Bodybuilding and Nutrition

Nutrition is one if not the most important element in bodybuilding. This is the source for your body?s energy, muscle regeneration and muscle growth that is the purpose of bodybuilding. Without a proper nutrition and diet, a level of performance cannot be reached and the progress will be immaterial.We will now focus on what are some of good bodybuilding nutrition?s basics. Improve your body?s growth and metabolism with frequent but smaller feedings. An increase in metabolism means that your body will burn fat.

Another reason for having more frequent meals a day is the following. If not fed for about four hours straight, the body will start feeding in muscular tissue and believing this is the start of a starvation period, it will start to accumulate calories and fat. This is surely not something you would want when you are trying to become a successful bodybuilder. Letting the body get used to a fixed calorie level, will lead to a plateau and your muscle development and growth will stagnate. What you have to do in order to avoid this situation is cycle the calorie levels for example five days of high levels of calories followed by two with a low calorie level for those seeking muscle growth. If you are looking to burn fat and gain muscle mass at the same time, just do the opposite with five days of low calorie content meals.

What you are aiming for is a very good balance between the necessary nutrients that your body requires. If you find you have a deficit in one area, even out you vitamin and mineral levels with the help of vitamin and food supplements. Also, balance your meals to contain the right amount of carbohydrates, protein and a lower level of fats. There are many ways that you can create your meals to best suit your purpose, but always remember to include these three nutrients or else the results of your program will fail to appear.

bodybuilding, diet, body building | body building interviews

Bodybuilding For Teens

Bodybuilding can be a very healthy and rewarding activity for teenagers for a number of reasons aside from the obvious physical benefits. However, due to their youth and the natural changes occurring in their bodies, parents often wonder if the training regimen of a teenager needs to vary drastically from that of an adult?

Most of the dangers relating to teenage bodybuilding actually have more to do with the ?teenage? portion of the equation. No one, other than teenagers, would argue with the fact that teenagers can behave impulsively and can be prone to ignoring the precautions and rules they find themselves faced with. Obviously, this doesn?t apply to all teenagers, but it is something that needs to be taken into consideration.

There has been a longstanding belief that heavy weightlifting can actually stunt the growth of bones. The basis of the belief is that heavy weight lifting can speed up growth plate closure, prematurely stopping the bone growth. This has been suggested, but not proven, but weight lifting at an early age certainly hasn?t stunted the growth of the many professional athletes who started young. However, they may be exceptions to the rule and the jury is technically still out with no definitive proof in either camp.

Regardless, the danger is only really associated with heavy duty lifting and only occurs prior to a teenager reaching full developmental maturity. Though it obviously varies from teenager to teenager, the average age of full developmental maturity is 15 and very few teenagers under that age are pumping heavy iron.

A teenager shouldn?t try to simply emulate the workout routines of the adults that he or she may see at the gym. The odds are that any adult worth emulating in the gym has been training for years and has vast amounts of experience and training, which the teenager is lacking.

While trainers are a good idea for everyone, they are especially important for teenagers. Bad habits in weight training can lead to serious injuries and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission states 12% of the annual accidents involving weightlifting equipment involved children between the ages of 5 and 14, and 35% involved people aged 15 ? 24.

A good trainer will help a teenager develop the proper form, which is critical to avoiding injury. A trainer can also help reign in a teen who, in excitement and immature reasoning, may try to use weights that are simply too heavy.

Another danger for teenagers is the disturbing trend towards supplement overuse. Again, this can attributed to a lack of intellectual maturity and experience, but teenagers seem especially prone to sucking into the mythology that supplements are a magic key to building muscles and looking better.

Despite what they may believe about their own thinking capacity, teenagers are especially receptive to advertisements and magazine hype. The fact that a majority of bodybuilding magazines are owned and published by companies who also produce supplements isn?t widely known. Obviously, these companies are going to use the magazines they produce to push the products they produce?so don?t believe everything you read.

Realistically, teenagers are under no greater risk than adults while working out as long as it is done properly and intelligently. The key to ensuring that it?s done this way is adult supervision and guidance.

Gray Rollins writes for MuscleProgram.com. Learn about teenage bodybuilding by visiting us. Also, check out our muscle building program review

Forced Reps: Disasterous for Natural Bodybuilding

Nobody can rightfully lecture me about training intensity. In the mid-1980s, I endured over thirty weeks of BUD/S Training; the basic regimen one goes through to enter the Navy SEAL Teams. I went through that training?s Hell Week twice ? start to finish. At a tender age, I learned how to push my body well past the pain barrier of muscle fatigue and bodily exhaustion that?s a signal to us that it?s time to quit and take a rest. I could, upon internal command, become an endorphin-releasing, pain-ignoring workout machine? unstoppable!

Our dependability under pressure was augmented by such a regimen, but not our physiques. In other words, we built more character than muscle in BUD/S Training.

Later on when I took up natural bodybuilding, I carried my work ethic and proclivity for intensity over to that endeavor. This resulted in experimentation with every conceivable bodybuilding workout intensifying technique in existence. I?ve used drop sets, pre-exhaustion, up-and-down-the-rack, and the ever ubiquitous forced reps. Name the intensifier ? I?ve tried it. At one time, I even used a derivation of forced reps that was borderline insane. Imagine taking a bench pressing weight with which you can eke out ten repetitions. Now imagine your spotter standing behind the bench and pushing down on the weight for the first few reps as you attempt to push it up. By the time you make it to the second five reps, your spotter has shifted from trying to make the weight heavier for you to trying to help you bring it up on the positive. This effectively gives every rep the intensity of a forced one and will have your spotter inadvertently getting a bent over rowing workout. I don?t recommend that you try these.

In fact, I?m here to dissuade you from engaging in any of this nonsense. If workout intensifying techniques were the key to muscle growth, I would have been freaky huge by the time I was twenty-nine. Instead, I was chucking my weight belt across the room in frustration as I arrived home from the gym each day. I was mad at bodybuilding. Thoughts of quitting plagued my mind. Nowhere was there such a mismatch between effort and reward than in this wacky endeavor or sport.

I remember reading an article that raved about how professional bodybuilder Tom Platz took all of his sets to failure and beyond. My thoughts were ?big deal ? I do this all the time?. It seemed that without the aid of steroids and the genetic predisposition for superhuman recovery, I was destined to build more character than muscle from high intensity practices. I wanted an attention-getting body, yet all I was producing was attention-getting workouts.

It?s this frustration from which I want to save natural trainers. You will waste your time and effort by taking the no-pain/no-gain mantra to its extreme. Much like a member of BUD/S Training, you?ll build plenty of character, but not a nicer body.

You might be asking how I could make such a claim. Yet the answer is revealed when you really ask yourself how well you?re doing with your muscle building progress if you?re a practitioner of forced reps or any other bodybuilding intensifying techniques. Are you making steady and measureable gains? Some words of warning: a ?pump? at the conclusion of your workout is not a sign of gains. The same is true for local muscle fatigue and soreness. As I often tell people: ?A successful workout might be physically taxing ? but this doesn?t mean any physically taxing workout is successful.?

In order for a muscle building workout to be successful, you must move a slightly higher volume of weight than you did during your previous workout. This won?t happen without adequate inter-workout recuperation. And adequate recuperation is next to impossible after muscles have been obliterated due to the erroneous belief that this will somehow equate to more or better growth.

If you?re a natural trainer (or even if you?re a steroid user who wants to make progress between cycles), heed my advice. Don?t waste time and effort discovering what took me years to figure out. Push your bodybuilding workouts with enough intensity to burst through your past volume records. Couple this practice with enough rest and recuperation between workouts to allow a warm expansion and absence of soreness to permeate the tissue.

When you do this, you?ll be well on your way to steady muscle growth. You can then leave the character building to those more devoid and desirous of that than a great physique.

Scott Abbett is the author of HardBody Success: 28 Principles to Create Your Ultimate Body and Shape Your Mind for Incredible Success.

Scott is a certified fitness trainer and a certified Master Practitioner and Trainer of NLP. You can view his own phyical transformation by visiting http://www.hardbodysuccess.com

Bodybuilding - Discipline And Endurance Married Together

Bodybuilding is getting more and more popular as it is a sport that requires both discipline and physical endurance. People involved in bodybuilding either do it as a way of getting in better mental and physical shape. More serious bodybuilder will aim at participating in bodybuilding competitions and are always striving to get to the top level in their category.

When involved in bodybuilding, a person has to watch her diet to ensure she is getting the proper amount of proteins and nutrients to build her muscle mass. A current misconception is that bodybuilders have to avoid carbohydrates. In fact, they eat them to help release energy in a steady stream rather than in spurts.

Carbohydrates are also known to help the body recuperate from the training regiment. Some bodybuilders choose to eat quick digesting sugars after their workouts. It is believed this process helps recover the glycogen in the muscles.

Diet and nutrition are essential elements in bodybuilding. It is recommended to do extensive research in this area or hire a trainer before getting involved in bodybuilding. Nutrition can play a major role and account for a big part of a successful bodybuilding program.

For people involved in competition bodybuilding, their training will be focused on acquiring an overall balanced, strong and healthy body.

Bodybuilding competitions are now judged by a panel who considers way more than just the size of the candidate?s muscles.

In a competition, the total scores of different factors are combined to determine the overall points. The winner at the end of the competition is the one with the most points. Natural bodybuilding gathers people who trained without any use of external supplements. It is much more intense and difficult that traditional bodybuilding. It requires harder workouts and a stricter diet. There are also stricter qualifying guidelines, but the winners as well as competitors in these competitions know they did all the work themselves without any supplements. Natural bodybuilding is gaining in popularity as there is a trend towards more natural training is all sports.

Teen Bodybuilding

Bodybuilding for men has been a competitive sport since the 1800?s. Women started participating in bodybuilding competitions around the mid 1900?s. In recent years, teenagers have demonstrated a growing interest in bodybuilding.

An added benefit to the physical ones is that teenagers involved in a bodybuilding program learn about discipline and good nutrition. They also acquire a lifestyle that will be beneficial for the rest of their life.

For more information now go to:

http://myalpha-power.com/your_physical_health.htm
http://www.yourownhomegym.com/index.html
http://www.yourownhomegym.com/Total-Fitness-Home-Gym.html