Muscle building is a huge and important subject for many guys. After all, who wouldn’t like to get ripped?

Unfortunately, this also means that it’s a BIG market and lots of people are trying to exploit that. For example, there’s no end to muscle and fitness magazines and of course there’s also tons of muscle-building related products.

The problem is that misinformation is often spread because of commercial interest. Who cares if a new supplement is worthless? Just spread some  rumors and have some articles published in fitness mags, that make your new supplement look like the best thing since sliced bread…

On the other hand, there’s alos lots of very good advice out there. Only: Which is which? How can you tell the good from the bad muscle building tips?

While I can’t possibly cover all the bases: Here’s my humble collection of the best and worst advice out there:

Great Muscle Building Tips:

• Rest is Just as Important as Working Out
  Any guide or article that emphasizes the importance of rest is on the right track. Sure, hitting the weights is the crucial component to building muscle mass, but becoming over-zealous and working out too often or for too long can be very counter-productive. Always make sure that your resting periods are long enough for your muscles to fully recover from a workout and go into hypertrophy.
  -
• Muscles Are Made in the Kitchen and the Gym
  Nutrition… no one’s a big fan of the nutrition-aspect of muscle building, are they? We all wish we could just hit the gym regularly and eat whatever and still end up with a dream-body, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. If you really want to maximize your results, you need a very good nutritional foundation; there’s no way around that. However, this does not mean that you must now painstakingly count each calorie you consume and keep track of protein and carbohydrate intake down to the milligram.
  You simply need to make sure that you eat healthy food more often than junk-food. The more healthy stuff you eat, the more of the important nutrients required for your muscle tissue to grow will automatically be included.
  -
• Full-Body Routines and Exercises
  I don’t mean to suggest that isolation exercises are all wrong. However, workouts based solely around isolation exercises are to be treated with some skepticism. Working out muscles independantly from each other has some benefits and many drawbacks and if you don’t include at least some full-body components to your routine, it can even be a health issue…

Worst Muscle Building Tips

• “Ultimate Exercise”
  Any guide, routine or program that focuses on one particular exercise or one particular machine is getting it wrong. To avoid plateauing with your progress, switching up routines and exercises from time to time is essential. Even the best exercise in the world will become ineffective if you never do anything else.
  -
• Supplement-Focused Advice
  Yes, there are a few supplements that can really aid you in building muscle mass. Most of the supplements are, however, nothing but money-makers for the producers. More importantly, no pill or shake in the world will do the hard work for you. You can become muscular without any supplements at all, but you’ll never get muscular without the right workout and nutrition, no matter what supplements you gobble down. Any advice that strongly advertises particular supplements belongs in the bin.
  -
• Local Fat-Burning
  This must be the worst one of them all: So much fitness-equipment is sold on the premise that it can help you burn fat in specific areas of your body, it boggles the mind. No matter how many crunches you do, it will never help burn more belly fat! If you want to burn fat, prepare to change your diet and do some cardio. It’s a long, hard road in most cases, but at least it will get you there.
  -
• High-Volume Training
  This may be a controversial one, but I suggest that high-volume exercises are NOT for “normal people”. Unless you’re a genetic freak, pumped up to your eyeballs with hormones and who-knows-what, doing 5 sets each of 7 exercises for your chest is a very bad idea and no way to build muscle effectively. I know there’s a lot of debate on the point of volume vs. intensity, but no matter which side you’re on, you have to draw the line somewhere, when it comes to volume…
  -
• “Easy” Muscle Growth and “Secret” Body Building Tips
  Look, everyone would like to find some lazy and easy way to build muscle fast and gain muscle mass in no time. It would be awesome if you could go to bed skinny and wake up ripped (like in that first Spiderman movie). And because we’d all like this, it’s being exploited by supplements manufacturers that continually claim to have such amazing secret pills or fitness mags and ”experts” claiming to have unknown but super effective weight training routines for sale (for a reasonable price, of course).

These are just a few good and bad muscle building tips. I’ll be expanding the article in the future, as I come across more advice.

Comment below and let me know about best and worst muscle building tips!

Because it’s such an important product, I dedicated a separate page to it. It’s linked in the top menu bar and you can check it out by clicking here.

Let me know what you think of this review!

Particuarly for men, it can seem like a real curse when they have difficulties putting on weight. Of course, that extra weight should be mostly muscle mass and not just fat, and that makes the problem even more complicated.

So, how can a guy put on some lean muscle mass? Let me present you with two options:

How to Gain Weight: The Obvious-but-Still-Important Answer

The first and least surprising answer is, of course: Eat more food!

Well, duh. It may seem totally obvious, but there are two reasons why the above really needs to be emphasized:

1. Many guys who want to put on weight claim that they eat a lot, but in reality, they don’t. On the one hand, increased food intake is something you just need to get used to while on the other hand, many are just afraid of eating too much and ending up with extra belly-flab.
2. Note that I wrote eat more food. This is an important point. We’re not talking about french fries and sundae, here. We’re talking about actual, real food. You know, the stuff that doesn’t go through a dozen factories before you eat it.
   For gaining muscle mass, eating real food as opposed to junk-food is absolutely essential. You need to give your body something to work with!

Essentially, to gain weight in muscle mass but not put on a lot of excess fat, you want to be sticking to only the best foods, but you want to be absolutely stuffing yourself with those foods. Vegetables, legumes, brown rice, lean meat: go crazy on that stuff!

Eating a lot of natural, unprocessed food vs. eating loads of junk-food is the difference between gaining healthy, solid weight and just turning flabby and sick. Don’t underestimate the importance of this.

The second thing to consider is this: Train less.

I see way too many guys work out like crazy and barely eat enough to cover their calorie expenditure. Result: Perpetual skinniness…

If you want to put on some weight, consider ramping up your food intake and reducing cardio to a minimum, while keeping the weight training down to two or three sessions (max!) per week.

I know this can be really scary, but that’s often just a result of bad conditioning. Many guys start out training relatively lightly and they see minimal gains. Motivated, they want more, so the start training more. But this does not lead to faster results. So they ramp up the training frequency even more… still no results. So, you’re in a state where you’re training really hard, but you still can’t seem to gain weight. Surely, if you trained less, you’d lose what little muscle you’ve gained so far!

Fortunately, this isn’t the case. More skinny guys over-train than under-train. Add a few more rest-days to your routine and you won’t only feel better, you’ll also likely gain more weight.

How to Gain Weight with GOMAD/LOMAD

GOMAD? What the heck is that?

GOMAD is an acronym for “Gallon of Milk a Day” and LOMAD is the metric equivalent: “Liter of Milk a Day”. It’s a very simple system for putting on weight and it’s no more complicated than what the name implies: every day, drink one liter/one gallon of milk.

Keep the rest of your diet the same and you’re likely to see some dramatic weight increase. Seriously, I know it sounds crazy, but give this a try. GOMAD can work wonders even for the hardest among hard-gainers.

No need for expensive “weight-gainer” shakes and powders, by the way. Just plain milk is awesome because it’s:

• Protein rich
• Carb rich
• Natural
• Affordable

It seems deceptively simple, but don’t kick it till you’ve tried it. Sidenote: GOMAD is a temporary thing. It will help you gain weight fast and once you’ve reached the target weight, you can reduce or completely remove the milk intake from your diet.

Conclusion

What it comes down to is not being afraid of putting on some fatty weight. You probably won’t be able to build 100%, shredded steel muscles and often, the only way to gain muscle mass is to also allow for a bit of fat to build up.

You can always cut that back down with some intense cardio, once you’ve reached your target weight.

The report is titled “Insane Muscle Gain” and it covers the 20 biggest, most frequently made mistakes in workout and exercise methods and techniques. It’s a pretty quick and entertaining read and I learnt a lot of thinks I’d never heard of before. He opens some interesting perspectives and gives some really great tips.

Since the report is completely free to download, you should definitely go check it out. Just head on over to this page and pop in your name and e-mail in the form at the bottom. You’ll immediately get access to the free report and I’ll be sending you some more cool freebies and special offers, if you want (you can choose to receive e-mail updates or not).

So, head on over to this page and download your muscle gain report right now!

While resistance exercises for your abdominal muscles are only part of the deal, they are of course essential. Traditional crunches and sit-ups will only get you so far and actually, they are not particularly effective exercises. Here are the top three most effective and most “hardcore” ab exercises:

1. Hanging Leg Raise
To perform a hanging leg raise, you need something like a pull-up bar. Something you can grab a hold of and hang off of that is high enough so that your feet don’t touch the ground. Then, slowly raise your legs (keeping them completely straight) as far up as you can. You should lift your legs at least up to your own waist-height, otherwise the rep doesn’t count. Then, slowly lower your legs again. Do both up- and down- motions slowly and smoothly.
This is an exercise that can make grown men cry, if done properly. Well, maybe not quite, but don’t be surprised if you can only do a handful of reps, even if you’re used to being able to do dozens of crunches and sit-ups without any problems.

Bonus tip: If your back is resting against a solid surface, that further increases the intensity of the hanging leg raise.

2. Exercise Ball Crunch
This is basically the same as a regular crunch, but it’s performed with your lower back only supported by an exercise ball. Again, do the motions slowly and smoothly. Because the exercise ball is an unstable surface, all of your core muscles will have to do much more work than if you were doing crunches on a solid surface.

3. Cable Crunch
Once again, the motion is identical to what you do when you are performing regular crunches. However, for the cable crunch, you need a cable machine. You grab onto a handle (use low weights to start out) and position yourself so that you’re lying on your back, with the handle behind your head, holding it in both hands. Now, you perform slow, steady crunches with the added resistance provided by the cable machine. Cables are a great way to add resistance to crunches as they provide full resistance for the full range of motion, but still give you a lot of free motion, almost like training with free weights.

For any and all abdominal exercises, always make sure to keep your lower layer of core muscles in tension. Tuck in your belly without raising your chest. That’s the base tension you should have in your core, before you start doing the first crunch.

With the three exercises above, your path to a six-pack will be shorter (albeit harder, but that’s kind of a given, with weight-training).

Here are two videos detailing how to properly execute Deadlifts and Squats.

Video 1: The Deadlift

Note how he keeps a very straight back throughout the upward and downward motion. This is extremely important. As soon as you no longer have the strength in your lower back to keep your spine straight, stop the exercise and take a break.

Video 2: The Squat

In this video, you see a demonstration of both the bodyweight-Squat (no additional weights) and the barbell Squat.

Even though you probably hate them, make sure to add these to invaluable exercises to your routine!

In other words: Do sit-ups and you’ll burn your belly-fat.

I’m sorry, but that’s complete BS. There’s no way to target specific areas on your body for fat-burning. Fat on top of stressed muscle tissue does not melt away more quickly than anywhere else.

The only way to get rid of belly-fat (or any fat) is to ramp up your energy consumption, ramp up your metabolism and stop eating junk-food.

The best way to do this is to do HIIT instead of the typical cardio exercises. It’s quicker and more effective. Unfortuntely, it’s super-tough, so you’ll have to grit your teeth a bit, to get through training sessions.

I’m going to write some more about HIIT in future posts. For now, just remember that steady-state cardio is not the only and not even the best way to lose your stomach.

On this site, you’ll find a whole range of articles, tips and advice on how to get ripped, how to gain muscle mass quickly, how to lose fat and excavate that six-pack of yours and you’ll also find motivational tips as well as workout plans and routines.

In short, on this site you’ll learn everything you need to know to go from skinny to ripped and finally build that dream body of yours!