A Muscle Gain Workout (Part 2) :

by female bodybuilders on 12:23 AM in Workout

On the topic of a muscle gain workout and nutrition, if you want to gain weight and muscle mass, you need to eat. And eat a lot. When you're not lifting, you should be eating. But don't eat all crap. You need healthy food to grow. I like to implement the 90/10 rule: that is, 90% of the food you eat in the week is good, healthy food, while the other 10% is junk. This will help you keep your sanity and still yield results. You're also going to want to eat a lot of carbohydrates. This will refill your glycogen stores and give you energy for the next workout. If you want to lose weight, you would obviously eat smaller meals, spaced throughout the day, still meeting your protein goal, but you would cut back on carbs. Eat them only pre and post-workout.

To get through a muscle gain workout will require a lot of discipline, dedication and hard work. You have to want to change your body. If you just go in the gym and go through the motions, you might as well pick up a box of Oreos on your way home and go to town. In fact, this is why I don't really like the term "work out." I don't work out, I train. Every workout is a mental and physical battle. Getting mentally prepared to do my last set of squats is a workout in itself. You should be constantly trying to better your lifts, going up in small increments each workout. Muscles wont respond to the stimulus they responded to last week.

There are many muscle gain workout training techniques, usually classified into two categories: splits and full-body training routines. Split routines entail training distinct muscle groups one day and another set the other day (e.g. chest and triceps on Monday, back and biceps on Wednesday, etc.). Full-body workouts, as the name suggests, entails training the whole body as a unit. This type emphasizes big, compound movements and lifts, such as the squat, bench press, deadlift, cleans, and others. In my opinion, full-body routines are superior to splits because I believe that the body is better trained as a unit, especially if you are an athlete. However, I have seen many people achieve great results with a split routine as well. Regardless of which workout technique you use, don't let your workout run past 45 minutes, as the body will enter a catabolic, or muscle-"eating", state.Adding new exercises to your muscle gain workout is very important. Eventually, your program will stop working, and your progress will stall. At this point, you would do well to switch up exercises, rep schemes and workout times (still adhering to the 45 minute rule). The body will not continue to grow with the same stress being placed on it. If you lift a box over your head over and over, you will eventually become proficient at lifting the box over your head, and you may even be able to lift heavier boxes over your head, but eventually you will hit a point where you won't be able to lift anything heavier. It can be compared to the law of diminishing returns in economics, which states that in a system with fixed and variable inputs, there will be a point beyond which each additional unit of input (doing the same exercises) yields smaller and smaller increases in output (will eventually yield smaller strength gains).