If you are looking to add on some real muscle for power results, I have included three steps below about doing so. These steps will help you build serious strength and power. These are the basics for serious strength training and should not be taken lightly. If you train and eat right, the world and beyond can be yours. With that said, your lifts are what you make of it.

Progressive Overload: When it comes to building strength, this is a pretty much basic principle to follow. This is where you start with a certain resistance or weight that you can handle with good form and slowly increase the weight and resistance over time. As time passes, your strength gradually goes up as you start to increase the load to lift more heavier weight. As an example: If you rep out 200lbs on deadlifts for a set of a set of five, add 5 more pounds each week to gradually lift heavier weight. So if you’re repping out 200 one week, rep out 205 next week, and build up from there. See where I’m getting at? Don’t try to overdo it and add 30-40 pounds each week. By overdoing it and pushing yourself beyond what your joints can handle, you’ll up with more injuries than anything else. Remember, the keyword here is progressive. So just keep that in mind.

Maximizing Body Tension: One of the keys to successful strength building is maximizing tension during your lifts. Your body’s production of tension is the definition of strength. Muscular tension equals force and force equals tension. Maximizing tension during your lifts adds more strength and force. When it comes to body weight training, you might be good at doing 50 pushups, but try doing 5 one arm pushups. It might be less reps, but more tension for your body to output more force. The more force your body creates, the more strength you’ll gain. This is one of the reasons why powerlifters and strongman competitors are so strong. This is the basis of strength training.

Compound Movements: When you want to build muscular power, doing compound exercises is a definite rule for sure. Don’t waste your time with those single isolated lifts like dumbbell curls or tricep extensions. That’s for bodybuilders. Instead of just doing dumbbell curls, try doing pullups instead. Not only do your biceps get worked, but your lats, traps, shoulders are getting worked out as well. By working out multi-joint type exercises, you trigger the natural growth of anabolic hormones and well as stimulate the nervous system.

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Without using high dollar supplements or steroids, one of the best ways to gain weight is the natural way. In many minds today, a lot of people tend to think all you have to do is drink protein powders and weight gainers to build a Greek like body. Some of these supplements might help you gain weight, but that might not be the right kind of weight you’re looking for aka fat. There is a slow and progressive process you have to follow in order to build muscle and gain weight.

Here are some tips to gain weight naturally:

1.) If you’re going to want to start seeing results, you are going to have to start eating healthy. Dieting, oh the gruesome word we tend to loathe with our hearts. Or at least 75% of the overweight Americans do anyway. For most people, it is almost near impossible to eat healthy every single minute. Anyone that tells you don’t have to diet in order to get results you want is lying. It takes hard work and discipline.

2.) Try not to go overboard when you first begin your mass gaining diet. And what I mean by that is don’t jump start your diet 1000 calories above your daily average caloric intake. Slowly build up your calorie intake as each day and week goes by. So if you’re consuming about 2,000 calories a day, bump it up 2200-2300 for the first week or so. Then the next week, bump it up another 200-300 calories. See where I’m going with this? The reason why you don’t want to straight jump into a 4000 calorie diet is your body is going to go into “what the hell” mode and then transform a large amount of those calories into fat.

3.) About every couple weeks or so, you should step on the scale to see how much you weigh. Try to avoid stepping on the scale everyday as this might cause some anxiety issues with some. Trust me, I’ve seen it. If you’re not seeing any increase in weight, revise your caloric intake and increase your calorie consumption. And it’s not all about just the calories either, you have to watch what macro-nutrients you are taking in such as protein, fats, and carbs. Weigh yourself again in about another 2-3 weeks to see if you have made any progress. If you still aren’t seeing any minimal weight gain, revise your diet and continue to increase your macro-nutrients and calories. Repeat this process.

4.) Instead of eating three large meals a day, try to eat 6 proportional meals a day with about 2-3 hours apart if possible. Doing this will help your body metabolize all nutrients and not turn into fat.

5.) This is where the real sweating begins. If your workout routine consists mainly of dumbbell curls, drop the weights now. Literally. In order to gain muscle mass the quickest way possible, you need to include compound exercises that hit large muscle groups all at the same time. By hitting large muscle groups at once, you can spend less time with isolation exercises and more time building muscle mass. The biggest compound exercises you should focus on are deadlifts, bench press, squats, power cleans, and the like.

6.) Last but not least, in order to grow you need to get proper rest. The most muscle growth and recovery you make is while you are sleeping. If you are only getting 3-4 hours of sleep per night, your muscle gains are going to be extremely minimal. So no more late nights on facebook or myspace and hit the bed after a good day’s worth of work.

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The days of the three to four hour, marathon workouts are long gone. At least these kinds of workouts are gone for the bodybuilders who have stayed in touch with the new, more effective cutting edge training philosophies. Workouts of two or more body parts in a single session, while utilizing 15 to 20 sets for each of those body parts, is way out-of-date. Today’s bodybuilders have evolved with the advancements in training methods understand that brief, intense workouts are all that’s necessary for stimulating substantial muscle growth.

A common belief among many people training in the gyms today is that “the more you do the better.” People in general feel as though the more volume of work they can pump out, the better the outcome will be. It’s logical for a person to think this way. Isn’t that how most accomplishments in life work? The more you toil at something, the better you’ll be at it, right?

But when it come to building muscle, this is not true. If you want to generate muscle growth, adopting this mistaken belief will force you to settle for gains that are substandard to what you’re truly capable of accomplishing.

As difficult as it may be for you to grasp this statement right now, you must integrate it into your belief structure if you want to effectively add muscle mass to your physique.

Less is more sometimes!
When done with the right amount of passion and intensity, training the different muscle groups with less volume and less frequently, rather than with more work more frequently, is a far more effective way to build muscle.

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From The Back Cover:

At age 26, scrawny, Oxford-educated Samuel Fussell entered a YMCA gym in New York to escape the terrors of big city life. Four years and 80 lbs. of firm, bulging muscle later, he was competing for bodybuilding titles in the “iron Mecca” of Southern California–so weak from intense training and starvation he could barely walk. MUSCLE is the harrowing, often hilarious chronicle of Fussell’s divine obsession, his search for identity in a bizarre, eccentric world of “health fascists,” “gym bunnies” and “muscleheads”–and his devout, single-minded acceptance of illness, pain, nausea, and steroid-induced rage in his quest for the holy grail of physical perfection.

This is the story of a guy who ran away to become a bodybuilder. He gave up everything, including his health to become as big as possible. He finally found out that too much of anything is a bad thing. The book is funny and witty and shows you what a person can go through to reach a certain level of bodybuilding. Overall I liked the book. If your into bodybuilding this is a must read.

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Thermogenics supplements, a term is used in the fitness industry, refers to a class of drugs and/or herbs that stimulate the central nervous system and/or thyroid gland. The idea is to decrease a person’s appetite so that they consume fewer calories while at the same time attempting to increase the body’s ability to burn more fuel. Thermogenic fat burning supplements range from Hydroxycitric acid (HCA) to the deadly Dinitrophenol (DNP) and everything in between.

Before you go and pop any supposed fat loss wonder drug supplement, you need to have enough information to make an intelligent decision. Consider the total picture, not just the fact that in two months, you wish to look good at the beach.

The critical thing that you must be kept in mind is that taking a thermogenic in and of itself will not cause a human to lose body fat. If supplement manufacturers were more honest, they would admit that these compounds are only beneficial for fat loss when they are combined with a calorie restricted diet and exercise.

They would increase their credibility if they would stop declaring with the utmost certainty that 40 pounds of fat could be lost in 15 days while you also gained 10 pounds of muscle mass. They know this is not true and is the reason that in miniscule print somewhere in the ad you will find words to the effect that not everyone will respond in the same manner as the model in the pictures. I’d venture a guess the model didn’t respond like that either.

Much of the problem is that everyone wants a 30-minute quick fix solution to weight loss when really solving the problem requires many weeks, and maybe more than a year (depending on the amount of body fat which needs to be lost), of effort. There are better ways to go about this and leave thermogenics (if even needed) to the very last option.

Considering that you are required to reduce your calorie consumption and exercise more frequently for healthy weight loss, it makes sense to start doing this before turning to supplements for some extra help. Thermogenics alone will not make you lose weight!

The best advice I can provide is that before you leap toward what is so common in our culture – a solution in a pill – take a realistic look at all the ramifications before you spend your hard earned money. Thermogenics, like many other drugs, have their pros and cons and you need to consider all of them carefully before you make the decision to use them.

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