Man has always strived for maximum strength and physical perfection since the beginning of time. Bodybuilding originated from the Greeks. Their basic idea was to celebrate the human body by portraying strong, symmetrical bodies. The Greeks believed that ‘a nation’s health is the nation’s wealth’. To produce a nation of men with towering strength to essentially protect the Greek empire, they presented massive and heroic men like Apollo and Hercules.
Bodybuilding, as we know it today, is considered mainly for health and aesthetic reasons. We are consumed with health magazines that give us all kinds of information on how to build muscle, attract ladies while flexing your bicep and how to consume performance enhancers to eventually look like Hulk on steroids. Before you decide to gain a couple of pounds of solid muscle, let me tell you that it is possible to tone and bulk the right way naturally…
Bodybuilding is the process of developing muscle fibers through the combination of weight training, increased caloric intake and rest. Exercise will improve your muscle tone and help you control your weight. The amount of exercise you do depends on the shape you are in, and what you believe your ideal physique to be. When creating a muscle building regimen, it is important to keep in mind your level of weight training experience. If you do not have a great deal of experience it is important to ease into a weight training routine. As a rule of thumb, three to four weight training workouts per week of at least thirty minutes should keep you healthy. It is essential to do research, or consult a professional who will safely support you in building muscle. Muscle hypertrophy ( muscle volume) mainly requires more number of repetitions and can be most efficiently produced through high volume exercises. Volume, in simple terms is nothing but the number of sets of a specific exercise multiplied with repetitions. This type of training requires a very low intensity when compared with your actual resistance. Constant use of sets and reps can help your body in stimulating and increasing your muscle mass and strength.
Nutrition is by far the most important factor and is almost always responsible for either success or failure in bodybuilding and most fitness programs. As you progress in your bodybuilding and gain further understanding of the relationship between performance, recovery and nutrition, you’ll be able to find certain nutritional strategies that will help drive you to new heights.
In order to add muscle tissue you must force the body to add it. Your body won’t just add a pound of muscle just because you followed a 3-set workout.
The key is to have a calculated and disciplined diet to stimulate muscle growth. When to eat, how to eat and especially what you eat are very important factors. It is essential to support muscle growth with a diet in lean proteins, complex and low glycemic carbohydrates. Remember, if you have not stimulated enough muscle mass in a workout session, all the excess calories consumed are either excreted or deposited as body fat. Studies indicate that 95 percent of trainees simply don’t train hard enough to warrant a consistent size and strength. And yet they still continue to eat big to get big. Let me point out that you will get big if you eat big but it is often fat and not lean muscle mass. You don’t need 6-7 meals a day to build muscle and minimize the deposit of body fat. In fact, all that really matters is that total calories consumed in a day must exceed your basal metabolic rate. The essence of bodybuilding can be summarized as follows: feed the muscles enough calories to help the growth process and no more. “More is not always better”. Consuming more calories than what is necessary to serve the growth process causes your body to work harder to digest food and misuses valuable energy that could be better used to serve the growth process.
Natural bodybuilding can be done! For more information on natural bodybuilding go to: www.liftforlife.com
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