Lee Hayward asked:


How would you like to learn a simple trick that will help you pack on a solid pound of muscular bodyweight each and every week without spending any more time in the gym and without forcing feeding yourself by trying to choke down more food at each meal?

Well in this article I’m going to show you exactly how to do just that by overcoming one of the most catabolic times of the day for you, and turning it into your advantage. Do you know when the most catabolic time of day is? It’s when you go to sleep because you literally starve your muscles for eight hours!

Just think about it, you would never go eight hours during the day without eating a meal. But that is exactly what you do each and every night when you go to bed. The old time bodybuilders knew about this. And during heavy bulk up training phases they would literally set their alarm clocks and wake up during the middle of the night and eat a high protein meal in order to prevent muscle breakdown.

If you are staying a certain weight right now then you are consuming your maintenance calorie intake. In order to gain muscle you need to consume above this calorie maintenance level. But chances are if you are struggling to gain weight then you feel that you are already eating like a mad man and can’t possibly eat any more food.

However, this middle of the night meal will provide these much needed extra calories for muscle gain, and since this is in addition to your daily meals it won’t feel like you are forcing down more food. Another bonus is that because you haven’t eaten for several hours most of the calories will be headed for your muscles and not stored as bodyfat.

If you consume a night-time meal replacement or protein shake with 500 calories in it; that’s 3500 calories for the week over and above your current maintenance calorie intake. This will help you gain about 1 lb. of solid muscle a week. If you can stick with it you can gain some serious muscular bulk pretty quickly.

There are 2 ways to squeeze in this extra muscle building meal…

One option is to set your alarm clock for the middle of the night. However, if you are like me you **** the sound of the alarm clock as it jolts you out of your sleepy slumber like a slap in the face.

The second option, which is a lot more easy, is to simply drink a couple glasses of water before going to bed. This will naturally make you wake up in a few hours because you’ll have to go to the bathroom.

Then all you have to do is before you go to bed is mix up a meal replacement drink in a shaker bottle and put it right on the bathroom counter. This way you don’t even have to think about it, you can just drink it and then go back to bed.

It only takes a few minutes of preparation each night and then a couple minutes to chug down the meal replacement drink. The little bit of work involved is well worth the reward of a bigger more muscular physique.



PILEGGI

Lee Hayward asked:


There is one key element that can literally mean the difference between making steady progress towards your bodybuilding and fitness goals and making no progress at all…

What I’m about to talk about is very simple, and I know you’ve heard of it before, but chances are you’re not applying it as part of your routine.

It is keeping a journal…

Now just to set the record straight, keeping a journal is not just something for giggling schoolgirls to do in their spare time. But it is one of the best tools you have available for tracking your nutrition and finding out where you can make improvements to move yourself closer towards your fitness goals.

Your nutrition journal doesn’t have to be anything fancy or complicated, just a simple notebook will do. All you need to do is each day write down what you eat and when you eat it. You can also keep track of other things like your bodyweight, bodyfat percentage, etc.

Keeping a journal gives you the data you need to figure out if you’re eating too much, or too little, eating the right foods, or the wrong foods. You can track patterns in your eating that you might not otherwise notice.

I recently read a study that showed on average, overweight people forgot approx. 50% of what they ate over the past 24 hours. They either forgot it entirely or they underestimated how much food they ate.

And I’ve also seen the opposite happen with underweight people who are struggling to gain muscular bodyweight, they often ‘underestimate’ how much they are eating and then wonder why they can’t gain weight.

By simply monitoring your food intake with a nutrition journal you’ll have more control over your results then people who try to “wing it” with their eating.

For the first week of keeping a nutrition journal I don’t want you to change a thing with your eating routine, just write down what you eat and when you eat it. But try to be as specific as possible…

For example, don’t just write down for breakfast at 7:00 am I ate “cereal and toast”. Write down what kind of cereal, how much, how many slices of toast, what you had on it, etc. and simply do this for each of your meals.

I realize that this will take some effort and it is a bit of a nuisance, but in order to develop a lean muscular physique you are going to have to keep accurate records of your nutrition. Guessing is not good enough.

After doing this for a full week, simply review your nutrition journal and ask yourself:

“Where Can I Improve My Eating To Move Closer Towards My Fitness Goals?”

It could be something as obvious as:

“I shouldn’t have eaten that double cheese burger, with large fries, and a DQ Blizzard for lunch yesterday.”

Or it could be something less obvious like:

“I need to eat more quality protein with my breakfast.”

When you keep an accurate journal of your eating like this it becomes a lot easier to pin point places where you are making mistakes and where you can improve. Just being conscious of what you are eating will automatically cause you to make better food choices.

The key with your eating is to just focus on making improvements. Don’t try to be perfect. But do get in the habit of recording your food intake, and then each week review your journal and pick 1 or 2 areas that you are going to focus on over the next week.

Stick with this week after week, and before you know it following a high quality nutrition plan that moves you closer to your physique goals will become automatic, it will just be part of your normal eating pattern.

A great recourse that I use personally when calculating out nutritional information is: http://www.calorieking.com

This website has a search function that allows you to search for virtually any food and instantly get the calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat, etc. You can even enter the portion sizes and it will automatically add up the numbers for you. It is a great tool that will make keeping your nutrition journal a lot easier.

Also, if you haven’t already done so, you should download a copy of my “Bodybuilding Nutrition Made Simple” e-Report. This e-Report outlines the basics of sound bodybuilding nutrition and has some great time saving meal preparation tips that you can use to help make following a healthy muscle building / fat burning eating plan more convenient.

You can download your copy right on my home page at: http://www.LeeHayward.com



OK

Lee Hayward asked:


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Number 5 - Not Monitoring Your Progress:

So many people just go through the motions with their workouts. They get into the habit of showing up at the gym day after day and mindlessly go through their routine. How many people do you see at the gym with no written plan and no way to keep score to tell if they are making progress?

For a lot of these people going to the gym just becomes a part of their social life. Now I agree that this habit is a lot healthier then hanging out at the local pub. But the time you spend in the gym could be a lot more productive and result in building a lot more muscle.

What gets measured gets improved. All it takes is little bit of time planning out where you want to go and then create a plan of action on how you are going to get there. Or get an experienced coach to help you create an action plan. The old saying “failing to plan, is planning to fail” is often overused, but it is 100% accurate, especially when it comes to bodybuilding.

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Number 4 - Performing Too Much Exercise: Overtraining

Working out too much is just as detrimental to building muscle as doing nothing at all. Once you workout you have to give your body time to repair and grow through rest. A common mistake that people make is thinking that they will get better results if they workout for several hours everyday. This is not true because what happens is the body get stressed and damaged but doesn’t get a chance to recover and build up. This is what is called “over training”. When you over train your body can’t build muscle.

Common signs of over-training include pain and joint injuries, insomnia, prolonged fatigue, lack of motivation to workout, and just feeling burnt out and exhausted. Taking time to rest and recover are vital for achieving long term consistent muscle and strength gains.

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Number 3 - Performing Too Little Exercise: Undertraining

This one is the opposite of the previous one, people tend to take things to one extreme or the other, no one wants to take a moderate approach. Just like some people will think that if some exercise is good, then more must be better. And end up “overtraining”. Others, who have learned about the negatives of overtraining, have taken it to the other extreme thinking that “if some rest is good, then more rest is better”.

The fitness media will always play on people’s laziness and therefore try to promote “easy workouts” as the answer to getting in shape. But the reality is that working out and getting in shape takes effort. There is just no way around it. Anyone who try’s to tell you otherwise is just full of BS…

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Number 2 - Thinking You Need Supplements To Build Muscle:

The magazines are the ones to blame for this. In a typical muscle magazine over 50% of the pages are ads (in some cases it’s a lot more). And a lot of the articles are just fancy sales letters recommending muscle building and fat burning supplements.

The truth is supplements are NOT necessary to build a lean muscular physique. Exercise and nutrition are the only things you REALLY need. There are some supplements can help a little, but not nearly as much as you may have been lead to believe. About 95% of your results will come from proper training and nutrition.

A lot of people have their priorities backwards and spend their time worrying about what supplements to take, rather then focusing on improving their training and eating, which is responsible for 95% of their progress.

It is very common for the typical novice bodybuilder, who has just started working out, to immediately go looking for a ’short cut’ by getting a bottle of “Super Duper Anabolic Muscle Dust 2000″.

It’s a shame that so many people are looking for instant gratification, instead of making the effort to learn how to eat and train better. Get your nutrition and training in order first. Then you can experiment with supplements, if you want to, and see if they make any difference to your overall progress.

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Number 1 - Not Following A Sound Nutrition Plan:

Your diet is one of the most critical aspects of your muscle building routine. You can be spot on with your workouts, but if you don’t fuel your body properly you will NOT get the results you want. Most bodybuilders that I work with day to day don’t have any problems going to the gym and working out. But more often then not they get slack when it comes to nutrition.

The whole idea of eating 6 well-balanced meals per day for bodybuilding is by no means a new concept. You probably already have a good idea of how you should be eating. But the main excuse is usually not having time to eat properly. However, eating a “junk-food” diet takes just as much or more time then it does to eat a healthy diet. At lunch heading over to the fast food joint, waiting in line at the drive through, and then heading back to work takes a lot more time then if you had your food prepared in advance and ready to eat.

The key to following a healthy bodybuilding nutrition program is planning ahead. When you cook your food always prepare for several meals. It doesn’t take any more time to cook larger quantities of food then it does to cook smaller amounts of food for just one meal. Purposely plan to have left overs that you can re-heat in the microwave, this saves time and makes it easier to have quick nutritious meals on hand.

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Transform Your Body From Flabby To Muscular with a Customized Diet and Training Program. Lee Hayward can help you get into your best shape ever with a personalized diet and training program. Whether your goal is to lose body fat, gain muscle, or increase strength; Lee will help get the results you want. For more information visit Lee’s website at: http://www.LeeHayward.com



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