Muscle

[ddrfreak90]

This is off topic, but I was wondering the what the best way to gain muscle is. I'm fourteen, but I can only do thirty curls with 10 pounders. So u can see im really weak. So I was wondering what the fastest and healthiest way to gain body and arm muscle was. What should I eat, and what should I do?

[abrannan]

30 reps of 10 lbs isn't necessarily an indication of lack of strength, it's more a lack of endurance. There are two types of strength, there's what I will call power, which is how much weight you can lift in one repetition (1Rep), and what I'll call endurance, which would be how many times you can lift a certain weight. It's possible that you could curl 150 lbs one time, but not be able to curl 10 lbs 12 times. You can target your workouts to improve either type of strength. Here are a few general guidelines to build muscle:

1. Lift heavy - Make sure that the weights your are working out with are heavy enough to stress your muscles. The latest study indicates that you need to lift at least 60% of your 1Rep maximum (1RM) in order to stimulate your muscles enough to grow muscle effectively.

2. Form over weight - Make sure you are lifting with proper form. If you aren't lifting correctly, at best you won't be able to lift enough weight to do any good, and at worst you can seriously injure yourself. You're 14, so if your school has a weight room, I'd go talk to a gym teacher, or a football or wrestling coach and ask them if they could help you out with learning the proper form.

3. Big muscles first - When you lift heavy enough, your body responds by producing hormones that stimulate muscle development. The larger the muscle group you work, the larger the response. These hormones cause muscle to be produced all over your body, even in areas that haven't received as much of a workout. So focus your efforts on larger muscle groups, like your quadriceps (Thighs), glutes (butt), pectorals (Chest), and biceps and triceps (Arms, front and back). Your workouts should start with exercises that work combinatios of larger muscle groups, and you should work your way down to isolating exercises that work only single muscle groups. Good exercises to start with include Barbell squats (Works primarily your quads and glutes, with some arm workout thrown in by hodling the bar), Bench Presses (Works your arms, pecs, and a little bit of your back.

4. Food - You'll need to make sure you're getting enough calories and nutrition to support muscle production. Your body can't make muscle out of thin air. After your workouts you'll need to eat some lean protein (Chicken breast, tuna, etc) and get some carbohydrates back into your system to replenish the muscle glycogen stores you consumed during your workout (fruit is good for this, as is dextrose, sugar can be okay, but I'd lean away from white sugar)

There's a lot of good information on muscle building here:
www.engr.mun.ca/~butt/main.html
Read, read, and read some more. Knowing why you are working out the way you are working out is key to your success.

[Laura Moncur]

Knowing why you are working out the way you are working out is key to your success.

Abrannan is right. You didn't tell us WHY you want to gain some muscle. If you are trying to bulk up so that you can be eligible for specific sports, you should definitely talk to the teacher responsible for that sport. That teacher is probably waiting for a motivated student like you to show up.

If you are trying to bulk up to impress the girls, there are many roads to that journey. Lean muscle mass isn't the only thing that rocks our world.

If you are trying to bulk up to defend yourself against a bully, you need to involve adults in the situation. These things tend to escalate. We don't want a Columbine on our hands.

If you are trying to bulk up to feel better about yourself, you need to know that you are great just the way you are. You can start feeling better about yourself today without the added pain of workouts.

If you are trying to bulk up so that you can be a healthy and well-rounded individual, then the massive workouts that abrannan is recommending are probably a little overboard for you.

So, why ARE you interested in bulking up. It can drastically influence your motivation.

[abrannan]

Actually, that wasn't the point I was making with that line, but your points are extremely valid. What I was saying is that he should learn about the physiology of muscle building to understand why the workout should be done a certain way. Workouts, if you don't understand the science behind them, become almost a mystic ritual. Without proper understanding of the hows and whys, it's easy to begin to focus on the wrong things, and ignore the pieces of the workout that really matter.

[ddrfreak90]

I dont think you guys are grasping the idea of how weak I am. Yea, I want to get stronger so I can play sports better. And usually to get a girl to like you, you should be stronger than her. I dont like getting hurt when my friends are just joking around. My wrists are like pencils...and im in high school. And I do want to be a well-rounded, healthy individual. I just dont wanna be the guy that can only do 2 pullups in gym when everyone else can do 10....so yea...lots of motivation.