Call it whatever you like: Muscle Building, Strength Training, Resistance Training, Weight Training or any other name. It builds the foundation for power, strength, muscle endurance and bulk for a lot of activities. In either form or for any purpose they do make your life much better giving you more confidence and an elevated self esteem. However, some activities are more specialized with a definite objective – be it sports or competition. Here are a few of those definite objectives.
Muscle Building Niches – Identify Where You Want To Fit In!
Bodybuilding:
Bodybuilding specializes in muscular definition and body shaping, and it is mainly for competition purposes. Most of the trainers involved in it utilize Hypertrophy programs where the main focus is on muscle size instead of muscle strength or flexibility.
Sport-specific:
These kind of programs utilize exercises that support and enhance, the muscular actions and joints of the sport. The main consideration out here is that the workout program so designed should be according to the needs of the sports. For sports where muscle flexibility and reflexes are an important part, building muscle size can lead to undesired problems. Swimmers often make use of exercise that simulate their swimming motions or enhance the muscles involved in swimming like shoulders, back and arms muscles.
Fat loss and General Fitness:
These kind of programs includes exercises that help in reducing body fat. At the same time the focus is to burn as much as possible of that fat into muscles, providing you an all round physique development.
Power Lifting:
Power-lifting requires only three lifts, the squat, bench press and dead-lift. The main focus in power-lifting is strength. Technique plays an important role in these kind of competitions and is deeply researched subject.
Olympic Weightlifting:
It is a specialty weightlifting sport that mainly utilizes two exercises, the the snatch and clean and jerk. Each lift is highly technical and specialized. This sport requires a lot of training and practice.
Muscle Building: Weight Training Frequency & How To Avoid Over-Training
Your training frequency and volume is directly dependent on your experience, goals, fitness, age, health and other factors such as training in gym or home, time devoted, commitment. A perfect bodybuilding program should be designed considering all the above factors. If you are having a personal coach or trainer be open to him about these issues and get your program designed accordingly.
On average for beginners, training up to three times a week is a sweet spot for optimum progression. Twice per week also suits a lot of people especially those who can’t take frequent breaks from work.. For beginners the advice is that there should be a gap of at least up to forty-eight hours for the muscles to recover and recuperate. For experienced or advanced level bodybuilders and trainers, training for six days a week is not uncommon. However most advanced level trainers too prefer split systems, training different muscle groups (isolation exercises) on different days. If your fitness schedule seems to exhaust you or you are experiencing problems you should better take some professional help.
The fine balance in muscle building is the balance between muscle and nervous system stimulation, adaptation and the recovery process. It may be too much intensity or volume or too frequent workouts, anything that leads to over-training can completely destroy your progress.
Here are some signs of over-training:
- Ongoing fatigue
- Poor performance
- Weight Loss
- Infections
- Hormonal imbalance
- Cessation
- Poor sleeping
- Bone density loss
- Disturbed eating patterns
- Musculoskeletal Injury
Muscle Building: Advantages & Disadvantages Of Working Out In A Gym
Sometimes deciding out whether a gym membership would be appropriate for you or not can become a really big excuse for staying away from muscle building. People spend up a big deal of their time in just deciding over it without actually taking up any action. This is just a step forward to kick start the process by providing some advantages and disadvantages of a gym membership.
Advantages of Joining a Gym
- Supervision: Most of the good gyms employ trainers. These trainers are usually available free to gym members. They are their for checking safety aspects of exercise form and consultation.
- Equipment: Look for a gym that is well equipped. This does not means you should go for a gym that has the max number of fancy machines and burn out your pocket. If you are following a workout program than look for a gym that has all the equipment that you might need. If you are not really sure consult some friend or gym owners and choose accordingly. You may need only a few basic set of equipment to start with. Don’t be over impressed by fancy machines that you are not going to touch any time soon.
- Commitment: Probably one of the biggest advantage of a gym membership is the fact that it is binding. Since you have already spent some money it means you are going to feel the urge to go there and get the worth of your money. Remember anything free is undervalued. Same goes with gym memberships, at home based gym there is no such commitment or time urgency. With a gym membership you just have a few hours per month to make sure you can take out value of the money you have spent.
- Amenities: Most of the gym are today ready to accommodate for your needs. So, there are ‘women only’ gyms or gyms that cater to the needs of busy people by providing them access to separate exercise machines. Check out for this before you pay your gym fees.
Disadvantages of Joining a Gym
- Joining Fees: Yes, paying dollars for membership and binding upon a monthly liability sucks, but remember most good things out there are not free and a good physique at any price is cheap. Don’t burn out your pocket though. Try to find something that you can adjust.
- Adjustments: It may not be easy to find a gym of your choice in nearby locality. Your neighborhood gym may be overcrowded or too expenses. You may have to adjust your work schedule as per the allotted time or make adjustment for travelling a longer distance.
- Gym Ambience: You can find all sorts of people in gym. People who are their more to show off then for actual workouts. People with poor habits or poor who like to talk more as compared to exercising. Whatever it is, don’t let any of these kind of feeling stop you from going to gym. You can avoid the kind of people you don’t want to meet and move on.
Muscle Building: Advantages & Disadvantages Of A Home Gym
Starting in a home gym is the preferred way for most people. Infact most of the popular online bodybuilders started the same way with some basic weights and equipments. Not only it saves money and time but can also provides convenience. They are quite popular these days and a large number of equipment manufacturers cater to the demans of people who want to have a gym at home.
Advantages Of A Home Gym
- Travel: No travelling headaches. This definitely reduces a lot of stress as well as helps you start your workouts with a fresh body and mind.
- Convenience: Nothing beats home gyms when it comes to matter of convenience. You can simply do it anytime or anyday as per your personal choice. Most gyms are quite strict about their timings. But in a home gym you can jump in the middle of night, before work, after work or just about anytime.
- Family: Why just to have your own personal fitness level improved. Help your family jump in the same fitness stride. Workout with your partner or kids. Have your pet watch you while you are doing the workouts. Its all fun and yeh will definitely improve your family ambience too.
Disadvantages Of A Home Gym
- Easy To Make Excuses: Home gyms are not meant for you if you are not strong on your personal commitments. On the other hand a gym membershpi puts you under social commitment as well as monetary pressure to be more regular with your workouts.
- Statstics are against home gyms: Some evaluations show that home-based gym work is not as effective as supervised training for diseases such as diabetes or hip operation recovery, particularly for older people; for example a hospital rehab center compared to a home-based program.
- Too convenient: Sometimes a training venue works better away from the dwelling place. Exercising in a different environment seems to provide the stimulation often required to follow through with exercise programs. Moreover at home it is easy to procrastinate or just waste out your time in doing frivolous activities instead of exercising. Also, you got to maintain your home gym too, which can be time taking.