5 Fitness Tips To Gain Muscle

Whether your goal is to lose a few pounds or even gain some weight, increasing your muscle mass is an important step to making that happen.  In this short audio you’ll learn 5 tips you can use to help you in your pursuit.

1. Music Can Improve Your Workout

Someone once told me that at one time, many gyms considered working out “serious business,” and that music and exercise didn’t mix. I can’t even imagine this to be true because literally every gym you walk into today pipes in heart-pumping music to motivate you.

Whether you’re listening to your own iPod or the canned music, working out is a little less boring and goes a little faster with music. You may also find that you get a rhythm going to match the music, and your lifting and cardio routines go more smoothly because you can focus on better with music in the background. Music can also be a distraction to the workout itself, if you get wrapped up in the song and somewhat “tune out” from the thoughts of exercise.  And if you’re one that finds the regular gym noises irritating or distracting, music can help with that too.

2. Consistency

You can have the best workout routine in the world. You can do the workouts that Arnold Schwarzenegger himself did. You can have perfect form and lift exactly the right weight, exactly the right way. But if you don’t do it regularly and consistently, it won’t help you at all.

Building muscle is a gradual, cumulative process. Consistency will get you there; inconsistency will not. It’s understandable that you will have a day here and there when you’re ill or can’t get to the gym, but other than that, establish a routine and stick with it. Schedule your workout on your calendar as an appointment. And don’t even think about whether you’re going or not. Know you’re going, and go. Get up and go every time without hesitation.

3. Rest

Most people think that if they exercise enough, and maybe change their diet, they can get fit easily, no matter what else they may be doing. But you also have to get enough rest. You don’t build muscle while you’re working out. You tear muscle down while you’re working out. You build it while you’re sleeping. Skip whatever else you need to skip for your workout, but get eight hours of sleep. It may seem like you’re being “tough” to go without sleep, but your body doesn’t know anything about being tough. It just knows it needs to recharge the batteries, and if it can’t do that, the batteries run low. So get plenty of sleep.

4. Evaluate Your Body

Like anything in life, you can’t know what you’re able to accomplish unless you know where you started.

Record your weight and measurements before you start working out, so that you can track your progress. Knowing your baselines will help you set realistic goals and move forward at a reasonable, but strong, pace. In addition to helping you set reasonable goals, measuring baselines will help you appreciate how much you’ve accomplished when you look at your progress down the road. And progress is a fantastic motivator!  Even if you’re not yet at your goal, if you’ve increased your strength and size and decreased your body fat, you’ll be able to see a real difference in the progress, as well as on your body.

5. Set Some Goals

You need to have long-term goals, written down so you can visualize them.

As you look ahead, your weekly, one-month, and six-month goals will constantly challenge you to meet each milestone, and allow you to envision what other milestones are coming up. You always hear about “reachable” goals, but that’s just part of it. Many goals are reachable given enough time. By setting goals for one and five years, but also for the shorter term and right down to this week, you can have goals that give you a payoff right away, and goals that you can really stretch for over a longer period of time.