Gain muscle

On the subject of gaining muscle, I feel obliged to point out a few facts.
Along with every kilo of muscle you gain comes a few extra kilo’s of blood and water retention to feed the extra muscle mass. Also to gain any kind of quality muscle mass you have to eat well and eat often. As an extra insurance I would advise you actually gain a small amount of fat along the way. This guarantees you are eating enough as your body has used the excess to make fat. A good general guide is to have a period of time when your main goal is to put on weight of any kind, as extra weight in the form of fat also gives you extra strength in some exercises. Not convinced? What do Olympic weightlifters and Strongmen look like? Generally they are carrying a few kilos of extra fat for its strength benefits. Remember these guys aren’t particularly interested in how they look but are concerned by lifting the heaviest weight they can. So if being mean and lean helped them lift heavier then they would all be lean and muscular.
So in short, put on a few kilo’s of fat too while your trying to build bigger muscles, after all it can only help you in your quest. Any extra fat can be got rid of later when you diet down to your original body fat percentage and look at any improvements you may have made..
Note I say may have made, because building bigger muscles is hard work, takes time and will sometimes drive you crazy in your efforts.
Everyone wants everything now and no-one wants to put the work in or wait any length of time to get what they want. Well here’s the bad news - building muscles without steroids is hard work and takes time, and we are talking years not weeks..
Hold on before you leave, I’m not saying it takes years to improve how your body looks, or get fitter and stronger and gain some muscle. What I am saying is have patience and expect to earn what you gain in a payment of perseverance, determination and good old fashioned hard work.

Ok here goes with some good old fashioned facts about putting on muscle.
All muscles respond to any extra effort you put them through by getting bigger in case you ask them to do it again. They are naturally resistant to change and would quite happily stay the way they are, so shock tactics are what they respond to the best.
When I say shock tactics I mean making them work hard for a short amount of time, then after letting them recover for a minute or two, making them do it again.
There are two main types of fibres in muscles, fast and slow. Endurance work i.e. work done over a period of time uses mainly slow fibres, think of marathon runners. But fast fibres in muscles are used for quick bursts of effort, like sprinters.
There are only three variables you can control in any weight gain program.
These are;-Food consumption (includes liquids),Excercise and Rest/recovery.
Rest and recovery is very important and overtraining is everyones biggest problem. It takes between 24 and 36 hours for your body to recover from hard exercise and I'm not talking about how you feel either.Your body needs this time to replenish various chemicals used up in exercise.So dont make the biggest mistake of all and think more is better also dont think overdosing of supplements will get you over this period. Yes take supplements if you feel your diet is less than perfect, but your body can only process a certain amount of any vitamin or mineral at any one time. So there really is no way to get round the fact that you need to rest...Unless your taking serious amounts of steroids or other performance enhancing drugs then never train more than 12 hard sets per session and never train 2 days in a row. Yes you will see split body routines where you work one muscle group one day and another the next day. These routines dont allow for the chemical balance in your body to return to normal so treat them as routine to be used infrequently.