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Bodybuilding
Program Basics
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Training
for Competition
Bodybuilding
training made Easy!
by Aaron Anderton
This free information will save you time and money
in designing a bodybuilding weight lifting program for
yourself. Some of you may be asking yourselves, "What's
the difference between training for bodybuilding and
training for anything else?" The answer to that
is pretty simple, but very few people can put their
finger on it.
When you are training to increase muscle mass as your
main goal, the difference is in how you lift the weight.
More specifically, it is not enough to just move the
weight through the range of motion, rather, you must
flex the muscle throughout the movement. Additionally,
it is important to maintain that tension for around
45 seconds.
Let's use the bench press to illustrate my point. Most
people lower the weight under control, and simply push
the weight back up. To stimulate your muscles to grow
as quickly as possible, you need to keep tension on
them by flexing through the entire movement. Momentum
is your enemy in bodybuilding! It is not good enough
to do one repetition like this, you need to do it for
8 to 12 repetitions, or 45 seconds per set.
While it is true that lifting heavy weights explosively
will increase your muscle mass, and lifting with constant
tension as I have described above will increase your
strength, if you want to maximize the training effect,
you need to train specifically for your goal. That is
to say that if you want maximum muscle mass, you should
train with constant tension.
There is nothing wrong with strength, but if that is
your main goal, you will want to maximize that by training
specifically for it. You can learn all about training
for strength on my <font color=red>Powerlifting</font>
and <font color=red>Strongman</font> pages.
Now, back to training for maximum muscle mass. We want
to maximize the volume of work that your muscles are
doing in a set period of time. Generally speaking, your
workout should last no more than 45 minutes for weight
training. This is because your natural testosterone
levels will drop after about 45 minutes of intense training.
You definitely do not want your testosterone levels
to drop if you want your muscles to grow. Now that we
have discussed length of training, let's look and rest
between sets.
We want to keep our rest between sets no shorter than
60 seconds and no longer than 3 minutes. Spend the majority
of your workouts with rest periods of about 2 minutes
between sets and you will be on the right track. The
reasons for this are that you can squeeze more work
into that 45 minute workout, and that using the lactic
acid energy system (which is how your body handles intense
work with rest periods like this) encourages more muscle
growth than if you rested longer between sets.
Probably most importantly, you must focus your time
and energy on basic, multi-joint exercises that work
the most muscle at one time. By doing this, you will
stimulate your entire body to grow. When training like
this, you also need to limit the exercises that do not
work large muscle groups (isolation exercises). If you
work as hard as you should be on the basic exercises,
you will need all the recovery ability you have, and
isolation exercises will only detract from that with
no added benefit.
Those are the basics of bodybuilding training for maximum
muscle mass. For more detailed training information
visit <font color=red>www.nlpbodybuilding.com</font>
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Aaron Anderton
No Limits Physique
About the Author
Aaron is has won State Championships in Powerlifting
and Strongman. He finished 9th out of 43 at the National
Strongman Championships at the GNC Show of Strength
in 2004. Aaron began in Bodybuilding and competed in
the early 1990's. His passion is in weight training
and he writes articles about all aspects of that.
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