Muscle Building Will Make You Feel, Look, and
Perform Better
By Bill L Davis

Muscle Building is a rapidly growing activity for athletes, movie stars, and individuals (Average Joes) who want to look, feel, and perform better. Every body looks better when they're toned, and getting firm and toned muscles requires progressive resistance weight training, proper nutrition, strategic supplementation, and adequate rest. The cool thing about bodybuilding is that you can get as big, ripped, toned, or defined as you want!

Bodybuilding is like sculpting, only you use your body as clay, weights and food as your tools. You can add some muscle here, lose some fat there, widen your shoulders, narrow your waist, and get that famous v-shape that everybody longs for. Muscle building is a lot about creating illusions.

Serious muscle building requires hard and heavy (High Intensity Training, or HIT) weight training, eating 6-8 times a day, supplementing with nutritional aids like protein powder, multi-vitamin/minerals, and creatine and other growth-enhancing products, and getting sound sleep for 7-9 hours a night.

To build muscle, you have to continuously trick your muscles into growth. The body exhibits a lot of "inertia" in that it is resistant to change. Muscle building is about getting your muscles to adapt to the stresses you place on it through weight training exercises like squats, bench presses, lat pulldowns and rows, curls, pushdowns, and calf raises. The best training method for packing on muscle is working out with 2 or 3 sets per exercise for 6-15 reps, moving up the reps as you gain strength and endurance, then dropping back down in reps when you add more weight.

For example, you might be able to curl 50 pounds for 2 sets of 8 reps (2x8). Your next workout, pump out 2 sets of 9 reps (2x9) with the same weight. When you get to 2x10, add 5 pounds and pump out 2x6 again. Keep doing this indefinitely. Every few workouts, however, do about 50 percent more reps than normal (if you're at 10 reps, do 15) and drop the weights by 10 or 20 percent.

The reason? Your muscles grow through different mechanisms. Muscle growth occurs when individual muscle cells grow in size and they grow in size when the components that they're comprised of grow in size or number. Additionally, bigger muscle cells contain higher quantities of fluids. Muscle cell components grow in size with lower reps; muscle cell components grow in number with higher reps.

Some experts call this training "holistic." Whatever you call it, call it "successful." Top muscle builders have followed this method of bodybuilding for decades.

This variety in training also keeps the muscles guessing. It keeps the mind fresh, too. Too much of one thing makes the body and the mind grow stale. As they say, "Variety is the spice of life." It's also a must-do if you want to build muscle quickly and effectively. If you're serious about muscle-building, you'll heed the advice I've given here. Know that practice, patience, and persistence pays off.

New to Muscle Building? Want to build muscle fast? Learn more at Muscle-Build.com.

Bill