New to Bodybuilding? Follow These Tips to Succeed

For years, many people would look up to those that were professional bodybuilders because of their amazing physiques, but would have never considered actually becoming one. One of the things that has changed the overall opinion of the general public is a need to control their weight and become more healthy which bodybuilding can provide. To be successful at bodybuilding, you need to read and understand the following tips so that you can make the right choices and avoid making the wrong ones.

When it comes to body building, nutrition is just as important, if not more important, than your exercise routine. As a matter of fact, whether you are “bulking up” your muscles or looking for the ripped lean-muscle definition, you will have a difficult time if you don’t follow the correct diet. If you are thinking about trying to gain weight to add muscle mass at the same time as eating to get lean muscle definition, you won’t succeed. The two phases, getting ripped and bulking up, are just the opposite. Thus, ideally, you would first go on a bulking phase, where you would eat larger amount of calories than you burn at rest. The reduced calorie “cutting” stage comes after the bulk up phase and it’s the more challenging of the two phases you must go through. You cut way back on your carbs – about 1 gram of carbohydrates per pound of body weight – with the exception of fresh fruits. Remember, though, that a bulking diet should be clean for the best results, in other words it can’t consist of burgers and ice cream. Complex carbohydrates, fruit, vegetables, good fats, and lean protein are the main ingredients for a good bulking up diet. If you weigh 240 pounds, a good method for figuring out how much protein you need is to figure 1 gram per pound of body weight or, in this case, 240 grams of protein.

To achieve an epic transformation you must take post workout nutrition very seriously. To recover from the stress of the workout your body will make better use of what you feed it straight after because it’s still in shock from the workout. Many leading health experts recommend consuming a protein shake as your post workout meal as it has been proven to increase levels of protein synthesis, which means you gain more muscle mass. The fastest absorbed protein is whey which means that your muscles will be able to use the nutrients much faster. Muscles are built and repaired with protein, which is why getting high rates of protein absorption is important. After an intense workout many people discover that they really can’t consume any solid foods, which is why protein shakes are good to drink straight after a workout.

Unfortunately, carbohydrates have acquired a bad reputation recently similar to what happened to fat during the 1980s. Eating more carbohydrates each day than your body needs for fuel can lead to fat build up on your body. Normally, your insulin secretion is sufficient to transport the glucose from the carbs into your muscle cells, but if you happen to be insulin resistant, or sensitive, this doesn’t happen. In any case, it’s just common sense to realize that, if you need to lose body fat, you must reduce the number of carbohydrates you eat each day. Carbohydrates can be very beneficial if you have already embarked on a good, steady workout program. If your body fat is below 25% then you can consider an intake of approximately 0.75 g to 1 g per pound of lean body mass. The secret to keeping your carbs from turning into body fat is to do your strength training consistently and without fail.

Lots of people believe that fats are bad however they really aren’t! A quarter of your daily calories should come from fats such as oils and animal fats. Fat is essential to many processes in the body and that is why cutting it out completely or reducing it to ridiculously low levels will be detrimental to your health. Additionally fats are an energy source that is burned off by the body slowly, meaning you stay satisfied for longer periods of time and therefore you’re less likely to eat again.

When you begin the “cutting” phase of your training – losing fat and gaining muscle definition – doing cardio workouts are imperative. When your goal is to lose the body fat you’ve put on, strength training will be of some benefit, but don’t just rely on it to reach your body fat loss objective. You can see why it is crucial, if you want to lose body fat, to have cardio workouts in your routine. There’s a lot of controversy in the bodybuilding community as to whether long, consistent hours of cardio is better for fat loss, or full-body highly intense, interval training. In any event, both will result if body fat loss. You should try both and see which works for you. However, you don’t want to overdo it either, because beyond a certain point you start getting diminishing returns. Therefore, your cardio sessions should never exceed 60 minutes. If you need to burn a lot of fat, try to do your cardio sessions six days a week. Allow your body one day to repair and recuperate.

If you wish to add to the size of your muscles you’ll need to increase the heaviness of the weights you lift after each session. If you continue to lift the same weights every session your muscles will get stronger however you will eventually hit a plateau when you’re strong enough to keep lifting the same weight. For beginning bodybuilders it’s a good idea to use a weight that you can only do a maximum of 6 reps with. To put it simply when you get to your sixth rep you’ll want to die and there’ll be no way you can do a seventh. You should continue using the same weight until you’re able to push out ten repetitions before failing. Once you can do eleven reps of the same weight you must bump it up so that you can only do six again. This is the most efficient way of increasing muscle mass and progressing in bodybuilding.

The advice offered in the article is meant to make your life easier as you take your first steps into the world of bodybuilding. You might initially find bodybuilding to be a little bit scary however you should just accept the hard work ahead because there are lots of benefits.

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