How to Build Muscle, Skinny or Not!

Too Much Cardio

Cardiovascular workouts are designed to chew up calories and if done right burn fat as well. This is fine if you are big already and looking to start cutting for a mroe defined figure but if you are weak then it does nothing to build muscles.

Limit yourself to warm up and warm downs for cardio, the rest should all be on your muscle groups and weight lifting exercises.

Not Eating Enough

The body requires a lot of energy from food to just do the regular things in life. Work, rest play and all the internal important things like digestion and fighting infections and disease and so on.

Building muscles requires some of this energy to repair and grow muscles but if you do no increase your calorie intake your maintenance level of calories will all be gone with nothing left but a wasted workout and sore muscles.

When aiming to build muscles you must calculate your resting metabolism rate and then increase that. For those that have plateaued remember your baseline calorie consumption will need to go up to feed the new muscles you have already grown.

Not Enough Rest

This is an all too common mistake. In a busy life we work, socialize and tend to the everyday needs of our household and life. When you start adding in a new eating regime and time at the gym some people choose to sacrifice good sleep and rest time over other activities and then wonder why they do not build more muscle.

The reason is that you actually BUILD muscles when you sleep not when you workout. Working out stresses the muscles but sleep is when the body goes into hyper drive on the muscle repair and growth. Good deep sleep also releases growth hormones that aid this well.

Make sure you sacrifice other things not your sleep time to build muscles or you will just waste your time and money looking for a quick fix. Everything worth doing takes some sacrifice.

No Progressive Overload

This means that as you train your body you to not increase the stresses placed on it and so stop the cycle of muscle building. If you were lifting a certain weight 3 weeks ago and you are still lifting at that weight then you will never get stronger!

You must always lift to your maximum ability during your training to fully stress those muscles so they grow and you become stronger. However you must then cut down your recovery period or increase the weight or do something that stresses the muscles and body even more.

You can never be satisfied with what you are doing and must always aim higher over time. The idea is to get progress as it is the only easy way to track your increases in strength and muscle.

By correcting some of these mistakes and more you can start to see some more progress on adding meat to your frame.

However if you are not satisfied with a slow increase in muscle mass then you need to know how to build muscle, skinny or not so skinny, with the most optimal training regime.

This means you need to be as efficient as you can with every part of body building such as:

• Diet & Nutrition
  
• Exercise & Weight Lifting
  
• Motivation & Understanding
  
• Rest & Recovery

For more information on all these things and more click below for more information.