Sunday, October 11, 2009

Tips For Bodybuilders: How To Gain Muscle While Avoiding Fat

By Ricardo d Argence

If you're anything at all like most bodybuilders, your ultimate desire is a simple one: To have an impressive, muscular physique with razor-sharp definition and the envy of everyone around you. You want to be huge, and you want to be shredded.

You want to be huge, and you want to be shredded as well. Because of the strong desire for this "ideal body", most people eagerly dive into their programs headfirst. Everyone is motivated to bulk up, but at the same time are afraid of putting on excess body fat.

To significantly gain muscle - and to add as much of it to your frame in as swift a period of time as possible - there is always the fact that you'll inevitably gain some extra body fat to go with it.

This is just one of the realities of the bodybuilding process. If you're truly committed to bulking up, there's no other way around it: It's a fact you'll have to accept.

In order to increase the amount of muscle gain, you have to consume a large amount of calories in order to support the protein synthesis your body is going through. There is simply no way that every single calorie will go to muscle gain. Some if it will always end up as body fat.

You first goal is for the most dramatic gain in the shortest time. To that end it's always better to focus first on muscle gain over a set period of time, followed by another period of time concentrating on losing the unwanted body fat.

Considering this information, it's clear that the goal of the bulking phase is to gain muscle size, to build up as much as possible while doing what you can to minimize gaining extra body fat. However, it's important to remember that during the bulking phase, your goal is not to lose body fat, merely to gain as little as possible.

This can be accomplished in 3 main ways:

1) Use your caloric surplus wisely. A caloric surplus is when you gain more calories than you burn. This is required for muscle growth, but simply gorging on food without a plan or exercise will simply earn you more body fat.

The general rule of thumb for muscle gain is to take 15-20% more calories than you need to keep your weight. If you are already within this range, there's no need for you to add more.

2) Watch what you eat. You should be concentrating your diet on lean, high quality proteins, high fiber carbohydrates, and unsaturated, healthy fats.

Instead of thoughtlessly eating every food item at hand, be sure that you're primarily keeping to lean protein sources. It's also important to keep your blood sugar levels stable by choosing the right kinds of carbohydrates and avoiding large amounts of saturated fats.

3) Don't forget the cardio. You don't have to go wild, but a good, solid 2 to 3 sessions of cardio workouts during the week will help keep your body on track, and cut back on the body fat.

Stick to exercises of 10-20 minutes of high intensity, as they have less likelihood of muscle loss compared to the longer forms.

Once you've gained an amount of muscle size that you're happy with (and this is totally up to the individual), you can then shift into a fat loss cycle and focus on stripping off body fat while maintaining muscle size.

The trick is to minimize it rather than try to totally avoid it, and you can do this with a reasonable diet and sensible exercise.

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