinning for generations, from zero tolerance to occasional monstrous greasy binges. The best plan focuses on moderation. This means eating a reasonable amount of daily fat, but choosing unsaturated sources (known as omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids) such as salmon, mackerel, natural peanut butter, olive oil and avocados, and avoiding saturated artery cloggers such as red meat, salad dressings, mayonnaise and butter. You need healthy fats to regulate hormone production, reduce muscle inflammation (especially after training), protect your joints, and provide the satisfaction you get from eating a big, well-deserved meal. Experts advise an equal balance among the three types of fats. This provides the medically desired 2-1 ratio of unsaturated to saturated fats, and will provide the greatest benefits these fats have to offer.
8. Priority Training
If you notice that one body part, or portion of a body part, begins to lag in development compared to the other muscle groups, try a priority-training approach. Always train the weak or slow-growing muscle first in your workout. For example, if your rear deltoids are slow-growth muscles, do rear laterals first in your shoulder workout, not last as you normally would. (Of course, warm up the entire deltoid complex with light overhead presses before you launch into your workout.)
9. Faster Fat Loss
To boost endurance and accelerate fat loss, add one long run a week (one or two hours) to your training efforts. Speed doesn't matter on these runs. Build distance very gradually, increasing weekly by no more than a mile (or 10 minutes).
10. Power Up
If you can't get in five or six small meals per day, eat between-meal protein shakes. This will keep your energy levels up, your amino-acid pool steady and your muscles growing.
11. Stretch between every set of an exercise to enhance muscle growth.
12. Wet Carbs for Weight Loss
One of the best ways to lose fat is to increase your intake of carbs--wet carbs, that is. One of the great joys in life is sitting down to a huge plate of food. But when you're watching calories it can get downright depressing if that plate is harboring a thin slice of steak and a dollop of steamed rice. This is where wet carbs come in. Foods that are high in fiber and loaded with water typically have very few calories, which means you can scarf them with impunity. Moreover, the body expends tremendous energy processing this type of carb. Studies performed at Penn State University showed that eating a lot of food is one of the keys to feeling satisfied, and satisfaction is the key to sticking to a weight-loss program. To keep your weight low and your satisfaction high, focus on foods such as cucumbers, grapefruit, tomatoes, cantaloupe, grilled fish, strawberries, yogurt, and vegetable soups--all of which contain an abundance of fluid and fiber.
13. Recover Faster
Eating immediately after a workout and then again two hours later is one of the best habits you can adopt for your growing muscles. The first two hours after a workout is a window of opportunity in which your muscles replenish and store glycogen at almost twice the rate they otherwise do. A study at the University of Texas showed that a combination of protein and carbs will expedite energy uptake faster than if you ate them separately.
14. Burn Calories in the Sand
By running barefoot on soft sand you'll expend 1.6 times more energy than you would on a hard surface, so it's a real calorie burner. But don't try sand running until you've done some conventional running first. Even guys accustomed to long runs should curtail their usual distances and pace the first time they hit the beach. Limited traction and poor stability make the aerobic demands enormous; almost immediate oxygen debt is the price of being overzealous. If the going is too tough, zigzag between soft and hard sand. Careful with your choice of swimwear.
15. Multitask
Multijoint exercises such as bench presses, squats, dead lifts, overhead presses, and chins allow you to manage more weight than you can with isolation movements. This not only leads to gains in muscle strength, size and density, but also results in increased growth hormone and testosterone levels.
16. Avoid These at All Costs
AVOID DOING SIT-UPS, even if a personal trainer or some other magazine suggests them. Unless you're already a superathlete with an incredibly well-developed midsection, sit-ups can lead to a strained lower back and, at worst, lumbar injuries. Additionally, rather than hitting your abs for maximal development, sit-ups may shift exercise tension to your hip flexors. Stick with crunches--and stop reading those other magazines.
17. Never Eat This
Almost every food, whether it's steak, or chocolate has some nutrients to contribute. However, one thing is absolute: Fried foods are garbage. Potato chips, French fries and onion rings are pregnant with saturated fat and calories, yet they contain zero healthy or muscle-promoting nutrients. A great example is the fried-onion appetizer popular at so many steakhouses, whether it goes by the name of Awesome Blossom, Blooming Onion or Full-Blown Coronary Onion (which sounds too honest to be true). Just one of these onions and a modicum of the accompanying dipping sauce contain 2,882 calories and 222 grams of fat. If you're on a fat-loss plan, simply eliminate fried foods. That alone will allow you to shed lard quickly.
18. Intensity Fix
If your muscle growth is starting to lag, the easiest way to change your intensity level is to shorten the rest interval between sets.
19. Stoke Your Metabolism
If you want to maximize your muscle growing or fat-loss efforts, never, ever, skip breakfast. Additionally, make sure that breakfast consists of complete proteins and complex carbohydrates, the best sources for stoking your metabolism at the beginning of the day, following a long night's inactivity.
20. Loosen Up
To keep from tightening up, spend 10 minutes after every run doing long, gentle stretches that work your calves, hamstrings, lower back and shoulders. After the age of 30, it's especially important to include upper-body stretches.
21. Do Partials
For the ultimate biceps pump, try preacher curls using the "21s" approach. After you've done a set of full-range reps of preacher curls, next do seven partial reps, from the bottom of the movement to its midpoint, and finish with seven more partials, from the midpoint to the top. Rest 90 seconds, and then do another set. Try four sets in all, and burn, baby, burn.
22. Retain Less Fat
Wanna stay lean and healthy? It's old news, but it's not going away: Vegetables are great for you. If you still don't buy it, take it from someone a lot smarter than we are. "We don't understand everything about fruits and vegetables, but we do know that the quarter of the population eating the most gets half the cancer of the quarter eating the least," says Bruce Ames, Ph.D., professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and renowned antioxidant authority. "So get at least five portions of fruits and vegetables every day." Vegetables are also loaded with fiber, and recent research shows that people who eat plenty of fiber stay thin, even if they don't pay attention to the rest of their diet.
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