Free Muscle Building Articles

Training With Muscle Soreness - Should You Do It? And Can It Actually Help You Get BETTER Results?

By Nick Nilsson

Muscle soreness is something that every trainer has

experienced. The typical advice is to wait until you're not

sore to train that muscle again. But what if you can

actually get BETTER results by training when sore!

It's safe to say that muscle soreness is something EVERY trainer has experienced at some point in their career. Severity of muscle soreness (known as Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS for short) can range from mild discomfort when you move to the point of being almost crippling.

One of the most frequent questions I am asked is "should you train when your muscles are still sore?" The answer is not quite as simple as some people make it out to be, though. Many trainers will tell you "if the muscle is still sore, don't train it." And, in truth, for many people that's the safest answer.

But, in fact, by NOT training when you're sore, you could actually be missing out on results AND slowing down your recovery!

So what is muscle soreness? Muscle soreness is basically damage to the muscle fibers as a result of training. Without going into great detail on how it happens and how the recovery process occurs (which is beyond the scope of this article), muscle soreness is your body telling you that it's in need of repair.

Now how can it possibly be GOOD for you to train a muscle again while it's still sore? Here's where we get into a contentious area. After reading this, you may choose to agree with me or disagree with me (if you've read my articles before, you know I'm anything BUT conventional) but all I ask is that you consider my arguments...

Now, if you've never trained a muscle hard two days in a row or trained it while it was still quite sore, you're going to be in for a shock at how unique a stimulus it can actually be. Sure there are arguments against doing that, e.g. the muscle hasn't fully recovered and you'll be tearing it down even more.

But consider this...from an adapatation standpoint, of the following two scenarios, what would give your body the greater stimulus for growth?

If you train the muscle hard once, you'll get a good growth stimulus. Your body immediately starts sending nutrients to the damaged area and starts rebuilding. When the muscle is fully recovered and is no longer sore, you train the muscle again and restart the process. This is the standard way of training and it usually means directly training a muscle twice a week with at least 2 or 3 days in between sessions for that specific muscle.

In the next scenario, you train the muscle hard then the next day, train it hard again. Recovery is nowhere near complete and the muscle is sore when you train it on the second day.

Here's the key...if you think about it, would the body see this second scenario as a greater threat to its survival? Would the body then ramp up its recovery processes to try and prepare for the next challenge, which it (from its recent experience of being hit with the same hard stimulus two days in a row) thinks is coming again very soon?

In my experience, this absolutely happens. The body's response to training is a very simple "stimulus-response" system, but your body is also fully capable of sending more resources where more resources are perceived as being needed.

When you eat, your body sends more blood to the digestive system. Your brain doesn't tell it to do that, it just happens. When you get hot, your body produces perspiration. The same thing happens with training. For example, when you train your biceps, your body sends blood and nutrients to the biceps for recovery. It doesn't send it to the calves if the calves haven't been worked.

If you train your biceps hard two days in a row, your body sees this as a big threat to the biceps and will ramp up recovery processes to specifically protect the biceps. If the biceps are still sore... VERY big threat! THEN you allow the biceps to recover. The two days of training has built much greater recovery momentum, getting more results out of your training.

Here's yet another advantage to training a muscle when it's still sore...even if you don't train it hard, you will still be sending blood (and therefore nutrients) to that muscle, helping it to recover faster than if you didn't train it at all. So even if you're not up for a hard workout for a sore muscle, even giving it some light to moderate work will still help with recovery.

So I've talked about training a muscle two days in a row...what about when you're scheduled to train it a couple of days later and it's still sore at that point? The same concepts apply - your body will STILL perceive that as a greater threat and increase recovery.

The only times I would NOT recommend training when sore is if the soreness causes you to use poor form in your exercises or if the soreness is so bad that it makes the exercises too painful to do.

For instance, if you just did deadlifts for the first time in your life and the next day, you have a VERY hard time sitting down without falling down into the seat, you may want to wait a bit before doing deadlifts again. Your form will change because of the pain and it could lead to injury.

But if your muscles are a bit stiff or sore, go ahead and train them. Your body will ramp up your recovery processes in response.

How do I know training the body with this frequency can be effective? I'll give the best example I know (WARNING - if you're a proponent of high-intensity, very infrequent training, this will make you shiver in your boots!). This is NOT a program I would recommend lightly to anyone because at this time, being on vacation from work, I was basically only eating, sleeping and training...no stress, no extraneous activity.

This was one of the most extraordinary programs I ever put myself on, not only in terms of workload but results as well. It involved doing total body workouts twice a day, six days a week. This meant 12 total-body workouts per week, increasing the workload every week.

I used partial training, negative training, low reps and high reps. For the entire first week, I was EXTREMELY sore but I stuck with it and trained everything twice a day, no matter how sore I was.

After 3 weeks of this training, I backed off, still doing 12 training sessions per week but splitting the body in half - I was still working my whole body every single day and doing partials and negatives.

During the back-off phase, my recovery processes were practically unstoppable! NOTHING I did could make me sore (and believe me, I tried!) and my strength and muscle mass shot way up.

Conventional wisdom would believe I would be completely totaled at the end of a program like this, overtrained, small and weak. My results? In 6 weeks, I went from 208 lbs in bodyweight to 228 lbs. I went from a 295 bench press for 1 rep to 350 lbs for 1 rep. I did a partial top-range lockout squat with 1100 lbs for 150 reps (not a typo!).

This is a VERY extreme example of training through muscle soreness and using maximum workout frequency. But the take-home lesson from it is this: you CAN get great results by training even when you're sore! Your body will react to the stress and ramp up recovery in response.

One quick tip: if you want to decrease post-workout soreness, try taking 500 mg of Vitamin C about an hour before your workout. This helps protect against muscle soreness.

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Nick Nilsson is Vice-President of the online personal training company BetterU, Inc. He has a degree in Physical Education and Psychology and has been inventing new training techniques for more than 16 years. Nick is the author of a number of bodybuilding eBooks including "Metabolic Surge - Rapid Fat Loss," "The Best Exercises You've Never Heard Of," "Gluteus to the Maximus - Build a Bigger Butt NOW!" and "The Best Abdominal Exercises You've Never Heard Of" all available at (http://hop.clickbank.net/?mfactor/betteru). He can be contacted at betteru@fitstep.com.

The Most Critical Lessons I Learned In My Very First Year of Training That Can Help YOU Maximize Muscle and Fat Loss

By Nick Nilsson

Get a step-by-step catalog of THE most important things

that I learned about fat loss and muscle and strength-

building from my first year of weight training. It will open

your eyes!

As a long-time trainer, I've learned a LOT of lessons about building muscle and losing fat. But nothing beats the learning curve of my first year of training. I didn't always make good progress. In my first year of training, I made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of things the hard way. I also did some things quite right completely by accident! Have a read through some of the most critical lessons I learned in the very first year of my training career.

IN THE BEGINNING...

I wanted nothing more than to get big and strong. I had been an endurance athlete all through high school (cross-country running, speed skating, skiing) but wanted to make a change. I was 17 years old and skinny and jumped into weight training with both feet. I saved up some money, bought the Cybergenics supplement program (mistake #1! - basically that was just an expensive multivitamin) and started training. It was June of 1991, just heading into summer.

I had a good program and I started getting stronger right away but wasn't really gaining much muscle. I was, however, getting absolutely ripped to the bone!

By the end of the summer, I still weighed about 150 lbs soaking wet (right where I started 4 months earlier) but I swear I was about 4 or 5% bodyfat. When you can see the division line between your upper pecs and lower pecs without flexing the chest, you know you're at low bodyfat!

LESSON #1

I wasn't eating NEARLY enough or frequently enough and wasn't getting enough protein. I would rollerblade or bike to the gym first thing in the morning and do my workout, eating NOTHING immediately after training. I would rollerblade home then eat a bowl of cereal. Then I would go to work as a lifeguard the rest of the day, eating maybe once or twice more that day with my largest meal being dinner.

THEN IT WAS OFF TO UNIVERSITY...

Having just graduated from high school, I enrolled in university that fall. I had learned my lesson about not eating enough and I was determined to make up for it.

And make up for it I did...with cafeteria food! Some people drink too much their first year of college - I ate too much.

Not to knock the food service there, but I'm just sure they deep-fried the salad. To show you my knowledge of nutrition at the time, I would (in the interest of trying to keep fat levels in my diet down) order fried eggs and cut out the yolks, eating only the whites (which were shiny with overused cooking oil). All this never realizing that I would have been better off cutting off the whites and eating the yolks (that's where the fat-emulsifying lecithin and the majority of the good nutrients in the egg are!).

Eight months later, at the end of my first year of school, I was 70 pounds heavier, probably about half of which was actually muscle mass. At one point, I sat down and calculated my caloric intake on some of my "big eating" days and found it to be almost 9,000 calories per day!

LESSON #2

When I learned my lesson about eating more to gain muscle, I didn't learn the lesson that you can eat WAY too much and you can easily eat the wrong types of foods. Sure, I got big and strong, but I probably went from 5% bodyfat to 15 to 20% bodyfat at the same time. NOT the results I was looking for! What I needed to do was eat more, certainly, but also eat a better quality of food.

That, plus I'm sure all the "Weight Gain 3000" type of supplements I was taking didn't help matters! Looking back on the ingredients, it was mostly cheap milk protein and maltodextrin (a high glycemic, cheap carb source).

TRAINING AT UNIVERSITY...

As I was eating more at University, I also ramped up my training. I would try and do more and more sets and use more and more weight. Because I was eating so much more, I was still making great progress! Plus, being then 18 years old, I could beat the tar out of myself in the gym and still recover from it pretty much without a problem.

I was seeing increases in strength and bodyweight on almost a daily basis. But then something happened...something that opened up my eyes...one workout I was in the gym for almost 2 and a half hours!

LESSON #3

I was training WAY too long and with too many sets. I was still making progress but only because I was eating so much. Little did I know, I could actually make BETTER progress by cutting my training time WAY down. From that day on, I always stopped my workouts at the 1 hour mark, no matter where I was at in the program. And it did wonders for my results. I think the week after I started cutting back, my strength shot up and my bodyweight went up 10 pounds. THAT opened my eyes.

In the Spring Semester, I tried a program that, if you've been training awhile, may be familiar with: Serious Growth by Leo Costa. At that point, I started training twice a day, six days a week, but only 45 minutes per session, at the most. Still eating a ton of food every day, I made excellent progress with this system and learned about the benefits of keeping your eyes on (and cycling) training volume.

BUT I TOTALLY NEGLECTED CARDIO TRAINING...

At the start of the eight months when I was furiously trying to increase my bodyweight, I had read that when trying to gain muscle, you should reduce cardio training. The aerobic work could burn up calories that could be used by the body for building muscle and might interfere physiologically with the muscle-building process.

Well, I took that a little too far and cut cardio training completely out. My thought was, I was doing cardio in the summer (blading to the gym and back) and didn't gain any muscle. When I was endurance training, I didn't gain any muscle. So maybe cutting it out was necessary. So I didn't even hardly walk up flights of stairs unless I had to.

LESSON #4

Too much cardio training (especially long-duration cardio training) CAN interfere with muscle growth, sure, but as I've learned since that time, SOME cardio training should always be a part of any mass-building program. The key is to do the RIGHT kind of cardio training (i.e. interval training, which can actually help the muscle-building process).

Let me put it this way, it's nice to be big and strong but when you're big and fat and strong and lose your breath going up a flight of stairs, you're not exactly at the pinnacle of health. Plus, think of it is this way...you NEED good cardiovascular functioning when training for muscle mass. What pumps blood and nutrients to the muscles? What helps you recover faster in between sets?

Cardio and muscle-building are not mutually exclusive concepts. I include it in ALL my muscle-building programs now.

WHAT HAPPENED AT THE END OF THE SCHOOL YEAR?

Well, at that point, being big and strong but big and fat, I decided I needed to burn off of the excess (the old bulk-and-cut concept). But then I made a HUGE mistake. I went back to similar habits that got me lean the previous summer. I didn't eat nearly enough to support the muscle mass that I had built and I didn't eat enough protein.

I also started running again, which at this point having not done any cardio training for 8 months, was a HARD lesson to learn. Imagine going from being a 150 lb cross-country runner who could do 5 km in about 15 minutes to being a 220 lb weightlifter who couldn't even jog slowly for more than 3 minutes straight!

Now, even though I was TRYING to do long-duration cardio, it actually resembled interval training more than anything because I had to stop and walk every few minutes. As I got in better cardio shape, I started running longer distances straight through (I would have been better off sticking with the intervals - little did I know!).

And I did lose weight and did lose some fat but I lost a LOT of muscle along with it. Nothing is more depressing than losing what you've worked so hard to build. I didn't lose all of my muscle and strength but it was enough to set me back.

LESSON #5

What you should eat and how you should train are actually fairly similar when you're trying to build muscle or burn fat. The main differences lie in how much you're eating and training variables such as rest periods and cardio frequency. You still need to eat a lot of protein regardless of your goals and you still need to lift heavy, even when on a fat loss program (it's how you tell your body that it needs to hold onto muscle).

Increasing cardio frequency, eating fewer calories and decreasing rest periods in between sets will get the fat burning process moving in the right direction. Don't starve yourself or go nuts by dramatically increasing your training workload.

SO WHAT HAPPENED IN MY SECOND YEAR OF TRAINING?

That's a story for another day...it involves going so far in the opposite direction of my first year of training that I actually made my roommate throw out a pot of water he was boiling for spaghetti because he added a pinch of salt (never mind that the sauce we were using had about 20 times that much salt in it already)!

Look for Year Two in the future, but in the meantime, check out more information on fat loss and muscle and strength-building here:

http://hop.clickbank.net/?mfactor/betteru&l=1039

http://hop.clickbank.net/?mfactor/betteru&l=1040

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Training Frequency - How Often Can You or SHOULD You Train To Maximize Your Results?

By Nick Nilsson

How often should you train? How long do you need to rest

between training sessions? How much is too much and how much

is too little? The answers may surprise you and even change how

you train!

One of the most basic questions in weight training is "how many times a week should I train for best results?" EVERYBODY has wondered this at some point in their training career, from the complete beginner to the most advanced professional.

The answer could very well change the way you train forever!

And the answer is simple... it depends!

Now, this is an answer that ALWAYS leads immediately to the next question... depends on what?

At this point, most instructors or training manuals will go right to the stock response of "train each bodypart twice a week" or something to that effect. It's easy to believe that this is the best answer because that generally works okay for most people. It's a safe answer.

But it's not the BEST answer. Learning what IS the best answer will help you cast out preconceived notions and determine what REALLY works best for your body.

There are a number of factors that influence how often you should train your muscles. Each single factor plays a part in how often you should train and they ALL interact with each other. I will go through the factors then give you real-world examples of how these factors come together to help you determine how often you should train.

1. Training Volume

Training volume is basically how much you are doing for each bodypart. It's the number of reps and the number of sets you are doing.

The more sets you do for a bodypart, the less frequently you should train the bodypart to give it a chance to recover. If you do fewer sets, you can train more frequently and recover from it.

2. Training Intensity

This is not the scientific definition of intensity (i.e. how close the weight you are using is to your one rep max for that exercise) but rather your effort intensity. Basically, it's how hard you're working your muscles.

The harder you push yourself in your sets, the less frequent your training should be as this will tax your recovery systems more strongly.

3. Nutrition

How much you eat and, more importantly, WHAT you eat plays a critical role in how often you can and should train. Don't think nutrition plays a big role in training frequency? Eat nothing but Pop Tarts for a week and see how often you're able to train...

The higher the quality of the food you eat and, to some degree, the more food you eat, the better you'll be able to recover and the more often you'll be able to train.

4. Recovery

When it comes to recovery, everybody is different...some people recover slowly while some recover very quickly. This difference can be heightened by outside activities and stresses to the body. For instance, a construction worker, who has a physical job, will need more recovery time than an office worker. Playing intense sports will also affect recovery ability.

Therefore, the slower your recovery rate and/or the more outside activities you do, the more time you will need between training sessions.

5. Exercise Selection

Which exercise is most demanding to the thighs and the whole body in general... a barbell squat or a leg extension? The squat, of course, because the more demanding the exercises are on a bodypart (or the whole body), the less frequently you can effectively train that bodypart.

6. Bodypart Size

The bigger the bodypart, e.g. back, thighs and chest, the more recovery time it needs. All things being equal, smaller bodyparts can be worked more frequently because they have less muscle mass that needs repair.

7. Type of Training You Do

Partials, negatives and other intensity techniques are going to affect how frequently you can effectively train a bodypart. These styles take more recovery time for the muscles and will require a decrease in training frequency.

TRAINING FREQUENCY RULES OF THUMB

These simple lists will show you the directions in which each factor will take you. All the factors interact to give you the best solution as to how often you should train.

You Can Train At a Higher Frequency If You Have:

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A better recovery rate

Good nutrition and supplementation

Lower training volume

Lower training intensity

Easier exercises

Smaller bodyparts

Fewer intensity techniques

You Should Train At a Lower Frequency If You Have:

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A slower recovery rate

Poor nutrition and supplementation

Higher training volume

Higher training intensity

Tougher exercises

Larger bodyparts

More intensity techniques

How It All Fits Together:

These are the major factors that determine optimum training frequency. Though the interaction of all these factors may seem complex, when you get right down to it, it's actually quite intuitive.

A good way to demonstrate this is by using myself as an example in different phases of training that I've been through. You will see, according to all the different factors, how I changed my training frequency and training schedules to maximize results.

You will also see that the common conceptions and "rules" that you have been told you must stick to in terms of training frequency (e.g. twice a week) are based only on simple assumptions, not on actual situations.

EXAMPLE #1 - Heavy manual labor, limited access to quality food

Because of the specific job conditions I was in at the time, I reduced the frequency of my training to three sessions per week and reduced my total training volume. I did total body workouts on each of the three days (Monday, Wednesday and Friday), using the heaviest exercises for each bodypart for 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps each (e.g. squats, bench press, bent-over rows).

I didn't push my muscles to complete failure in my training so that I didn't beat myself down too much in addition to the heavy manual labor job.

It was a simple program but very effective. It gave me enough recovery time because the volume was low and the intensity was moderate, even though the frequency for each bodypart was three times a week.

EXAMPLE #2 - In-home vacation, unlimited access to food and recovery, no demanding outside activities or work.

A number of years ago, I worked on cruise ships as a sports director. I would work 8 to 10 months straight (every single day) then have a few months completely off. During this time off, I had access to a gym, food and plenty of sleep.

To maximize results, I would dramatically increase my training volume and frequency and utilize intensity techniques regularly.

The catch? Since I was basically only eating, sleeping and training, I was able to recover from this high frequency and make excellent gains in strength and muscle mass.

As an extreme example of the frequency I was able to work with at this point, I was in the gym 6 days a week, twice a day, doing total-body workouts EVERY SINGLE TIME. This amounted to 12 total-body workouts a week, in addition to intensity techniques. The actual training volume (number of sets) in each workout was fairly low (3 or 4 sets per bodypart), which also allowed me to get results from that very high frequency.

I used a "controlled-overtraining" program similar in concept to the one that I wrote about in a previous issue of BetterU News here:

Training on the Edge - Learn How Overtraining on Purpose Can Get You Maximum Results FAST!

http://hop.clickbank.net/?mfactor/betteru&l=1014

Because I was able to recover from it, the high frequency of training worked in my favor and allowed me to get great results. But would I recommend this type of program to someone working a physical job or without optimum nutrition in quality or amount? No chance.

EXAMPLE #3 - Extremely busy work schedule, office job, meals determined by work breaks but workouts may have to be put off until the next day to accommodate overtime.

Having an office job meant that it wasn't physically demanding, allowing for good recovery. Nutrition, however, was often hit-or-miss due to busy scheduling. There were times, when work demanded, that I needed to put in hours after regular time, which forced me to push workouts back to the next day.

To maximize the results with this situation, I changed to a "one bodypart per day" training system. I would do a single bodypart in a workout, working it with high volume and high intensity. The next day I would do a different bodypart, rotating continuously through all the major bodyparts.

Because I was working only one bodypart at a time, the training frequency was very low, basically working the target bodypart once every 7 to 8 days. This, of course, would increase if I had to bump a workout back a day.

Even though I would basically "destroy" the single bodypart in its workout, this low training frequency gave my body enough time to recover and rebuild the muscle. It would take that much time for the part to recover. Also, when you work one bodypart, other bodyparts area invariably involved, allowing for indirect stimulation of the other muscles more frequently, e.g. when you bench press for the chest, the triceps are also involved.

This plan gave me the flexibility to easily change workout schedules without compromising results while allowing my less-than-perfect nutrition to still allow me to recover enough between workouts and get results.

CONCLUSION:

As you can see, optimum training frequency is nothing as simple as "work each bodypart twice a week." The give and take between a number of different factors in your life and schedule will help you determine how often you should be training and the type of training you should be doing for best results.

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Secret Training Tip #734 - How One Single Set of One Single Rep of One Single Exercise Can Build Massive, Strong Biceps

By Nick Nilsson

Learn the secret, extremely simple bicep exercise that

has the potential to put inches on your arms.

What's the first muscle that you think of when you think of bodybuilding? The biceps! Having big, well-developed biceps marks you as a serious trainer.

But what do you do if your biceps lag behind in development? Or if you simply want to build them as large and strong as possible as quickly as possible?

I'm going to share with you the secret exercise technique that helped me go from 13 1/2-inch arms to 18-inch arms in my first year of training. And all it takes is one single rep!

Let me just start by telling you that, personally, my biceps have always been among my weakest and slowest-to-develop bodyparts. Some people have the genetics to easily build big, strong biceps. Not me! I've had to come up with training techniques to blast past these limitations and have had to fight for every inch on my arms. The point of me telling you this is that I'm not somebody for which just anything will build big biceps. The training techniques have to be really powerful for me to see results.

The technique I'm about to share with you works the biceps so thoroughly and so powerfully, your biceps will have no choice but to get bigger and stronger.

After all this build-up, you're probably wondering just what kind of complicated exercise technique this is!

The fact is, this technique is so simple as to be downright elegant in its simplicity. What is this exercise? It's the Flexed Arm Hang.

The Flexed Arm Hang is not complex, but it provides you with a number of very powerful benefits that make it an ideal exercise for piling muscle mass on the biceps.

To fully understand the benefits of the exercise, you must first learn how to do it to properly focus on the biceps.

How To Do It:

In a nutshell, you will be simply holding the top position of a chin-up for as long as possible! Here's the procedure in detail...

1. Grasp a chin-up bar with a palms-facing-you grip. Your

hands should be about 6 inches apart on the bar. You want

to keep them fairly close together to maximize the tension

on the biceps.

2. Next, you will need to get yourself into the top position

of a chin-up. You can do this by standing on a bench or

pulling yourself up into position. My preference is to

start by standing on a bench. This allows you to get set

up very precisely and deliberately.

3. For body position to maximize bicep work, you will want to

have your eyes level with the bar, with your face very close

to the bar (almost touching it, in fact). Keep your body

as vertical as possible and try not to let your body lean

backwards. The more vertical you stay, the more tension

will go onto the biceps rather than the back.

4. Now comes the work...hold that position for as long as you

can! Contract your biceps hard and hold that position until

your biceps start to weaken. Now fight gravity ALL the way

down. Don't let your body drop quickly but try your very

best to hold your position as gravity pulls you down. Even

when you're almost at the very bottom with your arms almost

straight, still try your best to keep holding. Go until you

can't even hang onto the bar anymore!

That's the exercise. Not too complicated! If you're familiar with X-Rep or Static Contraction training, this concept is essentially the same...hold the contracted position of an exercise for as long as possible! Here are the benefits:

1. Holding the contracted position of this exercise for as

long as you can recruits almost every available muscle

fiber in the biceps. It's an emergency situation to the body

and it will fire every fiber it can. The fully-contracted

position engages the most muscle fibers.

2. This exercise places continuous tension on the biceps for

the entire duration of the exercise. Continuous high-level

tension will work wonders on your biceps.

3. The exercise uses your bodyweight and moves your body around

the resistance on the way down (like a chin-up) rather than

the resistance around your body (like a barbell curl).

Exercises that move your body have been shown to activate

more muscle fibers than exercises that move the resistance.

4. The highly intense, multiple-muscle nature of this exercise

stimulates far more growth in the biceps than exercises that

work the biceps in isolation (which most bicep exercises do,

even the gold standard barbell curl).

5. It requires almost NO equipment and can basically be done

anywhere you can grip on and hang from.

If you combine all 5 of these powerful benefits, you have an exercise that stimulates the maximum number of muscle fibers, with continuous tension, using a compound exercise that moves your bodyweight, and requires very minimal equipment.

So how do you take FULL advantage of this extremely powerful biceps-building exercise? Finish every workout with one single rep of the Flexed Arm Hang. One rep is all you need as that one rep will work the majority of your bicep muscle fibers.

You can also add resistance by holding a dumbell in between your feet or by using weighted dip belt. The potential gains in size and strength are tremendous!

If you make a habit to do one single intense rep of this technique at the end of each and every workout, I guarantee you will see excellent bicep growth and development.

When you've done one good rep of this exercise, you'll know you've squeezed out every last drop of bicep growth from your body!

To view pictures of this exercise in action, please click on the following link:

http://hop.clickbank.net/?mfactor/betteru&l=1007

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When One Side Of a Muscle Group Is Smaller Than The Other - How To Train to Fix It

By Nick Nilsson

Have a left bicep that's noticeably smaller than the right?

Is your chest significantly more developed on one side? Find

out how to even out your muscles now!

Everybody's got them. Sometimes you notice them, sometimes you don't. But there is nothing strange about having one side smaller or less developed than the other! It can happen for a variety of reasons, including genetics, reduced circulation or innervation (which is basically the amount of nerves going to the muscle) to the smaller muscle, previous injuries, or even small anatomical differences.

If you've got a significant size or strength difference between sides, this information is for you. The following techniques will help you to even out those lagging bodyparts once and for all!

These techniques can be incorporated into your regular workouts very easily, allowing you to quickly bring up those smaller, less-developed bodyparts. Several of the techniques work by increasing training volume, some work by increasing resistance, while others work by targeting the specific physiological causes of the difference (circulation and innervation).

1. "One and Two and One" Reps

This is a dumbell technique that increases the training volume for the smaller muscle. For this technique, you'll use the same dumbells in both hands.

Start with one rep with the one arm of the smaller part. For example, if you're doing curls, do one dumbell curl with your left arm. Now do a single rep with BOTH arms (right and left) at the same time. Immediately do another rep with the smaller arm again. Your smaller bodypart will end up getting 50% more work than the larger side.

2. "One and Two and One" Sets

This approach is very similar to the rep technique explained above. This time, however, you will do one set of an exercise for just that single side, rest, then do a set that works both sides. Then you'll go back and do a set with just the smaller side again. This will also increase the "smaller-side" workload by about 50%.

This approach also utilizes dumbells rather than barbells in order to allow for single-limb movements.

This "staggered set" approach is more effective for leg exercises than the "staggered rep" technique explained above simply because it's tough to find an exercise that you can do the "rep" technique effectively with. For legs, you will follow the exact same routine, doing a single-leg set, then a double-leg set, then a single leg set.

3. Uneven Weights

To do this technique,