Building Great Body Shape

Many people don’t realize that you don’t need a full home gym to build muscle — in fact, simple bodyweight exercises like pushups can be effectively used to build muscle up.

It’s easy to underestimate how effective pushups can be at building your chest and arms. Pushups might appear plain and boring at a glance: up down, up down, up down — that’s it. And that’s true to a certain extent. But many people outside of the fitness circles are only familiar with the standard pushups that they learned in their high school gym classes.

There is a wide variety of pushups that you can use to isolate different muscle groups, but we’re going to concentrate on five variations in this article. These are not necessarily the best five for all people, but they will open your eyes to the variety available in basic bodyweight exercises.

Military pushups: military pushups are similar to standard pushups, except that you move your hands underneath your shoulders and tuck your elbows tightly to your side. This variation works the triceps more than the chest.

Fist pushups: Sometimes referred to as “knuckle” pushups, require the use of your fists, instead of the palms of your hands, to bear your body weight during the pushup. Fist pushups are beneficial because they target different areas of your body than traditional pushups, and may actually increase the effectiveness of your workout.

Yogi pushups: also referred to as “divebombers,” you start the pushup in the yoga downward dog position, which is similar to a pike. On the down rep, you transition into the upward dog position in a motion that is similar to sliding under a fence, reversing this movement on the up rep. These pushups are brutal and really work your shoulders.

Decline pushups: Instead of placing your feet on the floor, or using your knees, place your feet on a platform so that your head is lower than your feet.  You can use a chair, a stepstool, or a bench — pretty much anything that will allow you to raise your feet up so that they are higher than your head. These types of pushups work your upper chest muscles.

Stacked pushups: with stacked pushups, one arm is spread wide to the side as in wide pushups, and the other is tucked in tight like military pushups. After 5 repetitions, the hand positions are switched.

Here are a few more pushup variations you might want to consider to build muscle up: wide, fly, diamond, military, fist, yogi, decline, incline, stacked, deep, prison cell, and inchworm pushups.

To get the most out of your pushup workouts, remember to add some weight once the pushups begin to get easy. You don’t want to push out 50 easy repetitions. Rather, struggle with 20 or 30. Also be sure to add variety by varying your hand position for each of the above types of pushups.

Push ups are a great way to strengthen your upper body and build mass, so they are a worthy addition to your muscle workouts. If you keep it interesting by mixing up your hand positions and trying a few different styles of pushups you can increase the effectiveness of your at-home exercising and relieve the boredom!

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While kettleballs have been used for over a century in places such as Russia, their use was not widespread until recent years. In America, kettleball training is just exploding, thanks to some very unique benefits that you can achieve with kettleballs. For anyone looking for muscle weight gain, kettleballs make a versatile entry in your workout routine.

Kettleballs look like mini bowling balls with large, thick handles. They come in various weights from around 2 kilos to 35 kilos, but the heavier weights aren’t used often, because kettleball training focuses more on conditioning, explosive strength, and movement, rather than sheer strength.

The incredible aspect of kettleball training is their versatility. In one quick session you can accomplish a number of goals. Some of the numerous benefits you’ll get from kettleball workouts include:

• Strength improvement
• Explosive power increases
• Increases in your level of conditioning
• Improved joint flexibility and range of motion
• Anaerobic conditioning improvements
• Core strength gains
• Stabilization and balance improvements

And I’ve saved the best for last: kettleball training can boost your metabolism for after a workout is over, making them ideal candidates to add to your muscle workouts and burn fat.

Kettleballs do have drawbacks, however, but they can be worked around. The drawback cited most frequently is that kettleballs are only effective for core and upper body conditioning, and not your lower body. To supplement you’ll need to pair your kettleball workout with a good lower body workout, or perhaps even a short interval training routine.

Keep in mind that ketteballs are considered most effective in interval-based workouts, so traditional strength training routines aren’t a great fit. However, if your goal is to build muscle up and you pay attention to advances in fitness science, you’re likely already aware that traditional strength training exercises aren’t the most appropriate option.

With the many advantages that kettleballs offer, they should be added to your workout workout, provided that your workout already emphasizes recent advancements in fitness science and is a good fit for your body type and goals.

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If you want to get 100% better at something, how would you approach it? I can think of two primary approaches. The approach you select will be somewhere along this continuum: performing one activity twice as well (or 100 percent better), or performing 100 activities 1 percent better. I think that most people gravitate towards the former approach, but the latter is much more realistic.

Taken a step further, to make each of these 1 percent building blocks more effective, you could also focus on things that occur outside of your workouts. So you focus on modifying your habits and making fractional improvements that will stack on top of one another to bring you huge benefits.

So here are five minor lifestyle changes you can make to amplify your muscle workouts.

1) Replace Aerobics with Interval Training

Aerobic exercise has a negative impact on mass gaining because it burns glycogen and branched chain amino acids (BCAA). Instead, focus on HIIT sessions for fat burning, for example a 400-meter sprint followed by a 400-meter recovery jog, repeated 3 more times.

2) Increase Total Time Under Load

Instead of concentrating on the quantity of repetitions, concentrate on the total time your muscles are under load. Try spending 2 seconds on the negative contraction, 1 second at a neutral contraction (bottom of the exercise), and 1 second on the positive contraction. Lengthening the negative is a simple method to overload muscles and promote muscle weight gain.

3) Eat More Fish

Not only is fish high in protein, it is also a natural source of essential fatty acids, which are vital for both your muscular health and your overall health. Essential fatty acids make your muscles more sensitive to insulin, so they aid glycogen storage and increase the absorption of amino acids into your muscles, while also preserving glutamine storage.

4) Mix up your Total Time Under Load

One really easy way to add variety to a workout, confuse your muscles, and build muscle up is to switch up your repetition tempo by adding an explosive day once per week, or an explosive set once per workout. It looks like this: 2-second negative contraction, 1-second neutral, explode as fast as you can on the positive contraction and repeat.

5) Try Something New

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. Commit to yourself to read a new (as in current and scientifically backed) exercise book every six months. You’ll pick up new approaches and new tips to add to your workouts.

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You’ve heard it over and over again: you can’t build muscle up and lose fat concurrently. They say that building muscle involves an increase in calories, while fat burning involves a decrease in calories. This conventional wisdom is partially accurate, but the beliefs are being shaken up with research into interval-based training. The truth is, you can achieve muscle weight gain at the same time as you burn fat if you add interval training to your workouts.

Interval training isn’t completely new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and practiced these days. While traditional cardiovascular activities were looked at as the only effective ways to shed weight, and the only effective workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has been shown to be advantageous to athletes of all types, and for people with many different goals.

Standard aerobic activity is often referred to as “steady state,” which means that you work up to a fixed intensity level and continue working out at that level for the duration of the session. During the workout, your body pulls half of its energy through your fat stores, and gets the remainder through your oxygen system, and by tapping into your muscle and glycogen stores.

High-intensity sessions, conversely, involve brief maximum intensity intervals followed by lower intensity rest periods. HIIT sessions are muscle sparing and are fast, but are killer. A fifteen-minute HIIT workout can raise your metabolic rate for almost 24 hours, enabling you to continue burning higher levels of fat for up to a day.

On top of this, because your muscles consume calories during every minute of the day, the more muscle you have, the more fat you burn, even while you’re sitting still. Because HIIT not only spares your muscle, but also helps you build muscle, your future fat burning ability is increased, which makes it a great addition to your muscle workouts.

The bottom line is that regardless of your fitness goals, HIIT sessions can help you improve your overall fitness level in very short sessions. But even better, if your goals include muscle building and fat burning, adding HIIT to your workout schedule is a no-brainer.

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Your goal is to achieve muscle weight gain and you want to do it quickly. You’ve probably heard how many long hours it will require, and you’re preparing yourself to get to the gym four or five times per week for 60 to 90 minutes per workout.

You’ve been misinformed. Conventional wisdom has led you down the wrong path.

With a scientifically-constructed workout, you can achieve better results with just three short workouts per week. By better, I mean that you can build muscle up just as fast as with the extended workouts, but you also get quite a few additional benefits:

• You will achieve muscle weight gain quickly and melt fat at the same time
• You will use more calories as a result of a 15-minute anaerobic workout than in a 60-minute cardio workout
• You can build your explosive power
• You can increase your your overall fitness level and anaerobic threshold
• You will increase your joint strength and flexibility
• You can increase your core without doing core-specific exercises

These techniques are not secrets, but aren’t widely used. These short workouts are based on interval trainings, which is nothing new. Intervals have been used successfully for years. But how you apply those intervals will be the key to success. That’s why it’s so important that you choose a proven routine if your goal is to build mass through muscle workouts.

The two primary types of interval training you’ll focus on are high intensity interval training (HIIT) and Tabata training. HIIT sessions are generally used for the aerobic sessions, and 15 minutes will replace 45 to 60 minutes of traditional aerobic exercises.

Tabata training is just one form of strength training using intervals and compound exercises that will have your muscles screaming in 20-second sets. You can also generously sprinkle in functional exercises, kettleball training, sports-specific exercise and more to keep your workouts fun. But prepare for hard work — you can’t build muscle up unless you put forth maximum effort during your workouts.

But these types of workouts aren’t for the squeamish. You must already have a base level of fitness before you try them, and your joints must be healthy to start. Anyone over the age of 60 should seriously consider getting checked out before attempting interval training. When you’re ready, put your game face on and get to work. You’ll love the results!

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Technorati Tags: body build muscle, build muscle up, exercise build muscle, muscle weight gain