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Nutrition tip: Muscle building
Make sure you’re getting enough protein. Protein is an essential building block if you’re wanting to bulk up with lean muscle, but too often we don’t get enough of it in our diets. A good rule of thumb if you’re wanting to grow muscle is to take in 2 grams of protein per kilogram of current body weight. So, if you’re a 60kg guy, make sure that you’re getting at least 120g of good, high-quality protein a day.
If that sounds like a lot of protein to be getting into your system, consider having a good protein shake to supplement your requirements.And, by the way, taking in 4 or 5 grams per kilo of body weight won’t accelerate the process – much more than 2 grams, and you’ll just excrete it out of your body…
Exercise tip: Muscle-building
Do a ‘burn set’ if you’re serious about bulking up. The way that muscle actually grows is by breaking down the individual muscle fibres, and then, when resting the muscle, the fibres re-form and re-build themselves – resulting in overall growth. So the first part of growing your muscles is to break them down, and this is what we do when doing resistance training. Your muscles are made up of tons of little fibres, and when put under stress (like when weight training, for example), they get little tears. These are then repaired through protein synthesis (which comes from a combination of rest and proper nutrition), and the muscle gets stronger and bigger (pretty much like a bone healing after being broken). To get the muscles to tear (obviously without overdoing it, and causing yourself serious injury) the general rule is to work them to fatigue. This is the state where you can no longer lift one more ounce of weight, or do one more rep, for a particular exercise. Most people stop well within their capabilities when weight-training, and are limiting the amount of progress they can make by not working the muscle to fatigue. To get there, do a burn set after you’ve done your last set of an exercise as usual. This is where you take a lighter weight (maybe half of your maximum) and push out as many reps as you can, until you just can’t do any more. It’s called a burn set because you’ll definitely feel the burn! This puts your muscle under just that much extra strain, and could be the difference between being stuck on that plateau, or pushing through to the next level in your routine…
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