Articlr

All right, so you want to get strong and go to the gym to work. You may think that pumping weights is all you have to do, but it is not that simple.

It is nutrition that plays in big role when it comes to recovery and growth. You need to change your diet according to the increase or decrease of your muscle mass. If you gain muscle you need to eat more. If you loose muscle you need to eat less. How can you observe what is occurring inside your body?

First you will want to monitor your weight and see if your goal of adding muscle is causing your bodyweight to increase. If the weight is stay as it is, then we need to look at increasing the food taken in. You are eating too much if your weight is increasing and if your stomach is growing. Be careful, as initially your weight will increase with lifting, and you want to monitor for increased in the dreaded fat.

Using body fat calipers is a great technique to assess whether muscle or fat is increasing. You can use the calipers every other week. If muscle seems to be going down according to your calipers, that is the evidence that you are not eating enough good nutrition. If the calipers reflect that the percent of bodyfat is increasing then you will have to consume less.

All good gyms will have a set of calipers and as long as the same person does the measurements every time you should be able to get a true reading as to what exactly is happening. Once you have obtained the amount of total millimeters and your bodyweight, the chart that comes with the calipers will show what bodyfat percentage you are.

If you take your bodyweight in pounds and times it by the bodyfat percentage then that will come out with your total bodyfat. Then take this figure from the total bodyweight and that will give you a figure for your fat free mass. The figure is not all muscle but includes internal organs, bones, etc, but just use the figure as muscle for our calculations.

After these two figures have been worked out, you should keep notes of your total body fat and free mass. You can then compare these measurements in the future to check if your body fat percentage has increased. You'll discover that with proper food consumption and balanced exercise and nutrition, the amount of mass without fat increases while bodyfat total decreases. If you don't eat enough, your muscles and fat free mass will decrease, but your body fat will increase.