Weight Gain Tips - Part 2

Once you have made up your mind that you are to gain weight and build muscle, one of the major problems that you are likely to face is the ridicule of people around you and the meaningless advice from those in the gym.

While you may easily ignore what your co-workers or acquaintances say about your weight gain plan, it may be difficult to ignore advice from a person who has been training for long.

Stick to Your Plan

Whatever weight gain and muscle building knowledge you need should be acquired before you actually venture out to accomplish your goal.

Take your time and collect information from multiple sources. Clarify any doubts that you may be having. In the process, if need be, consult an expert or login on a reliable website. Internalize the information. Set a goal based on all that you have learned and prepare a plan to accomplish it. Once you have done that, nothing should deter you from your chosen path.

There will be times when your dreams of gaining weight will get the better of your reasoning even when you are seeing visible improvement. Everybody in the gym thinks he/she is an expert. What you need to keep in mind is that each person needs a customized training program prepared after considering his or her body composition and tolerance levels.

Moreover, do not judge a person on the basis of his or her looks. A huge body frame does not necessarily mean that the person can give good advice.

Many people have a large body frame just because they happen to be born to parents with similar body shapes. No matter how they train and what they eat, they are still able to gain muscle. However, you need to stick to the right way of building muscle.

Workout Planning

Skinny people tend to get obsessed with workouts as there is a general belief that the more you train, the bigger you get. It is myth that refuses to go away simply because it suggests more action.

When you join a fitness program, or for that matter any program, you are naturally enthusiastic about it and want action, i.e. the more the better.

Muscle building is different. More training or overtraining is actually harmful. Training involves taking a muscle group right up to the point of failure, i.e. the point from where you are unable to complete the next rep. You are basically causing damage to your muscle, and you must allow time for it to recover.

Unless you provide your muscles adequate rest time, you will not be able to build new muscle. The point is that you go to a gym to damage your muscles. The repair work is done outside the gym when you are resting.

In addition, people who are naturally thin usually have a faster than normal metabolic rate. They have difficulty in gaining muscle. This means that they require less training and more rest.

Choice of Exercises

The time you spend in the gym is not important. What is more important is how you train. For gaining weight, you need to focus on a combination or multi joint exercises. Single joint exercises have occasional benefits and are recommended only in specific cases.

Intense training comprising of multi joint exercises stress nearly every muscle in the body. The increased stress that accompanies multi joint exercises stimulates your nervous system to release muscle building anabolic hormones, thus leading to overall muscle gain.

Do Not Rely on Machines

Let us not consider this as a modern vs. traditional debate. Machines are actually less effective, as they do not provide the resistance necessary for building muscle.

Also, machines do not allow the some of the movements essential for building muscle because some of the work that you should be doing is actually being done by the machine.

Machines restrict you to a fixed line of motion and also stabilize the weight for you. Free weights allow you to follow the body’s natural line of motion, and you stabilize the weight yourself.

Another inherent drawback of machines is that when you are relying on machines, you tend to ignore the muscles that stabilize. Prolonged reliance on machines also increases susceptibility to injury.

When you are doing a front squat with free weights, your muscular system must provide significant stability to your body. The machine stabilizes your body when you do the same exercise on a machine, thus denying you the full benefit of the exercise.

Challenge Your Tolerance

If you want to build muscle mass, you have to bring your muscles to the point of failure. This can be done by doing more reps with a lighter weight or fewer reps with heavier weights. The right way is to lift heavier weights even if it amounts to a lesser number of repetitions.

You already have a difficult time in gaining weight because of your thin body composition, and by lifting lighter weights, you are only making things more difficult for yourself. The idea is to challenge your tolerance levels progressively to a point where you are not able to do the next rep.

Every exercise has a start, halfway, and back to start positions. Consider these as the positive, midpoint, and negative periods. In lying leg thrusts, for example, the start or positive period is when you lift your legs, the halfway or midpoint period is when your legs are all the way up, and the negative period is when you go back to the start position. ...

... Once you have pushed the legs all the way up, do not pull them down with the same speed that you pushed them up. Slowing down the negative period stimulates the maximum number of muscles and activates all muscle fibers.

Intense but Short Workouts

The best muscle building is done with intense but short workouts. Your focus should be to stimulate your muscles in as short a time as you possibly can and then get out of the gym.

You need not work on every part of your body in the initial stages of your fitness program; leave that for when you have developed a good physique. You can then try to attack every angle and work on as many muscles you want to. Till then, go easy and let things take shape first.

There is no need to do more than 2-3 exercises per body part. Long training sessions are actually counterproductive as they are instrumental in the release of catabolic hormones responsible for destructive metabolism.

Examples of catabolic processes include the breakdown of muscle protein to use amino acids, which eventually leads to muscle loss. In addition, long training sessions result in the suppression of anabolic hormones, which are responsible for constructive metabolism.

Cardio and Aerobic Exercises

The primary reason why aerobic exercises are recommended is for burning calories. Now, it is a fact that most people who want to build muscle or lose weight are obsessed with calorie counting.

Since they find it difficult to control calorie intake, they tend to focus on aerobic exercises by believing that no matter how many calories they consume, they will burn them in the gym. The reality is that aerobic exercises do not work to build muscle if you are consuming a high calorie diet. The right way is to limit your calorie intake.

However, there is no harm in cardio and aerobic exercises as long as you keep them to the minimum and do not overdo it. If you want to gain weight and build muscle, treat cardio exercises as warm up routines before you get down to serious weight training.

Program Selection

As mentioned before, choose a muscle building or weight gain program after proper deliberation and then stick to it. The problem with people wanting to build muscle is that they get carried away and tend to get enthusiastic about any new muscle building program that appears on the scene.

Program hopping will not do you any good. Do not let your enthusiasm get the better of you because, as they say, a rolling stone gathers no moss.

Shifting to a new program every time you hear of a new ‘hot’ workout never gives positive results. Follow the program that you choose after proper consideration to achievement of your goal and it will give you good results.

Some programs not only look good, but they actually are. You will get enough opportunities to try them once you have achieved your current goal.

Back to Weight Gaining Tips - Part 1.