When building muscle there are basically two types of exercises that you are going to be doing and each are equally important.  Aerobic and Anaerobic.  Aerobic is basically anything that does not require resistance, but gets your heart and lungs worker harder.  Good examples of this are jumping rope and cycling.  The purpose is that we are building up our heart and lungs, getting more oxygen into our system.  Believe it or not aerobic exercise is one of our key components for building lean muscle.

Before you start to resistance workout (lift weights) do five minutes of an aerobic exercise.  This is going to warm up the muscles and reduce the chances of you getting an injury.  Keep in mind that anaerobic exercise is suppose to be done in short intense bursts without requiring a vast amount of oxygen.  This is why you need both types of exercise.  The aerobic is going to build up your endurance so that you will be able to get your muscles to the fatigue stage.  Without aerobic to complement your weight lifting you are going to hit a plateau rather quickly.

If you have been working out and struggling for significant gains I am willing to bet that the weight you are working out with is to light.  We want to workout with a weight that we can only lift 8-12 times maximum.  This is our optimum range for muscle growth.

Also we want to keep our workouts short, absolutely no longer than 45 minutes, 30 is actually better.  Remember anaerobic is suppose to be done in short intense bursts.  We basically want to shock our muscles into growth.

As you read more about muscle building you are going to find plenty of opinions, people are going to be talking about super sets, pyramid sets, etc..  Do yourself a favour and keep it simple.  One set per exercise, that is it.  If you have proper form and don’t cheat you will see some amazing results.

Each workout session which you should only be doing twice a week.  Your body is going to need time to recover from those short intense bursts we talked about earlier.  If you do this correctly, you should only be investing an hour a week!!  The goal is to work smarter not harder.

Also keep in mind that each workout session is going to involve you working the entire body.  I know everyone wants to build the chest and guns (the biceps), but in order to do that we need to work the entire body.  When we work the entire body we are actually forcing the body to produce more testerone and this is key to building that good muscle mass that we want.  Please keep in mind that the actual lifting and lowering of the weight is to be done rather slowly.  Our goal is to put as much stress on the muscles as possible, but for a short period of time.  A cadence of 5 up 5 down is perfect.

In the beginning you will be amazed at how much harder that is to do than just lifting in a rapid fashion.  When you are lifting and lowering fast you are actually cheating yourself because you are using momentum to get that weight up.  We want a nice even controlled motion.

Follow these steps and I am confident that you will build that impressive physique that looks good on the beach.

To Your Health

The number one reason is that without aerobic training you will lack the adequate stamina to push your muscles to failure so they can grow.  Like any other endeavour you need stamina!  It does you no good to go into the gym huffing and puffing and only reaching 50% of you maximum effort.

Without sufficient aerobic exercise you will be counting calories like a mad mathematician.  It is far easier and saner to just incorporate some aerobic training into your workout.

Aerobic training might be the most efficient way to flush out the toxins that working out leaves in your body.  After resistence training your body builds up quite a bit of toxins, most notably is lactic acid, yes lactic acid, that toxin that is responsible for that painful burning sensation that that you experience during and after your workouts.

If this were not enough add in the cardivascular benefits of regular aerobic exercise.  It strenghtens your heart allowing more oxygen into your body, making your heart stronger so that it can work better.

All of a sudden aerobic exercise does not sound so bad does it.  It has also been proven to reduce the risk of just about everything such as high blood pressure, stroke, diabetes and colon cancer.

One of the immediate pay offs for us however is the fact thataerobic training vastly improves your quality of sleep.  If you have read my other article on how to build muscle fast you will realize that we get quite a bit of benefit from aerobic activity just from the mere fact that you will be sleeping better.

Also as a side note many studies have reported that people who partake in a regular aerobic activity have a reduced rick of depression and anxiety.  This can only help us not only in our goals towards fitness, but in all areas of our life.

Of course aerobic training alone is not going to build our muscles.  Aerobic training is going to provide some immediate benefits to our program however.  Building stamina so that we can get the most from our resistence training.  Improving our quality of sleep so that our recovery stage will be far superior to what we would have without aerobic training.  Providing more oxygen into our system to making our bodies more efficient and stregthning our heart.  I stress that aerobic training alone will not get us to our goals it is just an important spoke in the wheel.  You are still going to need a workout program to follow.

To Your Health