Directions to the beach.

    Not everyone has the goal of losing weight. For many who have reached their weight lose goal, or are naturally thin they are more interested in refining how their body looks. For some that means creating lean muscle, which boosts metabolism and cuts back on the jiggle. Others may want big muscles, these tend to be more for show than anything else, and tend to be wanted by men.

   Building large muscles in a healthy way, like healthy weight lose is a long term issue and involves math. I talk about math more here than I ever thought I would.

    Now the bulk of the information I am about to give you a cribbed from a Jillian Michaels podcast so feel free to check that out if this all seems a little confusing.

  To start a healthy goal is to gain about 10lbs of muscle over the course of a year. This added muscle may also shift your body composition, resulting in a lower body fat percentage. You should also only start this if you have already reached your weight lose goals, this type of workout doesn't focus on fat lose so it's best to start from a good place.

  To start you need to find the heaviest weight you can lift once with good form, if you can do 2 reps with good form than you haven't gone heavy enough. Once you know your one rep max find what would be 85% of that weight, this is the weight you will be working with. Your new workout will be to do 3-5 reps (good form) with this new weight. If you can do more than 5 and keep good form you need to increase your weight, you may notice this over the course of the year so allow for occasional adjustments.

   What you're doing is creating new muscle fibres, it's these new fibres that will add the bulk you're after. Building these fibres take energy from your body with means you will need to cut back on your cardio and allow for recovery time between workouts. Excess cardio shunts energy away from muscle production, so if you keep a high cardio routine in you workout you'll limit your muscle growth. That's not to say you should do no cardio, just don't go making it the bulk of your workout. Another aspect to consider with muscle growth is that it take place when that body is recovering, so you can't work the same muscles at every workout. A good rule of thumb is to take every third day off, so you'll workout 5 days a week, and don't work a muscle group more than twice a week.

    Lastly, you need to consider your eating. You'll need to eat quite a bit so your body will have the energy (protein) to build new muscle. The basic formula (yes, math again) is...

Goal weight x (hours worked out a week + 9.5) = kcal

    

     So, if your goal weight is 190lbs and you're working out 5 hours a week your daily caloric intake would be 2755kcal. That doesn't mean you can eat crap, remember you're trying to build muscle, your body needs protein to build muscle so count on eating a LOT of lean protein. 

And that my friends is how you gain 10lbs of muscle in 365 days. 

Tara

Denying denial.

        When people start trying to lose weight they have a slash and burn approach to their eating. Chucking out every food they love, with a vow to never eat it again. Changing to an ultra healthy, extremely limited collection of foods will yield results, but it's just not practice for living a normal life. I'm not saying "don't eat healthy", but I am saying that you should eat realistically.

     Allow yourself an escape route. By allotting roughly 200kcal of your daily caloric limit for none perfectly healthy foods should give you just enough freedom to stop you from breaking down, bingeing, and giving up.  A flexible approach to eating is a major ingredient in long term weight lose. There will be days when you can't work out, or eat more than your BRM (basal metabolic rate), but that doesn't mean that you have to stop losing weight or gain weight.

    A great example of this is how I've been living lately. I'm in a friends wedding party, that means I haven't been the one controlling the food I have access to. I try and make the better food choices and keep within my BMR, but with the travel to and from the events, plus the time at the events themselves I just don't have time to workout. There are a couple different ways I can approach these situations.

1) I can bank my all or a portion of my 200kcal daily treat reserve. This way when everything is added up at the end of the week I will have had the same amount of calories as the week before. This approach can also be done retroactively. If you unexpectedly go out to dinner, someone buys you a treat, or you just really want one blow out calorie bomb meal you can just cut back your calorie intake by 50-100kcal till things even out.

2) Add extra workouts. This will be easier for people who are counting both calories in and calories out (look to Breaking it down for my parents for more info). Like the calorie banking this can be done before  or after the event, or a combination. By adding about 15 minutes to the cardio portion of your workout can burn about 100kcal. This wont replace a missed workout but it will help soften the blow.

   I find a combination of the two approaches works best for me. Most importantly because I knew I had options I never worried over what food would be at an event, or if I'd be home in time to workout. I just kept going, as I have been and continue to see results.

Tara