Strength and Fitness Tips | How to Build Muscle Top muscle building and fat loss tips.

A series of factors affect how fast a person can build up muscle, in areas such as age, gender, time training and genetics. The first thing I am going to cover is the time training and why this might be the reason you are experiencing amazing gains or slightly reduced ones. When you first start bodybuilding you will be completely changing your lifestyle. It’s likely you will cut out foods that are detrimental to muscle growth, eat more that promote it, train in the gym 5 times a week and put stress on your body that it has never experienced before. Well at least in theory that is what you are supposed to be doing. This can cause many people to gain muscle mass at a phenomenal rate. I will not go into extreme detail but your body reacts by producing excesses of hormones such as testosterone, growth hormone etc ... Read More »

In this article I am going to go over all the reported side effects of creatine and give my personal views towards the use of creatine. It’s important to consider both documented research results as well as anecdotal results due to the unique responses we all have to different chemicals. I have already written a post on ‘what does creatine do‘ which you should check out if you don’t know how creatine works. Creatine Side Effects Creatine is a very well researched substance, and there has yet to be a paper reporting creatine to be the sole cause of any sort of problem. Research involves looking at how creatine affects athletes performance in sports that are anaerobic or aerobic based. Many research trials have also been conducted into the affect supplemented creatine has on the kidneys and liver. It’s worth noting that 85% of users taking creatine reported substantial strength ... Read More »

Insulin and Bodybuilding – Isn’t Insulin a drug to treat Diabetics?   Before I started hitting the gym and reading up on how to put on muscle I thought that Insulin was used to treat high blood sugar levels in diabetics, little did I know about how it’s affects work wonders for muscle growth. In every healthy human insulin is produced in the pancreas, and it is produced on demand in order to regulate blood sugar levels. High blood sugar causes dehydration and loss of nutrients through urine. If all your energy is in your blood you will feel weak, lose weight and will have varied water retention throughout different parts of your body. All of these things are signs of being diabetic and obviously things to look out for. Insulin combats high blood sugar by channeling the sugars into the muscle where they can be used for energy and ... Read More »

‘Bulking‘ is an ambiguous phrase thrown around the gym. Some people perceive it to be putting on as much mass as physically possible by eating whatever they can get their hands on. It’s also mainly of a concern to the ectomorph (skinny people) when beginning their training routines. If you are a endomorph then you will have little interest of gaining even more fat! Bulking is it for me? The idea of a bulk is ensuring that your body has the optimum environment for building new muscle. If you have a very low body fat percentage, something around 6% then putting on pure muscle is going to be a slow process if your bodyfat remains constant. The body at this point is much more inclined to put on fat as it’s more useful in storing energy, boosting immune system, keeping you warm etc etc. This is where the idea of a ... Read More »

Is doing weights at too young an age bad for you? For the Youngsters on Strength and Fitnesstips. I as a teenager always wanted to be stronger, bigger and lift weights. It would have really helped to be bigger, faster and stronger than everyone else when I was playing rugby. There was a lot of skepticism about wether it’s advisable for youngsters to lift weights while they are still developing. There is not question about it that squats and dead lifts will put a lot of pressure on your back and joints. When you are developing your bones are ligaments are not as strong and you will be much more prone to injury. It’s therefore a bad idea to start doing heavy dead lifts and squats under the age of 16. I do not agree with the fact that it’s completely unadvisable to do any weights when your growing up, ... Read More »

You might be aware that in a lot of gyms including my own there is sometimes a lack of people doing squats and a surplus of people doing arms. Every now and then someone will do some heavy squats but it’s not that normal. It’s more usual to see people doing bicep curls, to get pump before going out on the town or going to the park. This may go against any inquisitive nature but working out your legs through squats and deadlifts will be better in the long run for building big arms than bicep curls themselves. You might think I am making no sense but I will explain the process to you now. Doing squats is not just a leg workout, it’s puts your entire body under stress, working the lower back shoulders and lots of core. Studies have also shown that heavy squats promote the release of ... Read More »

What does creatine do – Background Creatine is a naturally occurring nitrogenous organic compound that is used by the body to supply cells with energy, by increasing the formation of ATP. Creatine is produced by the liver and kidneys from three amino acids, L – arginine, L – glycine and L – methionine. The majority of it, 95% is stored in your muscles with the remaining 5% being stored in the brain. The source of these amino acids is principally animal protein, it’s a misconception to think that steak contains creatine it will do however it’s destroyed on heating. Red meats such as steak contain the amino acids needed for you body to produce creatine, not the creatine itself. When taken in a supplement creatine is usual in the form of creatine monohydrate. What does creatine do – How does creatine work? Creatine is stored in the muscles is in ... Read More »

Fitness and Vitamins If you have embarked or are embarking upon a fitness regime, you have to ensure you still follow basic principals. I’m sure as a child you were told to eat your vegetables and fruits because they contained vitamins which made you strong and healthy. Well your parents weren’t lying. You should still be doing this because you need vitamins as much as you need air, they catalyse and facilitate thousands of metabolic reactions. Almost every energy production or muscle growth process is reliant on a vitamin. Being deficient in any one of  them is going to seriously impede your progress. So Which vitamins should I take? You should be getting all of them from your varied diet consisting of fruit, vegetables, meats etc. You can also take a multi vitamin tablet to boost any of the ones your diet may not be providing you with. What do ... Read More »

Hey guys, over the past year and a bit of training I have heard mixed views on the effect of cardiovascular exercise when trying to gain weight. Some people say cut it out completely others say it’s vital, this obviously means that different people experience different results, as with all things in life. I therefore tried all sorts of different training types, until I found something that worked for me. As you may know I am naturally slender so it doesn’t really seem to make much sense to do much cardio as I am trying to gain weight.  This couldn’t be further from the case, I trained for 2 months without cardio and found I ended up gaining weight slower and built more fat than I wanted.  When I trained with 15mins of cardio before a session and 20mins after I found I put on lean muscle so much faster. ... Read More »

Hey guys, so you are looking for some high calorie foods and meals that contain virtually no dead calories. What are dead calories? Well I define dead calories as something that is high in energy but has very little nutritional value. For instance a cheesecake is very high in calories yet it has almost no useful nutritional value, all the calories are in the form of sugars and saturated fats. So what are you looking for? You need to find foods and meals that have a good balance of each nutrient. A good guide is 40% Protein 40% Carbohydrate (of which 30% is complex) and 20% fats. You should also be getting a good portion of vegetables in with each meal, as your Mum probably once said, ‘eat your greens!’ So here are some examples: Pasta based meals Pasta is an excellent source of complex carbohydrates, typically in 100g of ... Read More »