If you are a man, chances are at some point you have wanted to increase your strength and muscle mass. This can easily be achieved given the proper training and techniques.
Strength is the foundation of nearly all physique and performance goals. When you are strong, you more easily gain muscle size, lose fat, run faster, hit harder, play longer, and move more living room furniture for your wife.
Here are ten no-questions-asked tips to help you make everything in your life feel just a little bit lighter. The squat, dead lift, bench press, and shoulder press are the best strength-building exercises, period.
The chin-up and row are great moves too, but do not make them the focus of your workout - they can be assistance lifts to complement the bench and shoulder press, keeping your pulling muscles in balance with the pressing ones. Forget all the fad equipment.
The barbell is king, the dumbbell is queen, and everything else is a court jester - it may have its place, but it is not essential. Start your workouts with barbell exercises, such as the "big four," as described above.
Barbells let you load a lot of weight, and lifting heavy is the first step toward getting stronger. Once your heaviest strength exercises are out of the way, you can move on to dumbbell and body-weight training.
Some trainers make their clients lift with a certain rep speed, like three seconds up, one second down. But know this: there's no need to count anything but reps during a set.
Simply focus on raising and lowering your weights in a controlled manner, pausing for a one-second count at the top of the lift. Using an arbitrary tempo can lessen tension on your muscles or force you to use varying amounts of weight, slowing your progress.
The only way to be sure you are getting stronger is if your loads consistently increase. Write down your exercises, sets, reps, and the fate of each workout.
Keep track of your best lifts and the most reps you have done with a certain weight on an exercise. Constantly strive to improve those numbers.
Try to stick to three or four lifts per workout. Keeping your workouts short helps you take advantage of hormonal surges.
When you do too many exercises in a session, at least some of them get done half-done All you need is one main lift per workout (one of the big four), one or two assistance lifts (for keeping the body in balance and further strengthening the muscles that perform the main lift), and then core or specialty work at the end (ab exercises or some forearm or calf moves, depending on your goals).
Doing any more lessens your results. The main reason people plateau and stop gaining strength is that they go too heavy for too long.
Abandon your ego and do your main lifts using ten percent less than the most weight you can lift for the given rep range. Increase the weight each session - but by no more than ten pounds - and stick with the same lifts.
Cardio is a must if you want to be lean and healthy, but long-distance running or cycling increases levels of hormones that break down muscle tissue. To get stronger while getting leaner, do cardio in short, intense bursts.
Go to a moderately steep hill and sprint to the top, then walk back down. When you are ready, sprint again, in your first workout, do only half as many sprints as you think you could.
In your next workout, do two more sprints than you did the first time. Continue adding two sprints to your workouts until you cannot improve anymore.
Whatever you do for one side of the body, you must do for the other side. Follow that rule in your workouts and you should be able to avoid injury and muscle imbalances.
If you are doing squats (mainly a quad exercise), also do Romanian dead lifts (which hit the hamstrings hard). Your chest exercises should be balanced with back-training lifts.
You do not necessarily have to do your balance work in the same session, but it should be done in the same week. In general, follow a ratio of two-to-one between your pulling-and-pushing movements.
So if you bench-press on Monday (and most of the world seems to), you can do chin-ups on Tuesday and bent-over lateral raises on Thursday, for example. Every other pressing exercise you do should follow this formula.
This is the simple way to gain strength and muscles mass for males. See what works for you and start today!
Author Resource:-
Jack R. Landry has been writing about the exercise and health industry for years. He recommends using strength training equipment to stay healthy and fit.
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