Have you been having trouble gaining weight and building some real, quality muscle consistently? Or maybe when you first started weight training, did you gain a little muscle and body-weight but then suddenly it came to a stop? If you are not gaining any weight or getting any bigger, then I suggest you take a serious look at your poundage's.

I see so many weight trainers, easy and hardgainers alike go day after day, week after week, and month after month pushing the same weight they were doing last month, and the month before.

They feel satisfied that they had a "good workout" because their muscles are pumped and well exhausted by the end of their workout after doing a bunch of sets of a bunch of different exercises for one muscle group. This is a BIG mistake.

No matter what you've read or heard, getting a good pump has very little to do with muscle growth. All the "pump" means is that there is a temporary increased blood flow in your muscle tissue. Though getting a good pump has a few benefits for building muscle, you certainly shouldn't gauge your workouts by them, especially if you are a hardgainer.

What's a hardgainer? Any naturally skinny body type with a fast metabolism that finds it near impossible to gain weight or build muscle mass no matter what they do.

So if you're looking for the fastest way to build muscle, then you must progressively add weight to your exercises. This is one of the most basic rules in weight training called progressive overload. I don't care who you are, you can't expect to build bigger muscles if you are using the same weight over and over again. You have to get STRONGER if you want to get bigger, and I don't mean increasing the weight once a month. If you want to bulk up as fast as humanly possible, then focus strictly on getting stronger every week. You can't expect to look like the Incredible Hulk if your sister is pushing the same weight you are.

Whenever you finish a heavy workout, your muscle fibers adapt by recruiting more fibers so they can cope with the weight if it is forced to try to handle it again. As a result, your muscles will grow bigger. As soon as your body becomes accustomed to a certain weight, it will no longer grow. It will no longer need to! You must constantly overload it with more weight then it is used to handling.

It is always a safer bet to measure your workouts not by how good of a pump you get, but by your increases in strength. Keep track of exactly how much weight you use for each set on each exercise, how many reps you did, and make it a goal to slightly increase that weight at least every other week.

It doesn't matter if you write it down on a palm pilot or the piece of toilet paper stuck to your shoe when you walk out of the bathroom, as long as you know exactly how much weight you used and how many reps you did your last workout so you can add a little more on the next.

The last thing you want to do is just try to remember how much weight you used, because if you forget then you will put a stop on your progress by either not increasing the weight when you should have or adding too much weight too fast. When this happens often, then over the course of weeks and even months of training you will be wasting a lot of progress and momentum. Can you see how important it is to keep track of your poundage's?

Page 1 of 2 :: First | Last :: Prev | 1 2 | Next