midwtchamp
Banana
found this at http.//bodybuilding.about.com
1. Thou shalt eat enough to promote growth.
A good rule of thumb is that if you’re trying to bulk up, your daily calorie intake should equal your weight in pounds times 18. So if you’re 125 pounds, you should be taking in 2,250 calories. If you weigh 150, you’re looking at 2,700. If you’re playing sports or otherwise highly active, you may well need more.
2. Thou shalt eat at least five times a day.
Obviously, it’s going to be tough to get as many calories as you need in a day in just two or three meals. You’ll get sick, and all those calories are going to come right back up. That doesn’t do anyone any good.
2,700 calories becomes manageable when you split it into 5 meals, though. That’s just 540 calories a meal. That’s 6-7 eggs, a protein shake with a double serving of oatmeal, a couple of turkey sandwiches, etc. We’re still talking about good-sized meals here, but they shouldn’t be so big you feel stuffed for six hours. Basically, you want to be eating every 3-4 hours.
Even if you could get enough calories in 2-3 meals, though, you’re better off spreading it out more. First, more frequent feedings keep your body in a state of positive nitrogen balance, meaning that you’re packing on muscle rather than burning it. Second, blood sugar is better controlled by splitting your food intake into smaller, more frequent meals. This means you’ll have more energy and store less of the excess as fat. Finally, your metabolic rate rises for a couple of hours every time you eat. Frequent metabolic spikes also help keep you from storing the excess calories as fat.
3. Thou shalt eat the right kinds of foods.
Pizza Hut and MacDonald’s make it easy to get a lot of calories, and you’ll see lots of people building big bodies on their fare, but that’s not the kind of big body you want. Certain foods have no place in the building of a healthy body, and fast foods and sodas are high on the list.
What should you be eating? First of all, you should be eating about one and a half grams of protein per pound of bodyweight. That’s going to seem like a lot of protein, but that another place the minimum of five meals comes in. Assuming you weigh 150, we’re talking about 225 grams of protein a day, which comes out to 45 grams per meal.
Second, you should be eating good, low glycemic carbohydrates. Beans, whole wheat products, brown rice, oatmeal, fruits, vegetables, and fat-free dairy products are all good choices.
Third, you should be getting quality fats. Eggs, lean meats, fish oil, flax oil, olive oil, and mixed nuts are all good choices.
Now, the tricky part is how to combine them. I recommend splitting things up so you have two kinds of meals: protein plus carbohydrates and protein plus fat. Try to avoid combining carbohydrates with fat, as this combination is more likely to put fat on you than any other.
Sleep, Recovery, Training Each Body Part
4. Thou shalt get enough sleep.
You’ll notice that we’re in the fourth of our ten commandments and haven’t mentioned anything about what you’re supposed to do in the gym yet. That’s because muscle is built outside the gym, when you’re eating and when you’re resting. All your training does is provide a stimulus for growth. At the table and in bed are your make-or-break times.
Seven hours of sleep is a bare minimum if you’re serious about getting bigger. You need that time to repair the muscular damage you do in the gym, and your body releases significant amounts of growth hormone while you sleep. Cheating your body of sleep is cheating it of growth, period.
5. Thou shalt recover between sessions.
This one is related to the previous commandment. While sleep is important to muscular growth, so is properly applied laziness. Minimize your cardio if you’re looking to put on mass. Also, take adequate time off to recover between workouts. Under no circumstance should you be training the same muscle group twice in less than 48 hours, and you’ll frequently find you need more rest than that. As a rule of thumb, if the soreness isn’t gone and the muscles still feel the slightest bit tired, you’re not ready to train them again yet.
6. Thou shalt train thy entire body.
Certain body parts seem to be more glamorous than others. Everyone wants big pecs and biceps, along with ripped abs, but all too many people neglect their legs and backs. If your goal is to be big, though, not training some of the largest muscle groups in the body is pretty much taking careful aim and shooting yourself in the foot. The legs and back have incredible potential for growth, and they help balance out a physique. No matter how impressive your pecs, abs, and biceps are, you’re not going to impress anybody if your legs look like pencils and you disappear from the side or back.
Training your legs and back also result in larger releases of testosterone and growth hormone, the hormones that make you big. Thus, your pecs, bis, and even abs will benefit indirectly from training your legs and back hard and heavy.
7. Thou shalt focus on multijoint exercises.
Arm curls are fun, but they won’t even pack much meat on your arms, let alone the rest of your body. If you want to get bigger, remember that the exercises that involve the most muscle are going to help you build the most muscle. Look at the routines of powerlifters, bodybuilders, football players, and wrestlers--some of the biggest athletes around. Although the demands of their sports are different and their workouts have some significant differences, you’ll see the same group of exercises popping up again and again: squats, deadlifts, cleans, snatches, bench presses, bent-over rows, pull-ups, dips, military presses, etc. All these exercises involve using several muscles in unison to move a heavier weight than you can handle with any one muscle, and all of them will put size on you. Do you have to do them all in one workout or routine? Of course not. At the same time, though, at least 80% of any given workout should consist of these multiple joint exercises. If you still want to do curls, go ahead and do them at the end.
Supplement Rules, Keeping a Journal
8. Thou shalt not waste thy money on supplements.
There are two exceptions to this commandment: protein powder and essential oils (fish oil and flax oil). I consider them both food, not supplements, though, so the rule applies. Aside from these two exceptions, though, there’s no supplement out there that will help you gain mass as well as the food you could buy with the same amount of money. Creatine? It’s a useful product, but you’ll get more bang for your buck from real food. Fat burners? Don’t even think about it while you’re bulking. Food is pretty much the most anabolic thing you can put in your body--even steroids don’t work without it--and it’s cheaper than any supplement that won’t do one-tenth as much for you.
9. Thou shalt keep a journal of what goes in thy mouth.
I can’t stress this one enough. If you’re estimating how many calories you’re taking in, or how many grams of protein, carbs, and fat you eat in a day, you have no real idea what you’re eating. When your progress slows down or stops, it’s hard to make intelligent changes if you don’t have a solid idea where you’ve been. The more accurate your records are, the easier it becomes to troubleshoot your diet. For people trying to gain weight in particular, a food log provides a certain degree of accountability that you really will eat all those calories spread out over all those meals.
10. Thou shalt keep a journal of thy training.
Just like the food log, the workout log is non-negotiable. Your log lets you track your progress and see yourself getting stronger. You can also see where certain routines worked or didn’t work for you, helping you know what kinds of routines you respond best to in the future. You don’t have to remember how much weight you were planning on using, or, worse, go into the gym with no plan at all about how much you’re planning to lift. The workout log also does a wonderful job of providing accountability. You’ll be less likely to skip your workouts if you’ve got a physical notebook to record them in.
Obviously, these don’t cover everything there is to know about gaining mass, but if you follow these ten commandments religiously, you will reap the rewards of increased muscle and strength
1. Thou shalt eat enough to promote growth.
A good rule of thumb is that if you’re trying to bulk up, your daily calorie intake should equal your weight in pounds times 18. So if you’re 125 pounds, you should be taking in 2,250 calories. If you weigh 150, you’re looking at 2,700. If you’re playing sports or otherwise highly active, you may well need more.
2. Thou shalt eat at least five times a day.
Obviously, it’s going to be tough to get as many calories as you need in a day in just two or three meals. You’ll get sick, and all those calories are going to come right back up. That doesn’t do anyone any good.
2,700 calories becomes manageable when you split it into 5 meals, though. That’s just 540 calories a meal. That’s 6-7 eggs, a protein shake with a double serving of oatmeal, a couple of turkey sandwiches, etc. We’re still talking about good-sized meals here, but they shouldn’t be so big you feel stuffed for six hours. Basically, you want to be eating every 3-4 hours.
Even if you could get enough calories in 2-3 meals, though, you’re better off spreading it out more. First, more frequent feedings keep your body in a state of positive nitrogen balance, meaning that you’re packing on muscle rather than burning it. Second, blood sugar is better controlled by splitting your food intake into smaller, more frequent meals. This means you’ll have more energy and store less of the excess as fat. Finally, your metabolic rate rises for a couple of hours every time you eat. Frequent metabolic spikes also help keep you from storing the excess calories as fat.
3. Thou shalt eat the right kinds of foods.
Pizza Hut and MacDonald’s make it easy to get a lot of calories, and you’ll see lots of people building big bodies on their fare, but that’s not the kind of big body you want. Certain foods have no place in the building of a healthy body, and fast foods and sodas are high on the list.
What should you be eating? First of all, you should be eating about one and a half grams of protein per pound of bodyweight. That’s going to seem like a lot of protein, but that another place the minimum of five meals comes in. Assuming you weigh 150, we’re talking about 225 grams of protein a day, which comes out to 45 grams per meal.
Second, you should be eating good, low glycemic carbohydrates. Beans, whole wheat products, brown rice, oatmeal, fruits, vegetables, and fat-free dairy products are all good choices.
Third, you should be getting quality fats. Eggs, lean meats, fish oil, flax oil, olive oil, and mixed nuts are all good choices.
Now, the tricky part is how to combine them. I recommend splitting things up so you have two kinds of meals: protein plus carbohydrates and protein plus fat. Try to avoid combining carbohydrates with fat, as this combination is more likely to put fat on you than any other.
Sleep, Recovery, Training Each Body Part
4. Thou shalt get enough sleep.
You’ll notice that we’re in the fourth of our ten commandments and haven’t mentioned anything about what you’re supposed to do in the gym yet. That’s because muscle is built outside the gym, when you’re eating and when you’re resting. All your training does is provide a stimulus for growth. At the table and in bed are your make-or-break times.
Seven hours of sleep is a bare minimum if you’re serious about getting bigger. You need that time to repair the muscular damage you do in the gym, and your body releases significant amounts of growth hormone while you sleep. Cheating your body of sleep is cheating it of growth, period.
5. Thou shalt recover between sessions.
This one is related to the previous commandment. While sleep is important to muscular growth, so is properly applied laziness. Minimize your cardio if you’re looking to put on mass. Also, take adequate time off to recover between workouts. Under no circumstance should you be training the same muscle group twice in less than 48 hours, and you’ll frequently find you need more rest than that. As a rule of thumb, if the soreness isn’t gone and the muscles still feel the slightest bit tired, you’re not ready to train them again yet.
6. Thou shalt train thy entire body.
Certain body parts seem to be more glamorous than others. Everyone wants big pecs and biceps, along with ripped abs, but all too many people neglect their legs and backs. If your goal is to be big, though, not training some of the largest muscle groups in the body is pretty much taking careful aim and shooting yourself in the foot. The legs and back have incredible potential for growth, and they help balance out a physique. No matter how impressive your pecs, abs, and biceps are, you’re not going to impress anybody if your legs look like pencils and you disappear from the side or back.
Training your legs and back also result in larger releases of testosterone and growth hormone, the hormones that make you big. Thus, your pecs, bis, and even abs will benefit indirectly from training your legs and back hard and heavy.
7. Thou shalt focus on multijoint exercises.
Arm curls are fun, but they won’t even pack much meat on your arms, let alone the rest of your body. If you want to get bigger, remember that the exercises that involve the most muscle are going to help you build the most muscle. Look at the routines of powerlifters, bodybuilders, football players, and wrestlers--some of the biggest athletes around. Although the demands of their sports are different and their workouts have some significant differences, you’ll see the same group of exercises popping up again and again: squats, deadlifts, cleans, snatches, bench presses, bent-over rows, pull-ups, dips, military presses, etc. All these exercises involve using several muscles in unison to move a heavier weight than you can handle with any one muscle, and all of them will put size on you. Do you have to do them all in one workout or routine? Of course not. At the same time, though, at least 80% of any given workout should consist of these multiple joint exercises. If you still want to do curls, go ahead and do them at the end.
Supplement Rules, Keeping a Journal
8. Thou shalt not waste thy money on supplements.
There are two exceptions to this commandment: protein powder and essential oils (fish oil and flax oil). I consider them both food, not supplements, though, so the rule applies. Aside from these two exceptions, though, there’s no supplement out there that will help you gain mass as well as the food you could buy with the same amount of money. Creatine? It’s a useful product, but you’ll get more bang for your buck from real food. Fat burners? Don’t even think about it while you’re bulking. Food is pretty much the most anabolic thing you can put in your body--even steroids don’t work without it--and it’s cheaper than any supplement that won’t do one-tenth as much for you.
9. Thou shalt keep a journal of what goes in thy mouth.
I can’t stress this one enough. If you’re estimating how many calories you’re taking in, or how many grams of protein, carbs, and fat you eat in a day, you have no real idea what you’re eating. When your progress slows down or stops, it’s hard to make intelligent changes if you don’t have a solid idea where you’ve been. The more accurate your records are, the easier it becomes to troubleshoot your diet. For people trying to gain weight in particular, a food log provides a certain degree of accountability that you really will eat all those calories spread out over all those meals.
10. Thou shalt keep a journal of thy training.
Just like the food log, the workout log is non-negotiable. Your log lets you track your progress and see yourself getting stronger. You can also see where certain routines worked or didn’t work for you, helping you know what kinds of routines you respond best to in the future. You don’t have to remember how much weight you were planning on using, or, worse, go into the gym with no plan at all about how much you’re planning to lift. The workout log also does a wonderful job of providing accountability. You’ll be less likely to skip your workouts if you’ve got a physical notebook to record them in.
Obviously, these don’t cover everything there is to know about gaining mass, but if you follow these ten commandments religiously, you will reap the rewards of increased muscle and strength
