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To gain good weight, to bulk, to add muscle, you need to:
Stimulate growth by lifting heavy
Provide fuel for growth by eating a lot
Prioritize your goal by getting your life in order
Most healthy people who do these things gain weight. Mostly muscle.
1. LIFT HEAVY
Tell your body that it needs to get bigger by lifting heavy.
Either buy a barbell and a ...
89
Your goals and your current level of progress determine the number of sets and reps.
Possible Goals
Training for strength, power, endurance and hypertrophy all require a different number of sets and reps:
Strength (how much weight your muscle can move) is best developed by lifting as much weight as possible. This is probably best achieved with 5 or less ...
28
EDIT: Since "fit" is a very arbitrary term, I should include my definition, since the asker did not.
From the starting point of a 50kg man, I consider fit to include
gaining quite a lot of weight, mostly muscle
correcting most, if not all, posture imperfections and muscular imbalances
learning proper form in all exercises, and learning how to utilize ...
26
If you want to gain muscle and strength, then you need to
Eat
Don't buy into the 'hardgainer' non-sense.
Calories In > Calories Expended = Weight Gain
That's the simplest way I can put it. If you eat like a skinny person, you will gain weight like a skinny person (little to none). Proper nutrition is of course next but a little out of scope for this ...
23
A very well thought out question. First, the technical term for holding your breath is called the Valsalva maneuver. In the world of weight lifting it has a distinct purpose: to increase the body's ability to protect the spine under heavy load. The Valsalva maneuver does not work alone. There's a pretty fair treatment of the subject on a Rebock Crossfit ...
21
The row is the exercise that best antagonizes the push-up.
It's an easy conclusion to make just by considering the force vector of the push-up. The direction of force is outward and perpendicular to the body. If you reverse that vector, you have a row.
To clarify further, imagine only the upper arm and the chest when doing a push-up (imagine you just ...
21
What is a "good morning"?
Just to add context, a "good morning" is when you're doing a squat, you go down to the lowest point, but then you extend the knees without maintaining an upright back.
This results in the butt being raised up, but not the chest, so you're just bending forward, with a lot of weight on your neck rather than your shoulders. Then you ...
18
Sure it's possible, but it depends on what you are personally willing to sacrifice.
There are 168 hours in a week. Even if you work 60 hours in a week and sleep 56, that leaves 52 hours of the week available. If you are single without kids, it is plenty of time to get in the workouts needed to shape your physique the way you want.
However, it will require ...
15
While muscle strength and muscle mass do not have a direct one to one relationship, there is definitely a connection between the two. To understand exactly what that connection is, and how big a role it plays, it helps to have a little background on the fundamentals of muscle physiology...
Muscles are composed of connected bundles of muscle fibers, of which ...
15
Hypertrophy is not the same as strength.
We can train differently to attain different results. Some forms of training build mass, others add strength, others improve endurance. A larger muscle is, all other things being equal, stronger than a smaller one. However, a smaller muscle can be more neurologically efficient and/or dense, and therefore be stronger ...
15
Make this website your best friend: http://www.t-nation.com/
Here's a little checklist I wrote for myself.
BULKING: after figuring out calorie needs bump up the number 600-1,000 calories every single day
more calories per bite
add olive oil to everything
big Ziploc bag fill w/ almonds, cashews, raisin, peanuts, M&Ms, snack throughout the day
protein ...
14
I'm afraid that's purely genetic. The only "muscles" in that part of the wrist are the Pronator Quadratus, and they are so small, they'll never get noticably bigger.
If you want thicker wrists, I'm afraid you're going to have to gain a LOT of weight. Fat, specifically.
Also, just to squash your food question; there is no food that is good for growing a ...
14
Bodybuilding is a long term endeavor, two to three weeks is nothing in the world of bodybuilding. If you'd said two to three years, then it would be a different matter.
Whatever you're doing, carry on doing it for at least 6 months, then see where you are with it.
That being said, if you want to gain muscle (which I assume is what you mean by bodybuilding) ...
13
I think we need to distinguish between different goals here.
If muscle mass in general is what you want to maximize, compound exercises help you work as many muscles as possible with a single exercise. This is why they are recommended: Most people want to build all their muscles, not just one or two in particular.
If biceps mass is what you want, and you ...
12
Define waste.
You may or may not gain weight, but there are other considerations at play. Excessive caloric intake will probably cause you to gain weight, plus there are other metabolic considerations from the reduction in exercise that may have an affect as well.
When you have an excessive amount of protein intake, then you start placing a larger burden ...
12
The most important thing with getting people started lifting is to help them to like lifting. The worst thing you can do is to overwhelm them with details. The dirty little secret for newbies is they can do just about anything and make some relatively quick increases (with few exceptions). That means it matter less what they do and more that they do ...
11
There is a big difference in lifting for aesthetics and lifting for strength. While I don't think anyone will argue that lifting with the purpose of becoming stronger is better served by compound movements, people lifting for aesthetic purposes don't necessarily agree.
I think we can all agree that you need an aspect of strength to perform bodybuilding ...
11
Rippetoe & Kilgore describe in Practical Programming why many trainers--particularly strength trainers, and most particularly weightlifting trainers--eschew crunches:
The lower back is supported from the anterior by the abs, and ab work done correctly, protects and assists lumbar stability. "Done correctly" means that the abs are strength-trained, as ...
11
Everything always depends on your goals.
The best exercises are the ones that help you accomplish your goals.
If you are a power lifter, your goals are to get the biggest squat, deadlift, and bench press you can. Obviously, it helps to do those exercises to make them stronger. It does also happen that they are very good exercises for General Physical ...
11
There's actually a number of strength sports, where people who don't compete train similarly to competitors in those sports. A brief understanding of them will help you decide what would be a better match for you:
Bodybuilding is primarily building and shaping your muscle for aesthetics. However, there is a big nutritional component to bodybuilding that's ...
10
I recently stumbled on a great article that talks about protein consumption for the purposes of building muscle (recovery included). It's "The Myth of 1g/lb: Optimal Protein Intake for Bodybuilders". To make a long story short, there was a clinical study to determine how much protein was necessary to build muscle. It is still based on body weight, but the ...
10
Short of getting coached directly, the best tool for the job is taking video. There are a number of digital video recorders that have at least an hour of video available on the device. When you are training by yourself, you want a video recorder that can stable enough for you to stand up and trust that it won't fall over while you are lifting. You may ...
10
I would say it is almost impossible to exactly mantain body size. I would recommend to alternate low workout periods with higher ones (say, 1 month of aerobic and low intensity and low volume weight training and 1 month of higher weight training).
In this way, you would lose a bit of muscle while reducing body fat and re-taking previous muscular condition at ...
10
First of all, know that there is no ONE best way to curl. There are a few factors here to be aware of.
Standing vs. seated
When you curl standing up, it's very important that you try to keep your upper body as static as possible. It's easy to help out with your entire body by swinging the bar, taking focus away from the biceps.
This is, however, its own ...
9
Sorry to disappoint you, but having lots of time is not necessary at all for getting your body in top shape, and it won't contribute to your gains. For better or worse, the program I recommend (based on current scientific research) simply doesn't take very long:
Strength training with standard compound exercises, which are bench press, squat, deadlift and ...
9
It's not a very specific question, it's basically like asking whether it's necessary to wear running shoes to run a marathon.. the answer is no, but it's a lot harder with leather boots, and even harder without shoes. Unless you can't afford the running shoes, or you made some sort of silly bet, there's really no point in going barefoot.
Also, understand ...
9
The deadlift is awesome
I find deadlifts very productive. Since they're a multi-joint, multi-muscle exercise, they promote growth across the entire back and legs. Done heavy, I've found them very efficient at adding muscle. This is partially because I am a novice. It might be different for your situation.
I don't know of many exercises that could be said ...
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