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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 ...
25
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 ...
24
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 ...
22
Unless you are already strong, this is the wrong plan. Putting bodybuilding before strength training does not make any sense.
Strength Then Bodybuilding
Virtually everyone in the strength and bodybuilding community agrees: one becomes a bodybuilder by developing a base of strength and mass first, then targeting specific muscles and body-composition work. ...
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 ...
19
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 ...
16
First of all, 20 pullups is quite a feat, good job! I assume you are doing them with proper form: chin over bar on top, elbows locked and body still at the bottom. If you are doing something else, or eg. kipping pullups (basically, using your momentum in any way), the first thing you should do is transition to strict form pullups.
Doing 50 pullups is as ...
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
The full answer is beyond my scope of understanding; however, there is only one time in a trainer's life where they can build muscle and lose fat at the same time. That's when they are a beginner and are currently obese. Based off of information from Dr. Kilgore in "Practical Programming for Strength Training" we have a couple variables for building muscle:...
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
Once And For All Time: Protein Shakes Are Not Magical
We get a lot of protein shake questions. What should I put in it? and when should I drink it? and will my spleen explode if there's ice in it? The mysteries of protein shakes are many, and the science is weak.
Protein Shakes Are Just Protein...In Shake Form
Here's the deal: don't overcomplicate ...
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 are two key concepts to understand when trying to get stronger:
Overload. The disruption of homeostasis, where the body must adapt and hypercompensate in order to handle that demand in the future.
Recovery. The rest, nutrients, and calories your body needs to support hypercompensation.
So yes, you do need to continue to increase weight in order to ...
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
Your best bet is to split it into even doses throughout the day. Your body will make good use of it. Now, if you have some before bed, it won't hurt. Essentially, at night when you sleep, two types of adaptations will happen (assuming you have disrupted homeostasis):
Starting when you hit REM sleep, your testosterone levels will peak and remain at that ...
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 ...
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