Archive for July, 2009

Muscle Building Nutrition 101

Correct muscle building nutrition and a quality muscle building diet are often the most neglected parts of a weight training program.

Building muscle requires the right nutrition. Make no mistake, it’s an essential part of weight lifting and if you want to build muscle, you have to get it done. Bottom line — if you want to build muscle, you need to consume quality calories.

How many calories?

You need to consume more total calories in your muscle building diet than your body uses each day. It’s important to understand that the human body is constantly working, using and storing energy day and night.

It’s also very important to understand that in order to keep the machine rolling, you need to know what and how much to feed it. This is the single most important element in the muscle building process.

You need to feed your body a correct balance of calories, protein, carbohydrates and fat. Complete muscle building nutrition is the key. If you can find this key, your muscle building efforts will sky rocket.

Complete muscle building nutrition leads to optimal nutrition and optimal results. Over supplementation of certain nutrients will lead to imbalances in overall nutrition and is damaging to your weight lifting diet and health.

It is very important that you understand the importance of nutrition when building muscle. Without good nutrition and diet, your muscle gains will be non-existent and at best, poor.

As a muscle builder, it’s important that you get your muscle building nutrition down to a science. Your success is dependent on a well-balanced and complete diet that includes your optimal nutritional intake.

Poor dietary habits will hinder your progress and may eventually lead to injury to muscles and bones because they are not supplied with the nutrients needed to support the added stress of weight lifting.

What builds muscle?

Protein builds muscle. Without an adequate supply of protein, your body will not support any kind of muscle growth. If you supply your body with the optimum amount of protein, you ensure optimal growth; it’s as simple as that.

After all, you want to build muscle and to do that, you need a steady supply of high quality protein. You must include an optimal amount of protein in your muscle building diet in order to build and sustain muscle growth.

So how much protein should you include in your muscle building nutrition for maximum performance and muscle gain? Each of us has very different body types and the amount of protein will differ from individual to individual.

Protein intake will also depend on the amount of activity involved and how frequently you do it.

Your muscle building diet should be comprised of 30% to 40% protein, or about 1 to 1.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight. You will have to do a bit of experimenting at the beginning to find out your optimal protein intake.

What fuels muscle?

If you want to build muscle, you’re going to have to take in a lot of quality, complex carbohydrates. No question about it. You are going to have to fuel your body to handle heavy weight lifting.

You must include an optimal amount of carbohydrates in your muscle building nutrition program in order to fuel heavy weight lifting sessions.

Carbohydrates are a very important source of fuel for the muscles as well as the leading source of energy for your body. When you have a hard workout, your body draws on carbohydrates, which is stored as glycogen in the muscles.

Glycogen is the product of glucose, which comes from the breakdown of carbohydrates after the digestion of food. Glycogen is stored in the liver and muscle.

During a long intense muscle building session, you can easily deplete your glycogen reserves. When your muscles cannot get enough glycogen, fatigue sets in and your body begins to lose endurance and performance drastically reduces.

However, there is a way to delay the onset of muscle fatigue. By taking enough carbohydrates each day in your muscle building diet, you are ensuring that the amount of glycogen stored in the muscles is being constantly replenished.

Every meal must have sufficient carbohydrates to sustain your hard intense workouts It is suggested that your muscle building diet consist of 40% carbohydrates. If you want to build muscle, you need quality carbs every meal.

If you don’t consume enough quality carbohydrates, your body will resort to other fuel sources such as protein.

Protein is a second rate energy source. Protein’s primary job is to build muscle, not fuel it. Therefore, keep your body filled with grade A fuel to support and maximize your hard, intense muscle building workouts.

If you use the tips written above in making your own personal muscle building nutrition, you’ll be a lot healthier and you’ll succeed in having the rock-hard body you’ve always wanted.

But this can happen only by having good muscle building nutrition.

Divorced Dads Tips: Christmas and Holiday Access Tips – Celebrate Christmas Day before Mom

While Christmas and holidays, it really comes down to looking at things differently. Part of it is understanding the process of celebrating Christmas, and not letting that process get to you. This is where reframing it will really help. Some of this may sound foreign to you because right now it is an emotionally charged period of time and you just want to get something resolved now and it is not happening the way you want. We encourage you to not give up. Instead, step back and look at this in a much more logical way and a more strategic way and that is where we come in to help you with those strategies.

The first and most important part is not to rise to the bait of what is being put out top the Family Court and others – That were a) the bad dad, b) you are the deadbeat dad, c) that you are a menace to your child and society at large and cannot be trusted. Above all, if you are angry and why would you not be over all this.

We get calls where there are dads on the phone that are very, very angry. It’s understandable and totally justified. However, no one within the system that is going to help you, nor help you turn around the situation if you are presenting yourself in an angry way. They will be looking at you and saying, “Oh okay. No wonder you are not seeing your kids. Look at where you are at.”

A lot of your strategizing will come down to positioning. Often, many fathers or the grandparents have been positioned because of a lack of knowledge or a lack of education or a lack of guide rules?

Well, they are up against the wall. They have been pushed there. They are up against bigotry and ignorance.

Sometimes it is also the other party has more money for legal fees available to spend in Family Court proceedings, or they are on some sort of legal assistance so they can keep going back to court. Sometimes you cannot because you cannot afford to anymore. It is not a level playing field. The unfortunate casualties here are our children.

What distinguishes those fathers and grandparents who are successful in this situation is this: They were having a problem but ultimately they got it resolved before Christmastime – They started early, getting to Family Court long before the rush hour that happens the last few days before Christmas.

The fact is that the court system works very slowly and December is when people start worrying about seeing their kids. Also, marriages break up in December and January. It is the busiest time of marriage and family breakup there is in a year.

So, if you want to see your child, get started with your pans in October.

Why is that again?

For the very reason that in December, Family Court is just a bottleneck. There is just not enough time to get you in front of a judge to state your case as to what the problems are.

Now, here is one factor that you would keep in mind. This is something I am sure some of the people are thinking. Well, in October, everything seemed fine. I did not think it would be a problem seeing my kid for Christmas. Now, all of a sudden here we are a week away and I am being told “Well, no, you can’t have little Danny on Christmas Eve like we originally planned. I’ve got something else going on now. You can see him for a couple of hours on Boxing Day on the 26th.”

Well, this is why they have in every court system in the western world emergency procedures for just that sort of thing. That is why family court is so jam-packed at Christmas. The problem though that we encounter a lot of times and the statistics here in Southern, Ontario — and this well pretty much throughout I think the western world from everybody I have ever talked to on this subject, 50-85% of people are going through family court with no lawyer whatsoever because either:

(A) They never had the money in the first place Or they spent all their money;

(B) They spent all their money; or

(C) They have had such a rotten experience they do not want a lawyer but they still do not know what to do.

The other problem of course is that you do eventually run out of money and you may not have all of your issues resolved when that money does run out. So, what do you do then?

The solution really comes down to is that you have got to become an educated consumer of the legal services and family courts services. In other words, you have to take it upon yourself to begin learning how the process works. The first place to start really is to go into your local family court and start watching on motion days to watch how judges decide things, to watch how the lawyers argue things, to see if you still have some money and you are interested in hiring a lawyer see if you could find a lawyer who actually can win for a father.

BUT consider the following: What if you celebrated Christmas a week early? What if you didn’t tell the kids you were going to do this? Do you think they’d be unhappy?

Of course not and look at the legal fees you just saved that you can spend on Christmas presents instead.

My best advice: Celebrate Christmas Day before Mom you will be a HERO to your kids,

How to Select Your Martial Arts Equipment

Many people are planning to start learning about martial arts nowadays but may not have taken into account the fact that they will need martial arts equipment to be able to practice this hobby or occupation. Here are some tips on how to get the best martial arts equipment you need:

1.Try to figure out which martial arts equipment you want to become proficient in. The uniforms in martial arts differ in design, color and use so you have to be specific about which uniform you wish to use. This also applies to your martial arts equipment since the martial arts equipment for one martial art may be unique to that martial art.

2.Find out what protective gear you need to be able to spar and train in your preferred martial arts. Protective gear as martial arts equipment is very important because the last thing you want is to get injured in a sparring session. Protective gear as martial arts equipment can be categorized either as head gear (like face masks and helmets), gear to protect your torso (like chest shields), gear to protect your groin (which is more for men than women, and may consist of a crotch guard or sports cup to shield your privates from being punched or kicked), shin guards to keep the shin area of your legs from being injured when you block a flying kick with your legs (since getting hit on the shin tends to be rather painful since there isn’t much flesh and muscle to shield your shin bone), feet gear (such as kicking boots, designed to keep your opponent from being critically injured if you should hit them with your legs or feet), and hand gear (such as punching mitts, used also to shield your opponent from the full force of your punches.) You need to invest in quality martial arts equipment as protective gear so you get the best protection possible.

3.You can also invest in practice martial arts equipment. This means getting punching bags (like those used in boxing), and martial arts dummies (which attempt to give you an idea of how to punch and kick a real human being.) Your punching bag can consist of either the teardrop bag or the bigger boxing-type punching bag. Martial arts dummies are basically like punching bags except they may be a bit bigger and shaped like human bodies. Though these martial arts equipment are no replacement for sparring and training with real-live opponents (because these practice equipment cannot dodge your blows or retaliate), they are very important to have around so you can get the feel for the sport.

4.There will be sports that require you to become proficient in certain martial arts weapons (which are also martial arts equipment.) However, you should always be careful when trying out such weapons in the first few sessions because you might hurt someone badly (such as yourself) if you don’t know what you are doing. If you are at the stage when martial arts equipment like weapons are necessary, then always pay attention to your instructor and learn how to master the weapons first. Often, such weapons were designed to maim your opponent and maybe even kill him so caution is always necessary in training with weapons.

Martial arts equipment were designed to work a certain way. Many martial arts equipment have a long history that can help you study how your preferred martial arts evolved. Study carefully how martial arts equipment are meant to be used and they can really help you become a better martial artist afterwards.