Bodybuilding Posing You've Got It Now Flaunting It!

Bodybuilding posing is usually one of the most ignored aspects of contest preparation. Competitors are so focused on their dieting and training that many don't take the time to prepare an exciting posing routine. Some bodybuilders leave it until the last week to try and put something together. There are even a few brave souls who step on stage and try to "wing it." It's easy to spot the bodybuilders who don't do their homework; they can't even perform the mandatory poses properly.

If you hope to win or even place well in a show, you must give your contest preparation the same diligence and dedication as training and dieting. You may be the biggest and most ripped guy on stage, but if you flounder around looking unprepared, your chances of winning, or even placing, will be greatly reduced.

The best bodybuilders select music that reflects their personality. It's also much easier to perform a great routine if you like the song you are posing to. In a manner of speaking, your physique is your product, and you're using the posing routine to 'sell' yourself to the judges. The judges award points in three areas: how well you hit the individual poses, how well your routine flows with your physique; and how well your routine flows with the music you have selected. If you have a rugged, muscular physique, music that is powerful and upbeat will be your best bet. On the other hand if your physique is more symmetrical than massive, slower pop music or classical music, will probably work better for your bodybuilding posing.

Here are a few tips for music selection and preparation:

Choose a song that you like (you'll be listening to it over and over)

Select a song that matches your athletic abilities (i.e. flexibility)

Pick a song that matches your personality.

Choose a song that suits your physique

Whenever you're listening to music on the radio, visualize posing to each song.

Always make at least two, preferably three copies of your music.

Contact the contest organizer to see if they want your music on CD or cassette.

If you have a gift for posing, put together two routines; one for the pre-judging and one for the evening show.

Posing: The Routine

Your first step in contest preparation is to take a series of photos showing all the mandatory poses as well as the other classic poses. Divide the photos into great, good, and poor. Unless your physique is really not ready for competition, disregard the poor photos. If you hold each pose for an average of 3 to 5 seconds, you'll only have enough time for 18 to 30 poses. And don't forget that it each pose will be separated by a couple of seconds of transition time. This means that you'll only have enough time to hit 18 to 20 poses in your routine. Your goal is to start and finish your bodybuilding posing routine with one or two of your best shots. Also don't forget that while not necessary, you should include some, if not all, of the compulsory poses in your posing routine. The judges will quickly spot bodybuilders who avoid hitting the mandatory poses. They'll assume that you're trying to hide something.

Once you have your best poses picked out, your next step is to set the poses to your music selection. Time it so that you are moving between poses as the music is rising and hitting the poses as the music peaks. Many bodybuilders hire dance choreographers to help them prepare their posing routines. One of the early scenes in the classic documentary, Pumping Iron, shows Arnold Schwarzenegger and Franco Columbu practicing their posing routines under the watchful eye of a dance instructor. While most bodybuilders have no problem holding each individual pose, what distinguishes great posers from good posers, are their transition skills; how well they move between each pose. The best make it look like poetry in motion.

If you don't have access to a dance instructor, check with one of your gym's aerobic instructors. Most aerobics' instructors, especially those who incorporate martial arts into their classes, know how to set coordinate static and transition movements with music.

Once you have your bodybuilding posing routine put together, it's time to start preparing for each of the four Rounds in the contest. As each round is distinct you must know how to conduct yourself during each one. You don't have to win every Round to place first, but you must place at or near the top in most of them.

Bob Howard expert on bodybuilding and steroids. Are you looking for more of his bodybuilding-posing articles? http://www.bodybuilding.md  Article ? Bob Howard 5/5/2006

Diet For Natural Bodybuilding - Powerful Tips You Can Use Everyday

We are going to examine the most common challenge bodybuilders face which is nutrition.

Unfortunately there is so much confusion about what to eat, when to eat, how much to eat and on and on that it is almost impossible to sort out what to do. Also eating to grow is very different the eating to get shredded so the key point to remember is that your diet needs to evolve with your physique.

Consistency and self-discipline on your eating is two biggest keys to long term success on whatever eating program that you are following. Bodybuilders who are successful always plan ahead and have meals prepared well in advance. If you don't plan out your meals and have them with you at all times you will invariably fail in giving yourself the best possible gains. Hoping that restaurants, or friends or relatives will be serving "bodybuilding food" is unrealistic and leads to frustration as well as no progress. Don't be one of those people who do not prepare their meals in advance.

Here are a few simple rules to remember:

1. Always carry 1-2 meals with you more than you think you will need. This way any delays in your schedule will not throw your eating off.

2. Always eat before you go shopping, to the movies, or to other social occasions where non-nutritious food will be served this way you will reduce any cravings for junk.

3. Prepare food in bulk and use Tupperware containers so that you can grab quick meals at any time. Also you will find it takes very little extra time to prepare 10 meals as it does one meal. This savings in time will actually make your life way more efficient and your eating plan easy to stick too.

4. Get off all artificial sweeteners. Artificial sweeteners cause cravings for sugar, mess up your metabolism and brain function, and may have negative effects on your overall health. Cut them out of your diet immediately and switch to Stevia, or Raw Honey for sweetening. No Diet Sodas.

5. Drink plenty of water each day. Most often dehydration is misinterpreted as hunger. Slug back a liter of water 30 minutes before eating or when you feel hungry and you will see how it curbs appetite significantly.

6. Place nutritious snacks in you car, your office desk at your house basically everywhere that you spend a considerable amount of time. You will quickly develop the habit of eating healthy and junk foods will quickly lose their appeal.

7. Schedule a regular junk food meal once per week. This is a powerful lesson that starts building the will to understand delayed gratification. Every time you have a craving for junk food simply right it down and schedule to eat it on a set day. By the end of the week you can review the list and go eat those foods guilt free. Often times by the junk food day you won't want the food or it won't taste as good as you anticipated. Over time you will develop more control over your cravings and reduce negative guilt associations with food.

This list isn't the be all and end all of eating but it gives you a start to work with.

Keep in mind that your eating program should evolve over time. Your body will naturally adjust from desiring different types of foods depending on a variety of factors such as season, nutrient levels, PH balance of the body, training demands, and conditioning levels to name a few.

Recording how food affects you as biofeedback is critical in understanding the powerful effects of food on your mood and your performance. Review your eating journal regularly so that you become aware of your patterns of eating as well developing awareness of how each food affects your body.

You must master eating and training first before supplements can be effective. So many people try the other way around and wind up frustrated. No supplement can make up for a poor diet or poor training so vow to master these two facets first before wasting money on supplements. Once you master your diet than the right supplement at the right time can do wonders to improve performance but seldom does the supplement deliver when the diet is poor.

Check out http://www.muscle-guide.com for more great information on building muscle and getting fit.

Protein and bodybuilding (2)

Many body builders and weight lifters are overly concerned about what they eat and what food supplements they take. If you want to grow larger and stronger muscles, you should concentrate on lifting weights, but you can help muscles grow larger by understanding how what you eat affects how you recover from hard exercise. Just exercising will not make you strong and it will not help you to grow large muscles. If exercise made you strong, marathon runners would have the largest muscles. The only stimulus to make muscles larger and stronger is to stretch them while they contract. When you lift a heavy weight, your muscles start to stretch before they start to contract. This tears the muscle and causes soreness on the next day and beyond. If you rest and let the muscle heal, it will be stronger than before you stretched it lifting weights. This training principle of stress-and-recover is so strong that you can enlarge a muscle by lifting weights even if you are fasting, losing weight and all your other muscles are getting smaller. In one study, obese, un-athletic women were instructed to restrict food and lift weights. They averaged a weight loss of more than 35 pounds in three months and gained a lot of muscle. Training for sports is done by taking a hard workout and then having sore muscles on the next day. Then you take easy workouts or you take off until the muscle soreness disappears. You improve by taking hard workouts and your muscles grow and heal while you recover on your easy days. Of course, if you could recover faster from a hard workout, you could do more work and be a better athlete. Scientists have known for years that you recover faster by eating carbohydrates immediately after you finish your hard workout. Other studies show that eating extra protein on the day that you take hard workouts helps you recover even faster. Eating extra protein reduces muscle damage during hard exercise. Eating carbohydrates along with a protein building block called leucine helps you to recover even faster. Chronic muscle fatigue in athletes is associated with low blood levels of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The sooner you eat protein after you finish your hard workout, the quicker you will recover. The benefits of eating protein soon after you lift weights do not apply just too elite athletes. A study from the University of Arkansas shows that eating meat helps older people grow large muscles when they also lift weights. Muscles are made primarily from protein building blocks called amino acids. Muscles heal from a hard workout when amino acids and other nutrients travel from your bloodstream into the muscles. Eating food, particularly protein, immediately after you finish your workout helps muscles heal faster. This study shows that men between the ages of 51 and 69 recover faster and grow larger muscles when they include meat than when they eat only dairy, fruits, vegetable, whole grains, beans, seeds and nuts. Most foods contain protein. Your stomach acids and enzymes in the stomach and intestines break down proteins into their building blocks, amino acids, which pass from the intestine into the bloodstream. If your body needs to build protein, your liver combines amino acids to form body proteins. Your body has no way to store extra protein. If you don't need all of the protein you have eaten, it is broken down into organic acids and ammonia, which can be used for energy or stored as fat. .

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Whey Protein and Bodybuilding

Most bodybuilders would agree that supplementing with whey protein is an important element in achieving serious muscle gains. This article will examine the facts relating to whey protein as a supplement and help you decide whether you need to follow this particular strategy. Whey protein is produced during the process that sees milk turned into cheese. It is also found naturally in dairy products, eggs, soy and vegetable proteins but none of these compares in quality to whey protein powder. It also scores highly in providing the branched chain amino acids (BCAA's) that are important in the building and retention of muscle. Whey protein is highly favored by bodybuilders because it provides the necessary building blocks to produce the amino acids that the body uses to build lean muscle tissue. Many studies have shown that whey protein contains the perfect combination of amino acids, in just the right concentration for optimal performance in the body. It is also thought that whey protein has a role as an anti-oxidant and immune system builder. It is best taken in powder form mixed in juice or milk, spread throughout the day to maintain a positive nitrogen balance. Serious bodybuilders often consume up to 150 grams each day but as a rule of thumb, daily protein intake for active trainers can be calculated by taking your weight in pounds and multiplying by 1 or 1.5. But remember, you need to work out how much protein is taken from food and other sources, and then spread the remaining whey protein balance over the day. Whey protein is a relatively safe supplement but no more than 30 grams of protein should be taken at one sitting as excessive single doses could overload the liver. The safety of whey protein has been well documented in many scientific studies and there is clear proof that taken consistently, coupled with regular exercise, it will result in meaningful muscle gain. You can find out more about the muscle building benefits provided by whey protein at the web site listed below.

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Know your bodybuilding supplement - l-lysine

 Lysine is an essential amino acid therefore it must be obtained from the diet as the body cannot produce its own. It is an essential building block for all protein in the body and can be found in animal meats, fish, dairy products, legumes and brewer's yeast. It performs many useful functions in the body and has proved to be especially useful in treating herpes and cold sores. Lysine also increases the absorption of calcium so it may help to prevent and treat osteoporosis.

To the bodybuilder, lysine offers many benefits:

1. It helps build muscle protein.

2. It helps maintain nitrogen levels.

3. It supports the production of hormones.

4. It speeds up recovery from injury or overtraining.

Although lysine can be readily obtained from many foodstuffs, supplementation can enhance the effects noted above. No problems have been reported with normal usage but high doses exceeding 15 grams can cause stomach problems and cramp.

Richard Mitchell is the creator of the bodybuildingadvisor.com website that provides guidance and information to athletes at all levels of bodybuilding experience. Go to Bodybuilding Advice to learn more about the issues covered in this article.

Fitness - A Guide To Buying Home Gym Equipment

Membership of your local gym gives you access to a wide range of equipment and also provides you with advice and encouragement from the gym staff and other members, but also limits you to the opening times of the gym and means that you're going to have to add the time to travel to the gym and venture out, rain or shine. By contrast, a modern home gym can also give you access to a wide range of equipment but with the ease of being able to exercise whenever you want to without having to venture out of the house. But what should you buy?

If you're just starting out, or returning to exercise after a lengthy break, you should hold off on buying a home gym for a while and should enroll at your local gym for a short time so that you can check out some of the latest equipment with a knowledgeable instructor. This way you can get a good idea of just what you want to buy and, more importantly, don't want to buy.

If you're interested in weight training, then one of the first things you'll want to buy is a set of weights.

Free weights can be purchased quite cheaply with basic set of weights often coming in at under $50. You'll need a mix of small weights, 10 lb (4.5 kg) and 20 lb (9 kg) hand-held dumbbells and a bar with larger, exchangeable weights. There's little to choose these days between different bars but you'll need to choose between metal or plastic weights. Here it's largely a question of personal choice between the old-fashioned clink of metal and the marginally safer plastic (often a composite filled with sand) weights.

At some point, you'll probably want to move up to a weight machine which offers the ability to focus on specific muscle groups, such as the biceps, quadriceps and deltoids, in a much safer way than using free weights. In addition, some muscle groups, like the calves and hamstrings, are harder to work using free weights.

Once you're ready to move up to a weight machine, be prepared to pay a fair amount of money. Configurations and cost will vary widely from simple resistance machines, at a few hundred dollars, to multi-station, adjustable weight stacks, which will run you somewhere between $2,000 and $5,000 or more.

Another increasingly popular option is stair steppers. A simple model, offering you the ability to get a good cardiovascular workout in a small space at home with low joint impact, while building thighs and calves will cost from about $80 up to $150.

A more elaborate stair stepper which is adjustable (speed, angle, resistance level, pedal distance etc.) and includes such things as a heart rate monitor and digital readouts for things like your speed, distance climbed and calories burnt, will come in at nearer to $1,7000 or $2,000.

Treadmills are also becoming a very common item in most home gyms. Again a very basic treadmill will cost you just a few hundred dollars but, like the stair stepper, a feature-packed treadmill will set you back at least $1,000 and could easily come in at about $2,000 with all of the features you'll want to have.

By the time you've finished your home gym is going to cost you several thousand dollars and so it's not something you should invest in unless you intend to make exercise a part of your daily routine and dedicate yourself to a regular and consistent program of training.

If you are looking for fitness made simple and information on any aspect of fitness such as a definition of physical fitness then please visit Lifetime-Fitness-Made-Simple.com today.

The Best Home Gym Equipment Features for Everyday Use

If you haven't been involved in weight strength training in the past, it's easy to get confused by all the different kind of home gym equipment that is on the market today. It may almost seem like a foreign language at times. But the good news is that just a little bit of information can help you understand that language quickly and easily. So here are some things that you need to know about home gym equipment in order to get what you really need.

First let's divide this discussion into two parts. In the first part we will cover traditional free weight systems. This may be what many people think of when they think of home gyms. Essentially, they are a collection of free weights and the bars that the weights are assembled on. The responsibility of using the weights properly in each exercise falls entirely on the exerciser in this case. And it's easy to injure yourself if you don't use the proper form when doing free weight exercises. For that reason, be sure to get some good guidance and training before you undertake using free weights to make sure you are doing it properly.

But the equipment that you will need is very simple and not complicated. First of all, you will need about 200 lbs. of free weights that have a hole in the center of them. Then you will need a barbell, which is a long metal bar for stacking weight on each end. Next you will need two dumbbells, and these are used for single-handed exercises. The weights have to be held on to both the barbell and the dumbbells with a simple device called a collar, and you will need enough for both ends on each bar. The next piece of equipment is a bench, and this bench should have a standing rack on one end that will support the barbell with a full load of weights.

Really, that is about all the equipment that you need for a very simple home fitness gym consisting of free weights. However, these days more elaborate home gym equipment has been made available that structures all of your exercises and help you keep the proper form as you go. This usually makes for a more safe overall exercise experience.

The most common components of a typical home gym machine includes a bench, and a press, which often are performed lying down, but sometimes are done standing up on some machines. A lat pulldown is often included too, that lets you pull weights down from above to strengthen the lat muscles in your back. Other popular equipment include a leg extension and leg curl at the end of the bench, and a low pulley for single arm curls. There are also the gyms that include leg presses and squats, but you often have to pay more for those features.

You can actually do just as many exercisers with free weights as you can with one of the expensive home fitness gyms, but you have to know what you are doing in order to do it right. Many folks these days are deciding that they prefer to use the structure that a home gym machine gives them for their individual workouts. Whatever type of the equipment you choose, be sure to use them in advance to be sure that they will meet your needs properly before you buy.

You can find the best home gym equipment and home gym reviews by visiting our Home Fitness website