No Fail Muscle Building - Squats Build Muscle

Squats are called by some the king of all muscle building exercises. I personally would put the deadlift right there along side squats for building muscle. I wanted to share this article with you that I got from Sean Nalewanyj

Simply put, squats are the most difficult, intimidating and
painful exercise you could possibly have in your arsenal. They
require massive amounts of discipline and willpower to perform
correctly.

After you have performed a set of squats to failure, you'll know
exactly what I'm talking about. They are also a challenging
exercise to master from a technical standpoint.

All this aside, squats are one of, if not THE most effective,
growth-producing exercises you could possibly include in your
workout routine.

They will pack more size and strength onto your lower body than
any other exercise out there, and due to their high level of
difficulty, they also force your body to release higher amounts
of important anabolic hormones such as testosterone and growth
hormone.

This increased secretion of hormones will pack muscle size onto
your entire upper body as well.

Quite simply, they really, really work.

Unfortunately, many people have yet to experience the benefits
of heavy squatting. It seems that people will come up with just
about any excuse they possibly can in order to steer clear form
the squat rack.

If you're in the gym with the goal of maximizing your total body
muscle gains, squats are an absolute must.


***Proper Squatting Technique

For safety reasons you should always perform your squats in a
power rack or cage. This way you can adjust the height at which
you clear the bar, and you can drop the bar on the safety pins if
you need to bail. The safety pins should be set at just below the
depth you are squatting and the J Hooks should be set at about
the level of your nipples.

At all times during the squat your head should be pulled back,
your chest raised and you should have a slight arch in your lower
back. You should always be looking straight ahead, and at no time
should you be leaning too far forward, or be looking up or down.

Step up to the bar, placing your hands at about the same width
as a bench press. Before clearing the bar, make sure it is placed
evenly along your traps. The bar should rest on the lower portion
of your traps and across your rear delts. It should almost feel
as if the bar is going to roll off your back.

Now that you have cleared the bar, take only as many steps back
as necessary. Most squat injuries occur when backing up, so make
sure that you only back up as far as you need to. Your feet
should be placed about shoulder width apart or slightly wider,
and they should point out at a 45-degree angle.

Take a big, deep breath, and make your descent. You should not
lower yourself straight down, but rather as if you were sitting
in a chair behind you. At all times your knee must remain in line
with your feet, and they should never bow in. Lower yourself
until your thighs are at least parallel to the ground.

As soon as you have reached the bottom position, rise up
immediately. Do not relax in the bottom position! Drive up with
your heels and straighten your back as quickly as possible.
Once you are in the upright position again, take another deep
breath, and continue the lift until you have completed the
desired number of reps.


***Final Thought

You have all the reason in the world to get into the squat rack,
so go ahead and do it. Treat this lift with respect and you'll be
shocked at the resulting muscle gains.

I would recommend performing your squats once per week, for 2
sets of 5 to 7 reps. Focus on pushing yourself hard on this
exercise and continually strive for more weight and more reps.

Sean

No Fail Muscle Building: Workouts For Building Your Delts

Massive Shoulders In A Matter Of Minutes


By Sean Nalewanyj
Natural Bodybuilding Expert & Best-Selling Fitness Author
Muscle Gain Truth


If you’re looking to develop an impressive, muscular physique, well-developed shoulders are an absolute must. Thick, round “cannon ball delts” will make your upper body appear wide and powerful and will help immensely in creating the v-tapered look that all bodybuilders strive for.

Many serious lifters will argue that underneath clothes, muscular shoulders make the greatest contribution toward the overall appearance of the upper body.

The shoulder is a 3-headed muscle that performs the function of lifting and rotating the arm. It consists of the anterior region (the front), the medial region (the middle) and the posterior region (the rear).

These heads can be stimulated in the gym using two different movements: an overhead press and a raise.

The overhead press is the meat and potatoes of effective shoulder training. There isn’t a single lift out there that can match the incredible shoulder-stimulating effect of a basic overhead pressing movement. Both a barbell and a dumbbell can be used for this exercise, but dumbbells are the best overall choice.

Dumbbells allow you to move through a more natural range of motion and also don’t allow one arm to cheat for the other. They also place a greater amount of total stress on the shoulder region in comparison to the barbell, which shifts some of the stress to the upper chest.

I would recommend using the seated overhead dumbbell press as your core shoulder movement. Grab a pair of dumbbells and sit on a bench with a vertical back support. Press the dumbbells overhead until your elbows are just short of locking out, and then lower them back to shoulder level.

The next exercise to look into is a basic side lateral raise, which can also be performed with a pair of dumbbells. Side laterals are an isolation exercise and will shift the majority of the stress to the medial head of the shoulder. This will build greater shoulder width and will contribute to that wide upper body look.

Stand with your knees slightly bent and hold a pair of dumbbells with your palms facing inward. With a slight bend in your arms, raise the dumbbells up to shoulder level and then lower them back to the starting position.

When it comes to training your shoulders for maximum size and strength, a basic overhead press and a side lateral raise is all you need. It’s very important to realize that the shoulders are stimulated on virtually every single upper body exercise that you perform and therefore they do not require a lot of direct work.

Most people perform far too much work on their shoulders and actually hinder their gains as a result. Because of this I typically do not recommend that you perform isolation exercises for the anterior and posterior heads.

The anterior heads are heavily stressed during all chest pressing movements while the posterior heads are hit equally hard on all rowing movements for the back. A couple of extra sets won’t hurt, but you should try to minimize the volume as much as you can.

The key to massive shoulders is quality, not quantity.

Here are a couple of sample shoulder routines that you can use...

Shoulder Routine #1

Seated Overhead Dumbbell Press – 2 sets of 5-7 reps
Standing Dumbbell Side Laterals – 1-2 sets of 10-12 reps

If you insist on performing isolation exercises for the front and rear heads, you can use this routine:

Shoulder Routine #2

Seated Overhead Dumbbell Press – 2 sets of 5-7 reps
Standing Dumbbell Side Laterals – 1-2 sets of 10-12 reps
Standing Front Dumbbell Raise – 1 set of 10-12 reps
Seated Rear Lateral Dumbbell Raise – 1 set of 10-12 reps

There you have it.

All sets should be taken to concentric muscular failure where no additional reps can be completed using proper form. Keep a detailed record of each workout and strive for continual improvement from week to week by either increasing the resistance or the number of reps performed.

If you want to learn the specific training methods for hitting all of your other muscle groups, go ahead and visit www.MuscleGainTruth.com. You can gain instant access to a complete online muscle-building video lesson series that outlines the proper techniques for maximizing your muscle gains in your chest, back, arms, legs and abs, with a special lesson dedicated to each.


About The Author
Once an awkward, pencil-necked "social reject", Sean Nalewanyj is now a renowned natural bodybuilding and fat loss expert, best-selling fitness author, and creator of the wildly popular online muscle building program, "The Muscle Gain Truth No-Fail System". Learn how to build muscle and gain weight in just 24 minutes a day by visiting: Muscle Gain Truth

Sean is also the owner and operator of the web's premier muscle building and fat loss support community, currently accepting new members at the Fitness Inner Circle

No Fail Muscle Building How It Works Part 2

No Fail Muscle Building How It Works Part 2

Your New Best Friends

Let me now take the time to introduce you to your 2 new best friends: "Overload" and "Progression". Your entire strength training program should be centered around these two all-important factors. "Overload" refers to providing your muscles with a workload that is beyond their present capacity. By training to failure you are 'overloading' your muscles and effectively stimulating new growth. "Progression" is pretty self-explanatory.

It refers to making steady increases in weight and/or reps in each training session. For example, you squat 200 pounds for 10 reps in one workout. Next week you increase the weight to 210 pounds for 10 reps. This is progression, and must be the center focus of your entire training program. Why is progression important? Well, it all comes back to the whole "adaptation to the environment" spiel I gave earlier. Maybe this will help explain it:

Envision What You Are Doing

Envision a building. An earthquake hits, and the building is destroyed. Workers rush to the scene to repair the damage, only this time they decide to make it bigger and stronger incase another earthquake hits. Surprisingly enough, another earthquake hits! Only this earthquake is slightly larger than the last one.

Sure enough the building is destroyed, and the workers come back to repair it. However this time they make the building even larger and even stronger in the event that another earthquake should hit.

Understand? As your weight/reps increase your body is forced to adapt to the larger workloads. If you never progressed in weight or reps the body would have no reason to grow larger and would have no incentive to adapt. Progression is such an important part of gaining muscular size. This is why I recommend keeping a training log and making records of each workout. Nothing complicated, just some simple notes which will let you know your current weight/rep records.

In each workout you should strive to make improvements in every lift. What kind of improvements? The ability to increase by a single repetition each week would be more than sufficient. Even a half rep would be great, as long as you are improving every week and forcing your body to adapt to greater and greater workloads.

Your Worst Enemy

Okay, so I've introduced you to your two best friends. Now it's time for you to meet your worst enemy: Overtraining. This nasty, ugly term refers to training the body beyond it's natural recovery abilities, i.e. training too often, training for too long in each session, or using too-high training volume. I've seen people on the message boards say that overtraining doesn't exist and that it was a term made by the lazy in order to avoid work. This is ridiculous and just plain wrong. Yes, some people are able to get away with more frequent/higher volume training, but for the majority of us, this will bring us farther from our goals rather than closer to them.

You see, usually in life the more we put in, the better results we receive. In bodybuilding however, this is not the case. More is certainly not better. Most people just don't realize how stressful strength training really is to the body and underestimate how much recovery time they really require. Not only in terms of training volume, but also in the way of training frequency. You do NOT need to train 5 and 6 days a week in order to gain muscular size. You would be a fool to do this. Any more than 4 training sessions per week and you're setting yourself up to overtrain. In my opinion, three training sessions per week is ideal, but if you insist on training more often, then 4 sessions should be just fine.

Another Enemy

As far as each individual muscle is concerned, it only needs to be directly hit once per week. Any more and you are not allowing adequate recovery time. Ideally, each workout should last no more than 45 minutes. Why 45? It's because of another bodybuilder's enemy, "Cortisol". Cortisol is a powerful catabolic hormone which is released after about 45 minutes of intense exercise. Cortisol stimulates the break down of muscle tissue for energy. I'm not going to get all scientific on you here, so we'll leave it at that. Now I personally require more rest in between my sets, so my workouts usually last about 1 hour. Anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour is the ideal time frame to complete your workout.

That covers training frequency and time, but what about the actual volume of each workout? Keep in mind that this is an opinion article. I'm sharing with you my personal viewpoints on muscle growth. These are, in MY opinion the ideal number of sets for each bodypart:

Back: 6-9
Chest: 4-6
Abs: 3-4
Shoulders: 3-4
Biceps: 2-4
Triceps: 2-4
Forearms: 1-2
Thighs: 5-6
Calves: 3-4

I've messed around with many different combinations, and these are in my opinion the ideal numbers. Many people will look at that and say the volume is too low. Trust me, if you are training with 100% intensity, that is more than enough! Any more than that and you are simply eating into your recovery time. The idea is to stimulate or "spark" muscle growth, and then get the hell out of the gym and grow. This can be accomplished without the use of endless sets.

Now we must establish a rep range. Remember, the idea is to create muscular overload, not muscular fatigue. For all upper body movements I believe that an ideal rep range is to reach failure anywhere from 4-7 reps. Abs and forearms should be trained using 6-10 reps. The lower body is a bit different and seems to respond well to almost any rep range. Experiment and see what works for you. Some may advocate the use of 4-6 reps, some may say 8-10, others will say 12-15. I personally stick with a rep range of 8-10 for thighs, and 8-12 for calves. So here it is:

Back: 4-7
Chest: 4-7
Abs: 6-10
Shoulders: 4-7
Biceps: 4-7
Triceps: 4-7
Forearms: 6-10
Thighs: Anything under 15 reps
Calves: 8-12

This brings us to the all-important factor of exercise selection. If you want the most bang for your buck and are looking to receive the most dramatic results possible from your training, then you must focus your attention on basic compound movements. Stop wasting your time slaving away on dumbbell flyes and tricep kickbacks.

No Fail Muscle Building How It Works Part 1

Bodybuilding is simple. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand the basic concept of muscle stimulation and growth. However, this doesn't mean that it's easy. In fact, it is very difficult. Extremely difficult. You can have all the knowledge in the world, but without the ability to apply this knowledge you will get nowhere, and very fast.

I can't help you with the "applying" counterpart of bodybuilding. This all-too-important factor is up to you, and is something that cannot be taught. You must find it within yourself to make this commitment, and to systematically apply your knowledge on your quest for mind blowing muscle mass and strength.

Knowing What You Are Doing

However, the knowledge portion of bodybuilding is something that can be taught, and that's what this article is all about. People often ask me how I was able to make the gains that I did at the age of 15 with only 2 years of training and no real supplement use. It had nothing to do with a top secret workout plan or any magical supplements.

It was the result of sound, sensible training using the basic guidelines of muscle growth and nutrition. I'm going to share with you my philosophy and viewpoints on muscle growth, and why they work. SIMPLICITY is key. LESS is more. Intensity is EVERYTHING. Forget everything you think you know about bodybuilding, and read on…

First off, to understand how to gain muscular size you must first understand what causes muscle growth. Every action that goes on within your body is centered around a single ultimate goal: survival of the species. In other words, keeping you alive and healthy. For example, when the body is hungry and in need of food, your stomach will begin to feel uncomfortable. Why? It's your body's way of telling you, "feed me!"

This uncomfortable sensation will continue until the body is fed. Similarly, the natural responses of blinking, coughing, sneezing, getting a suntan are all there for the same reason - they protect your body and help to fight against potentially harmful outside forces. The action of gaining muscular size and strength, otherwise known as muscle "hypertrophy", can be viewed in the same way.

Each Rep Counts

Each repetition closer to failure creates deeper inroads into the muscle fiber and causes "micro tears". When you lift weights you are damaging your muscles, and through proper nutrition and rest your body will repair this damage. So, just like hunger, sneezing, coughing etc, in response to harmful stress placed upon the musculature, the body responds by increasing the size and strength of that particular muscle in order to protect it from possible future damage. Understand so far? It's really quite simple. It's all about survival. Meaning that what you accomplish in the weightroom must be perceived by your body as a threat. This brings me to my next point, intensity.

If what we accomplish in the weightroom must be perceived as a threat to our survival, then naturally the more intensity we put forth during our workouts the more heavily our bodies will respond. Intensity is, in my opinion, the most important factor for gaining muscular size and strength. Training with 110% intensity is what separates the champions from the wannabe's. Unless you have a killer set of genetics, submaximal intensity will yield little to no results.

What this means is that every single set you perform in the gym must be taken to the point of muscular failure and beyond. What is meant by the term "failure"? Simply put, it means taking each set to the point where the weight will not budge no matter how much force you apply. To the point where even if you're life depended on it, the bar would not move another inch. This is true intensity, and this is the way you must train if you want serious results. Let me describe a typical set in order to give you a better idea of what I'm talking about. I'll use a simple barbell curl as my example:

The bar is loaded and on the ground. I take time to concentrate, and focus my mind on the task at hand. I block out any potential distractions and find my grip on the bar. I remind myself what it is that I want to accomplish on that set, "5 reps", I tell myself. I pick the weight up and begin the set. I curl the weight up for the first rep. Not too difficult, but I remain focused. Rep number 2 is a little tougher, but I still feel strong as I let the weight the down slowly and accentuate the negative. I'm feeling the fatigue on number 3 as my strength is starting to drain out. Rep 4 is a struggle, and the weight is moving very slowly as I give my all to curl the weight into the top position.

I let it down slowly. My arms are burning, my grip wants to let go, and just about every part of my body is screaming at me to stop. But I dig down deep into my mind, ignore my body's alarm system and pull the weight with every last bit of strength that I have. It's moving slowly and I know that I'm going to get the rep. The last rep feels like an eternity but after a 10 second battle I've gotten the weight into the top position.

Intensity Is Everything

By now my arms feel like they're going to explode. Intensity is everything, and I want to take the set for all its worth. So I let the weight down extra slow this time. I try to hold the bar and fight gravity as long as I can until it collapses. Am I done? Hell no. There's no way I'm getting any other reps, but I want mountains for biceps, so I continue the set. I try to curl the weight as hard as I can for another 15 seconds and battle the weight for all it's worth. I can hardly hold the bar now. The set is over.

This is the type of intensity that must be put forth during every set and every workout. If you aren't used to this level of training then it may take a few weeks to get accustomed to it. I can't stress enough how important it is to train with 110% intensity. Either lift all out, or you may as well go become a ballerina. I have no sympathy for anyone who complains about lack of muscular gains when they are not training themselves to the limit.

Okay, you now understand that:

a) Muscle growth is a product of the body's natural alarm system
b) You must train with 100% intensity. Each set must be taken to complete muscular failure and beyond.

Stay Tuned For Part 2

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