Bodybuilders need to work the body’s muscles but not until the muscles fail. This is false and not the correct way to train.  I am sure you have heard you should overwork you muscles to see results.  Overwork only tears your muscles and then they grow back bigger and much stronger, true. However, you don’t to this at every training session.

You need to schedule and regulate your training, so you don’t fall into overtraining. Overtraining gets your bodybuilding career nowhere.  Leap-frog your overwork days or schedule overwork days at least twice a week.  Remember, nobody knows your body better than you do, so experiment and see what schedule works best for you. If you take a couple of days off for rest, it might do your body good.

Competition diet is one of the most important aspects for preparing for a competition. The idea of the competition diet is to get the cut look.  Cardio can help with this. However, since you are on a strict diet, at this time, exercise may work against you. Try experimenting to find out what works best until you know your body well.

The last week of the diet is a game of chance and many competitors test their diet tricks at this stage. The tricks are fat loading, carb loading, sodium loading and depletion. The purpose of these is to increase muscle density and fullness with maximum vascularity. You might have heard this being called “peaking.”A bodybuilder can only keep the peak condition very short phase of time. For this reason, it is crucial that peak condition be reached during the competition - pre-judging - the morning show is ideal.  If the bodybuilder doesn’t calculate his peak time correctly, like the day after or before the show, it is a real tragedy. All that hard work to watch the bodybuilder lose control of his body is tough to experience.  The bodybuilder comes in one day ripped and vascular and the next day flat and smooth. It is a good idea to experiment and see what works best for your body.

The World Natural Bodybuilding Federation means business when they say no drugs and build the mass naturally.  Visit WNBF drug-free terms by clicking on this link.  See if you could build with these limitations. Judging from the pictures of their members, they look pretty pumped and healthy. The WNBF is the world leader in drug-testing bodybuilding and figure competition.

“The WNBF will award more than $81,000 in prize money in 2008, and will finish the year at more than $950,000 in prize money handed to the best Pro Natural bodybuilders and figure competitors in the world!”

When you decide to compete as a bodybuilder, you will have to face the Competition Diet. IT is most likely the most difficult aspect of contest preparation. Your workout may last an hour or two; yet dieting is 24/7. It takes a lot of willpower and determination if you plan to be successful at competition.

The diet is also expensive. The diet takes quality food, protein powders, MRP’s (meal replacements) and supplements add up quickly so be geared up. The definitive goal of the Competition Diet is to lose the maximum amount of body fat while retaining the maximum amount of lean muscle mass. But realize you will lose some muscle during this process. Reportedly the ratio is 1 pound of muscle to every 3 pounds of body fat.

Place your hand at the back of the neck. Meet your neck. This particular body part has a very important job to do — support your head. 

The muscles of the neck flex and rotate the neck forwards and backwards and side to side. While you turn the head, your neck muscles do all the work to carry your head.  As you perform your routines and your neck is not prepared or exercised correctly, the movement of your neck develops into achy and stiff. A well-exercised neck may perhaps save your life and keep you bodybuilding well in to your golden years.

There are four muscles of the neck that keep your head on straight. The rotators muscles supports the head in moving from side to side as well as help you glance over your shoulder while your drive your car. The flexors muscles help the head move up and down, so the chin can touch the chest. The lateral flexors muscles help the head tilt from side to side from ear to shoulder. The extensors muscles support the head, so it can tilt backward and help you see the white puffy clouds in the beautiful sky as a bird flies through.

America’s Worst Breakfast Foods
Courtesy of Yahoo Health

By David Zinczenko, with Matt Goulding

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of eating breakfast. Studies show that people who take time for a morning meal consume fewer calories over the course of the day, have stronger cognitive skills, and are 30 percent less likely to be overweight or obese. Beyond that, people who skip breakfast are more likely to drink alcohol and smoke, and they’re less likely to exercise.

But just because breakfast is the most important meal of the day doesn’t grant you permission to go into a feeding frenzy. But that’s exactly what many of the country’s most popular breakfast joints are setting you up for, by peddling fatty scrambles, misguided muffins, and pancakes that look like manhole covers.

These foods are loaded with unhealthy fats, added sugars, and refined carbohydrates, which catapult your blood sugar, sap your energy levels, and tell your body to store fat.

To help you avoid the morning mishaps, we searched out the good, the bad, and the greasy, and uncovered some of the worst breakfast foods in America. We’ve presented a sampling of the worst offenders below. It’s like a lineup down at the local police station, except in this case, they’re all guilty as charged.

Read the rest of this entry »

V.E. Irons, founding father of the National Health Federation and Yale graduate, contracted a condition of arthritis at the age of 40.  He became a student of natural health out of sheer desperation.  What Irons found was that in order to regain vital, youthful health, detoxification of his body was the first step.  Irons dedicated his life to teaching people to take charge and change their approach to health. 

He was convinced that the colon of the average American had gotten so distorted through all the years of poor eating habits and improper elimination.  He believed that unless all fecal matter is removed from the colon, no amount of drugs, surgeries, vitamins or food supplements would rid the body of all chronic ailments.

Bodybuilders and athletes in general need to be cognitive of overtraining. If you have ever been or are a bodybuilder or competitive athlete, you have some time in your sports career experienced overtraining. It happens frequently in athletes who train for competition or a specific event. They train further than their bodies are capable of recovering. 

Bodybuilders and athletes regularly exercise longer and harder with the purpose of improving their abilities. There is nothing wrong with this type of training. Yet, if bodybuilders train without sufficient rest and recovery, these training programs flop and in reality reduce the body’s strength, immune system and overall performance.

Training means conditioning the body, which requires a balance between overload and recovery. Every athlete needs to watch for too much overload and not enough recovery, which results in physical and mental exhaustion.

A few symptoms are:

Irritability

Tiredness

Frequent Colds or Flu Like Symptoms

Restless Sleep

Increase in Muscle Pain

If helping your body run as efficiently as possible is a priority to you, then read on. If not, go out, get yourself a cheeseburger and some fries and sit in front of the TV.

In 1988, the Surgeon General determined that “eight of the top ten causes of disease are directly related to our diet.”  Among the top ten diseases are heart disease, coronary heart disease, cancer, strokes, chronic lung disease, diabetes, liver disease and atherosclerosis.

Webster’s dictionary defines health as a “condition of wholeness in which all of the organs of the body are working at perfect efficiency 100% of the time.”

Over the generations, our body has been guided by our nervous sensory system.  With our sense of taste and smell we determined what to feed ourselves.  With our sense of intelligence we have been able to create items of better taste and smell thus fooling our own bodies into desiring things that are not of optimum benefit to our own healthy living. And to what end?  We have tricked ourselves into consuming the very items that are now poisoning our systems.

Oftentimes it is difficult to accept responsibility for our own health.  If we become ill, we blame luck, fate, genetics, germs or viruses, though our intelligence may hint to us that it could be our own actions that violate natural health laws.

We have the power to increase our health and energy level thus reducing stress, fatigue, headaches and heart disease among common ailments.  Nutrient deficiency and autointoxication are the two conditions from which all other symptoms and maladies stem.

To get leaner and build your mass it’s conducive to add detox food to your diet because it not only helps you feel refreshed and healthier it lowers your weight and cleanses your body. You’ll even look better, which is a great byproduct. 

To help you begin enjoying more detox food, here are some detox foods you can buy at the grocery store.  Once you add these foods to your diet you’ll reap the benefits. 

Keep in mind to drink lots of water while you add detox foods to your diet because water flushes out toxins. 

First of all, consume green leafy vegetables. Eating them raw is better, but if you must add them to warm broth. Leafy vegetables contain a wonderful element called chlorophyll. Chlorophyll cleanses environmental toxins like heavy metals and pesticides.  It is a very effective liver bodyguard. 

Every morning drink water with fresh lemon juice.  Lemons contain vitamin C. Vitamin C is a detox vitamin. Amazingly, lemons take toxins, convert them to water-soluble substance that flushes out of the body.