The Prepared Pantry - The Key To Building Muscle

So you want to build muscle, right? Not only do you want to build muscle but you want to build it fast. Let's step inside your home for a minute. Pretend I'm the pantry police and I'm here to do a raid. What would I find? Would I find all the key muscle building ingredients you need to pack on solid lean weight or would I find a bunch of empty calorie foods that do nothing but prevent you from reaching your goal?

If you're trying to gain weight, the good kind of weight - solid lean mass- having a prepared pantry can mean the difference between victory and failure. Let's step back inside your home again. If you open your refrigerator, will you find flat soda and a jar of mayo or will you find live organic produce exploding with enzymes, vitamins and minerals? What if you open your cupboard? Will you find unprocessed, whole grains rich in nutrients or will you find highly processed, diluted, refined products with a bunch of sugar and high fructose corn syrup?

So do you believe every rep and every set is important to gaining muscle? You're right, they are important, but what about, every bite and every meal? Do you believe they are equally important? Yes, they are! If your body is so busy digesting and processing all the garbage you're putting into it, it can't possibly have enough enzymes left to digest all the proper food components you're consuming to build muscle.

So what do you do with all this STUFF that your body doesn't need? Throw it out! Do you think a runner will win a marathon if they did not eat adequate nutrition prior the run? Absolutely not, so why do you think that a body builder doesn't need adequate nutrition to perform like an athlete?

Half the battle to growing muscle and growing it fast is to be well prepared with the proper nutrition immediately ready and available for consumption. A bunch of frozen chicken breasts and raw potatoes aren't going to help you out either when you're hungry. An easy source of live and immediately available protein is hemp protein. All you have to do is add water or juice and BAM! you've got a power packed punch of nutrition.

Keep raw almond butter, fruits and veggies on hand read for immediate consumption. Having all the wrong foods immediately available are only going to result in poor food choices slowing your muscle gains down. Think about that one for a minute. Do you think you would be reading this article if the title was "Sure Fire Ways to Slow Your Muscles Gains Down"?

Nothing is more frustrating to me than to see someone call themselves a hard gainer. You know what? They're right, it's awfully "hard to gain" when you're on a diet of burger and fries! It's those last minute decisions that cost you. Your valuable hard training becomes meaningless if you can't provide your body what it needs when it needs it.

So how can you start building muscle and building it fast? The bottom line is that preparation is EVERYTHING. If you leave the house unprepared (since your pantry and refrigerator were unprepared) then you ultimately have to make unprepared decisions about what you consume. Building muscle isn't just about pushing around weights in the gym.

You can work out all year long and if you're not prepared to eat right when and where your body needs it, you can kiss your gains goodbye. I have never heard of anything being built fast without the right product or tool. So get the right products (proper foods) and get the right tools (being prepared) and start building muscle today!

Copyright 2008, Masszymes Inc. All rights reserved.

Rochelle Moreno is a dedicated natural bodybuilder who has built a lot of muscle mass fast using the Freaky Big Naturally Training System. Learn more about build muscle, our cutting edge training program, bodybuilding recipes and much more. Go to http://build-muscle.freakygrowth.com for your FREE Ultimate Bodybuilding Package.

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High Reps Build Muscle Big Time!

If you were to ask a million bodybuilders / weight trainers, or read thousands of "muscle building" articles, or picked up almost every book ever written on the quickest way for natural trainers to gain weight fast (quality weight, of course), 99% of them will tell you that lower repetitions during sets, 10 reps or less, will build more muscle mass than any weight training program that requires you to use higher reps.

This philosophy has been around for decades, and , has lead to the undeniable truth that lower reps are not the best way to build muscle without the use of anabolic steroids. If it were, then why don't we see millions more of "muscle heads" walking around in every day life? There are millions and millions of individuals that are very dedicated to their workouts, yet most have nothing to really show for it. Sure, they may be getting stronger, but they aren't getting bigger in size.....and there's a huge difference between the two.

Unlike what most think and say, the two are not one and the same.

Case in point: According to The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, in a study titled "Muscular adaptations to combinations of high and low intensity resistance exercises", Japanese scientists had trainers separate into two different weight lifting groups:

1) A strength training group

2) A mixed-training group

They had both of them follow your typical workout routine:

* 5 sets per exercise / 3-5 reps per set / 3 minutes rest between sets

The change came in the mixed group. Once they were done, they then went on ahead and did 1 set of 25-30 reps 30 seconds immediately after they were done with the last set. The results were interesting, to say the least.

As reported, not only did the mixed group continue to make in muscle mass while the strength training group had a slight loss in muscle mass. In addition, the mixed training group gained about 5% greater 1-rep max strength than the other group.

Now, not that you should place all of your weight training philosophy faith on one study. But this just adds to all of the real world proof that clearly demonstrates that if you are after pure muscle building or weight gain.....not necessarily pure power or strength, you have to up the amount of reps you perform per set. Higher reps provide a ton of muscle building factors that lower reps don't, such as longer time under tension, lactic acid build up, greater blood pumps, so on and so forth.

Keep all of this in mind the next time you are tempted into only worrying about how much you are lifting instead of for how many times. Always be sure to remember that if you are a naturally skinny individual that strength gaining is not your main goal. Your main focus to gain weight and build muscle. In order to do this, you'll have to structure your weight training routine and calorie eating to be able to accomplish this. I'll say it again, this one factor alone is one of the main reasons millions of weight lifters never reach the physique they work so hard to attain.

The weight training misconceptions don't stop here. If you want to read more articles dealing with the real way to train and eat for muscle building / weight gaining purposes, go here: Fast or Slow Reps To Build Muscle & Gain Weight?

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