Search Results for: muscle

June 22, 2020 By Soni Thakur 2 Comments

Do Your Muscles Turn Into Fat When You Stop Weight Training?

Being indoors for this long has given people a lot of time to do some research. If you have been researching fitness, weight training and muscles, I’m sure the thought of – “will my muscles turn into fat if I stop weight training” has crossed your mind. While you might watch your fitness levels, maintain a healthy weight and improve strength, etc, it is equally important to understand what happens once you stop weight training in order to preserve muscle mass.

What Do Muscles Mean?

Muscle is a tissue in animal bodies. Their main purpose is to help us move our body parts. When a muscle is activated via exercise, it contracts, making itself shorter and thicker i.e. it grows in size.

When you exercise, your body does not create new muscles. Instead, your existing muscles grow larger and stronger.
With regular exercise, muscles also develop more mitochondria (this is where biochemical processes of respiration and energy production occur in the cell). The result is larger and more muscle mass.
When you stop weight training/adopt a sedentary lifestyle, then the increased blood flow previously needed to fuel your cells during exercise is no longer required, so your body begins to contract and reduce the size of your capillaries. As a consequence, muscles shrink and decrease in mass.

Points To Consider

Muscle cells and fat cells are different structures and are not interchangeable at all. They will become smaller and weaker if you stop weight training because they lose muscle mass. Although, it will not happen in a short period of time as the process of losing muscle mass is slow and gradual which may take 4-6 weeks. Fat may be produced if your diet provides your body with more calories than required based on the activity levels you maintain.

You can preserve and maintain your muscle mass by keeping yourself active. By active I do not mean hitting the gym everyday but by just walking in between breaks, using the staircase instead of the lift, stretching your body every 2 hours, walking while being on a call instead of just sitting at one place, walking after every meal whether it’s your main meal or just snacks in between and obviously by eating a well- balanced healthy diet.

Keep an eye on your protein intake because the protein requirement of your body is directly associated with building and losing muscle mass as well. Don’t overtrain as this can also lead to decreased muscle. Leaving weight training alone should not be blamed for decreased muscle mass. 40-45 minutes of exercise 5-6 days a week is recommended and 1 day should be dedicated for rest and recovery.

We hope this article helps you. For more useful information on muscles, strength training, etc. check out Healthy Reads or tune in to fitness experts on GOQii Play.

February 17, 2020 By Tanmaya Patil Leave a Comment

5 Muscle Building Mistakes Which Might Be Keeping You From Your Goal

If you’ve been looking at motivational posters on social media or your local gyms which have “go hard or go home” or “work until your muscles hurt” or “no gain without pain” or something to the effect of relating success to extreme weight training, then you’ve clearly been looking at the wrong posters. We come over so many cases where users claim that they’ve been at it in the gym for so long without ever achieving their desired result. In order to help you avoid the same fate, we’re sharing this article on muscle building mistakes!

Common Muscle Building Mistakes to Avoid

1. Prioritising Quantity Over Quality
We live in an age where we believe more is better. A gaze around the gym might show mindless addition of reps and set backed by piling unreasonably more plates (mostly on the leg press machine and rarely the squat rack if not for 1/100th partial rep squats). Most folks aiming to add muscle might believe training seven days a week must undeniably be better than three. What these people fail to realise is the foundation of quality muscle building still rests upon what it used to be about a hundred years ago – Getting stronger. Becoming stronger is neural training. The central nervous system demands its necessary share of rest before it is ready to tackle new challenges in your next workout. In the words of the Bodybuilding Legend Lee Haney: “Stimulate, not annihilate!”

Pro Tip: Build Movement Quality in a lift before gradually adding volume (sets and reps), before gradually adding weight.

2. Chasing The Pump
If you are a true meathead, you remember the first time you curled that lonely barbell in the gym and the immediate next thing you did was flex your arms before the nearest mirror. It’s okay if you did. Pursuit of the ‘pump’ or build-up of metabolic fluid as a result of high volume resistance training in a muscle has fascinated millions of people entering muscle building. The degree to which pump helps increase muscle size fades as quickly as the pump itself a few hours after training. Don’t get me wrong, metabolic and high rep training has its place, though making every exercise in your program a high rep per set one in order to feel the temporary pump at the expense of actually getting stronger (refer to point 1 above) would be a big miss.

Pro Tip: Focus more on documented progress in weight lifted and the volume for which it is lifted rather than an arbitrary goal like ‘feeling the pump’.

3. Pain is (the only way to) Gain
Most people wearing the ‘Pain is Gain’ t-shirts have a very myopic vision of their training years. Most of them belong to the late teens to late twenties. Fast forward ten years and they may soon begin to laugh at their idea of ‘balls-to-the-walls’ intensity every workout, week after week. As we age, especially as we enter 30s, training revolves more about recovery than making unending progress. Joints and connective tissue take a solid hit if we are really lifting seriously. As such, making every workout a masochistic fiesta can seriously hamper our joints’ ability to outperform them later.

Pro Tip: It’s okay if a workout didn’t leave you hurt and devastated. Try to make a majority of your workouts in a year energizing and your training longevity might increase by several years.

4. Taking Supplements Is Like Pressing A Switch
All of us know that someone who swears by his or her shelf full of powders and pills claiming to transform them into a machine. Supplements have their place in the life of serious strength and physique athlete. However, replacing natural, real food with doses of meal replacement drinks is a strategy that might fail to deliver real robust and healthy changes in your physique. Quality, natural and fresh nutritional food would always beat sole supplementation.

Pro Tip: Make a select handful of supplements such as Whey and Creatine Monohydrate a tool to fill in the gaps in your nutrition wherever or whenever you see it, rather than a staple in your diet.

5. I Need To Train Like A Pro
In the pursuit of ‘Big Guns’, an amateur might look up the internet for the training split of an eight time Mr. Olympia winner and begin to emulate it in his training. The efforts might soon begin to be outweighed by the stopping of gains through either injury or incorrect loading parameters and the trainee might soon end up in dire frustration before switching to an altogether new program, this time followed by a multiple ‘World’s Strongest Man’ title winner.

Many individuals fail to understand that it might take more than a decade of continual solid and consistent effort with the big lifts in order to come anywhere near being called a pro. And we aren’t even talking about ‘pharmaceutical aids’ yet.

Pro Tip: Aim for Health first, followed by getting stronger, followed by improvement in appearance whenever drawing out your training strategy or designing a muscle building program.

We hope this article helps you avoid these common muscle building mistakes and aids you in making the right choices. For more tips, muscle building mistakes to avoid and the dos and don’ts, check out expert LIVE sessions on GOQii Play within the GOQii app.

Do leave your thoughts in the comments below and let’s #LevelUp our muscle building game!

#BeTheForce

July 1, 2019 By Mohammed Tufail Qureshi 18 Comments

Building Muscles With Proper Diet & Exercise

Body building has always fascinated me. My weight training journey began at the age of 16 and since then my goals have been very clear – building muscles and lifting weights! They became my passion.

But I realized that just lifting weights to achieve a fit body was not the solution. Anything to do with fitness requires dedication and hard work coupled with smart eating and proper rest. This ultimately helped me achieve the results I was seeking.

You must be wondering how I managed to achieve what I was seeking. Well, the idea germinated in my mind after I watched a movie, ‘Pumping Iron’ starring Arnold Schwarzenegger – my body building idol. Arnold is perhaps the greatest bodybuilder of all time! It was his personality and muscles that I admired and got kicked about lifting weights.

It’s funny – I am half as tall as him, yet I wanted to have a body like him. I set out on the path of building muscles. Within a short period of time, I learned the techniques and secrets of building muscles – which I am about to share with you.

For many of us, gaining muscle would mean spending countless hours in the gym and we seldom think a good diet is important. Remember that our body needs calories and nourishment to feed growing muscle mass and to adjust to varying amounts of activity.

I am going to tell you about building muscles through a three tier process namely proper diet, good exercise and good rest. Each of these tiers is equal and important. Let us take a closer look at each of these processes.

1. Proper Diet

To build muscles you need a proper diet that consists of micro and macro nutrients. Micro nutrients are vitamins and minerals whereas macro nutrients are a combination of protein, carbs and fat. Eating each of these micro and macro nutrients in the right quantity is important to build proper muscle mass.

Just pumping iron or what we call ‘lifting heavy weights’ in the gym does not serve the purpose. One needs to create a proper balance between the two.

Protein: One needs to eat sufficient amounts of protein to build good muscle. The rule of thumb is that an average person needs one gram of protein per kg of his body weight to maintain his muscle mass, skin and hair. But an individual who is exercising needs almost 1.5 to 2 grams of protein per kg of his body weight to build muscles. For example, if you are 150 lbs(pounds) or 68kg, you should eat between 150 and 225gm of protein each day if you want to consistently gain muscles.
Proteins are found in eggs, meat, fish, cheese, milk and soya beans. Muscles are active tissues, unlike fats. Like every active thing, muscles also need proper maintenance. In order to maintain muscles, the body needs to burn calories and that’s one reason why our basal metabolic rate (BMR) goes up. More the muscle mass in the body, more the BMR level. Increase in BMR level avoids gaining fats in the body and is very helpful for fat loss as well.
Carbs: Including carbohydrates in your diet in the morning and post workout is essential. The primary function of carbs is to provide energy. Carbs intake should be monitored very closely. One gram of carbs gives 4 calories. A number of carbs that get utilized as energy and the extra carbs that are still present, get stored as fat.
In order to avoid carbs getting stored as fat, we need to limit their intake. You can get Carbs from Sugar which provides the energy required for daily activities. Sugar may be available in three forms, lactose, fructose, and sucrose obtained from milk, table sugar, and fruits respectively. Carbs from Sugar Starch can be found in rice, beans, peas, and other grains. And lastly, carbs from fibers. Fibrous foods help in quick digestion of food and can found in some green vegetables, whole grains, peas, dry beans, bran, and soya beans etc. Fiber is also good to remove waste from your body.
Fats: Most people are of the opinion that fat is our enemy. Although, it gives 9 calories per gram. That’s much compared to carbs and proteins. The function of fats is to give energy during an emergency such as when the glucose level of the body dips to a low and there is no source of energy (Adenosine Tri Phosphate) and there is no food available in the body. In such a case, the body uses stored fat as the source of energy for that period of time.
You can get fats from olives, peanuts, sunflower, fish, nuts, flaxseeds and pumpkin seeds, soy products such as tofu or soy milk. Fats build healthy cells. Without a healthy cell membrane, the rest of the cell cannot function. Fats help the body use vitamins. Vitamins A, D, E, and K are fat-soluble vitamins, meaning that the fat in foods helps the intestines absorb these vitamins into the body. Therefore the diets should contain carbs, proteins and fats. You can get vitamins from the inclusion of green vegetables such as spinach and broccoli.
Water: is the other important nutrient that is important for our body. One who is exercising should always hydrate himself or herself well. Water provides cushioning and lubrication between joints. Pain problems around joints are a very common among bodybuilders and strength athletes. Maintaining hydration and joint health is a very important part of your training over the long haul.

2. Proper Exercise

The second tier of building muscles is through proper exercise. Without exercise, it will be impossible to build huge muscles. When we exercise there is a wear and tear process that takes place within the body and the immediate reaction of the body is to repair those muscles.

The greater and deeper the damage to the muscle, the bigger and stronger the muscle will be repaired. It is therefore important to schedule the exercise program in order to achieve great results. Weight training should be done 3-4 days a week and this should be coupled with cardio exercise on the balance days of the week when you are not weight training. With weight training, you will be able to build muscles and get stronger. With cardio, you will be strengthening your lungs and heart and it will help you increase your stamina.

3. Rest and Recovery

This is the last and final tier of building muscles. This aspect is the most neglected tier of the three. You train hard in the gym, nourish your body with proper nutrition but if you do not give enough time for your body to recover through proper rest, the body will not utilize the nutrients in a proper manner to build muscles. After a hard day’s work when you finally go to sleep, that’s when the damaged and tired muscles get repaired. One needs to sleep for at least 7-8 hours to obtain good results.

Muscle can only get stronger and bigger by stimulating it through hard exercise, helping it recover with high-performance nutrition and giving it rest.

Disclaimer: Before making sudden changes in your lifestyle, you may want to consult your doctor and trainer

If you found this article helpful, do view LIVE shows on building muscle and weight training exclusively on GOQii Play. Download the app now!

#BeTheForce

December 15, 2018 By Mohammed Tufail Qureshi 8 Comments

Sleep Your Way to More Muscle

Did you know you can build muscles even while sleeping?

The three aspects of the muscle building pyramid are nutrition, training and rest. Most of us pay close attention to the first two factors but frequently ignore the third and suffer the consequences.

Sleep isn’t a luxury for the human body; it’s a genuine necessity. Extended periods of sleep deprivation can lead to amnesia, delusions and hallucinations. Shorter stretches cause forgetfulness, bad moods and irritability.

If you’re trying to gain strength, sleep becomes even more important because it’s synonymous with recovery. If your body doesn’t get to fully recuperate from a hard workout, there’s no way it will be ready for the next one.

Heavy training destroys tissues. In order for the tissue to be repaired, your body needs the proper nutrients and deep sleep. One of the key events that occur during sleep is that the body releases growth hormone which is critical for repairing the tissues, maintaining tonus in the muscles and keeping the fat in the cells. Since the body releases growth hormone only during deep sleep, the question is how do you get deep sleep?

Getting enough rest is critical to your overall health. Lack of sleep, even for a single night, can have a huge effect on your immune system. Research has shown that there’s a 20-to-30-percent drop in immune system cells that fight cancer and viruses after just one night of sleeplessness. If sleeplessness continues over several days, the percentage of decrease of immune system cells climbs drastically, but the good news is that you can bring the number of cells back to normal with a solid night’s sleep.

So how much sleep is enough? That depends on individual to individual and it depends on a great many variables. Ideally one should aim to get at least 7-8 hours of sound sleep.

Sleep is the most critical variable affecting our workouts. How well we have slept the previous night will determine how good a workout you do the next morning.

Work-related stress is one of the many reasons that most suffer from sleep deprivation. One of the best things you can do is slip in to a nap prior to your workout. You don’t want to drop off into the deeper stages of sleep before training because it will make you groggy. Twenty to 30 minutes is plenty before a workout.

Deep sleep at night is very important and here are some of the things we can do to get sleep fast. Some people read to help them relax. Others take long showers or soak in the tub. Some like to listen to music. Chamomile tea is used by many. A warm turmeric milk will induce melatonin, which is a sleep hormone.

A light snack can be useful in promoting a more relaxed state, but it’s smart to select foods that contain the amino acid tryptophan, which converts to serotonin in the brain, helping you to feel drowsy. Milk, yogurt, cheese, turkey and fish contain tryptophan.

Now here are some things you should not do if you want to have a good night’s sleep. Don’t overindulge in alcohol. The same goes for food. Eating a large meal before bedtime isn’t conducive to going to sleep because the food will trigger various systems, including the heart, to work harder. Also, the digestive tract may become upset and disrupt sleep even more.

Avoid stimulants such as caffeine and nicotine. Try not to have coffee, tea and soft drinks. Avoid any form of strenuous exercise or participating in a competitive sport will work against you. Vigorous physical activity stimulates the body, and it takes some time to calm you down.

Don’t take your work to bed. If you make your bedroom an extension of your office, you’re sure to carry business problems with you at night. Your bedroom should be a cool, dark, sleep chamber.

You may have to do some experimenting to find out what works for you. But if you’re having trouble getting a good night’s rest on a regular basis, make some changes in your lifestyle, quickly. The “magical one-third of your life” is a critical variable in your quest to gain strength.