darklight79, I 've appreciated ur posted. U sound professional to me. NIce and thank you upon the information that u've given.

yeah, my brother is not growing as much as I want hope it grow longer

You're welcome. It's not my article though. I just pick the good ones and put them here.

Too bad for you dude

this is a good article which i check from time to time...
yup, i am fine

A very useful and helpful thread indeed.

Just one question - to all the seasoned pros in this fitness forum, is there any local websites that sells gym equipment? (like maxtrition.com which sells supplements)

Tried searching through the thread but can't seem to find anyone that mentioned this.

Would appreciate you guys out there can enlighten me on this.

Just wondering whether i can gain mass and at the same time lose fat..
i've searched many articles...some says that its impossible while some says that it can be done...hmm...confused....can anyone give some opinion?

is mee more fattening than rice?

my muscles are growin slowly....but i wud like to have a more visible tonned body with nice cutting....hw can i get those cuts? my muscles jst look bulky..dun like it... is it becuz of da diet? less carbo?

good posting here.. i agree wit u bro... all above.. thats y i didnt grow up.. just get fit only... but not too fit.. i'll upload my picture later...

i agree with no 1,2,4,9,10. this all the most important. thanks for da advice

can i substitute my tea time break with sneakers?i used to eat pau ayam@roti boom during tea time.ok or not?

wow.. it's amazing that until now ppl still think that lifting weights can stunt ur growth or make you short!

anyway, n00b here, first post in this section
what do you guys think about the body types that we all have?
Ectomorph, Endomorph and Mesomorph?
I think by knowing what type you are you can train accordingly..although i'm not sure that if you're say an endomorph ( easy to build muscle,stocky, muscles not defined ).. is it possible to become toned and ripped?
Same goes on whether ectomorphs ( tall skinny, difficult to put on mass ) can achieve size and mass?
I'm aware that one can be a combo of either of the body types..
Any opinions?

I used to be a scrawny guy. After form 5, I was 1.75 metres tall but weighed only 57kgs. 3 years later, I picked up my first set of weights. It was just a pair of 5 kgs plates attached to a bar, and I struggled like hell with it.

The best mistake I made was not to read any muscle mag and stick with fixed routines like those "10 reps x 4 sets" stuff. I was lifting that bar every single moment of free time I had. I was doing curls, triceps extensions, overhead presses.. any motion that felt natural, that didn't put my joints in an awkward position. I incorporated pressing routines into my squats as a compound movement out of intuition and the urge to experiment.

In three months, I gained 5 kgs of lean muscle mass and was ripped like hell. My college mate couldn't believe what he was seeing when I took my shirt off. In the next 3 months, I gained another 3 kgs.

This was achieved without any supplements, without any fixed regiments. I just continued increasing the weights on the bar, and bought dumbbells so that I can do a larger variety of stuff. But basically, all I did was dinosaur training.

I didn't bother counting the reps.. I just continued doing it on and on till I can't do it anymore. I didn't bother counting the sets. I did lifting anytime I had some free time on my hands.

When I started working back in 2000, I joined Fitness Network in Centrepoint Bandar Utama and continued my dinosaur training style.. intuitively doing drop sets to keep the intensity up. I'll be doing high-volume high-intensity stuff, moving from one set to another with less than 1 minute's rest in between. In some cases, like supersetting between biceps curls and triceps pressdowns, I do them back to back to failure with no rest in between, while dropping weights (dropped sets) for every subsequent sets.

I got plenty of results pretty fast. From 65kgs, I went up to 72kgs in just a year. Most other people who have been swinging those bars in the gym for 2 or 3 years didn't even get this sort of result mainly because they didn't incorporate the necessary intensity, and limited themselves with those "10 reps x 4 sets" nonsense.

What I learned down the years is that in order to gain power, strength and speed, we have to put our body in the longest duration of tension possible. Whether you're doing a static isometric routine, or doing repeated isotonic routines back to back, it doesn't matter. It is far better for gaining strength and increase the efficiency of your muscles (innervation efficiency) if we use plenty of compound movements, and force the body to undergo an extended period of elevated muscular tension.

If we're lifting weights right, we should be sweating, huffing and puffing as if we just ran 10km! Whey protein and creatine supplements go a long way towards helping the beginner, and is really good for helping the intermediate ones break past the plateaus.. especially creatine.

Eat smart, supplement smart, and do plenty of compound movements as if we're cavemen crossing a terrain on a mammoth hunt. Do it old-school, do it rigorously, and workout like an animal whose body operate as a single unit. That will give you plenty of functional strength and not just "show muscles". Incorporate lots of chinning, pushups and stretching if possible, being functionally athletic is far better in terms of health and everyday life than having a bulky body that looks clumsy and, well, bulky.

Dude, what about overtraining? You sound like you are doing it everyday and you make it like you do every set trained to failure. I had previously did every set to failure but its not good as it kills my recovery time.

what he does works for ectomorph newbies. Give it another 3 months and it won't work anymore. It doesn't work forever, nothing does.

Hmm yeah.. i can't see myself training without a proper regiment and rest..
but i believe that you need to be in your discomfort zone while working out to get good results.like really push it!
I usually do full body workouts 3 times a week + explosive + funtional; cause i play footyball regularly so need the sports kind of weight training..nothing to bulk me up

That's mostly correct but not quite. It works perfectly for ectomorphs. In fact, I suspect that these high-tension routines contribute towards satellite cell differentiation and not just hypertrophy of the myosin sheath around the actin fibers (i.e. the usual method of muscle volume increase).

Not that it didn't work after 3 months, mind you. The gains slowed down after 1 year.

However, I'm a hard-gainer. I have tried all that stuff from low-volume HIT to rest-pause to regular muscle-mag recommendations of 10 rep x 4 sets. No luck. The results don't stay for long, especially not those 10 reps x 4 sets crap. What I "gained" with those low-intensity stuff is just a "pump" that I carry on to the next workout. hence it's a false gain.

Furthermore, it was a priority for me to maintain my ability to do splits and all sorts of kicks. My cardio consisted of plenty of bagwork and compound stuff like clean & press, and I incorporated a lot of stretching.. even weighted stretches. That was due to me doing martial arts.

High-volume high-intensity training is the only stuff that has worked for me down the years. From times when I've gotten out of shape and needed to get back in shape 2 months before a company trip, or times when I needed to whip up my endurance for a half-marathon the following month, high-intensity high-volume training has worked wonders.

The lean mass that I've gained isn't the "false gain" from water retention that most supplements give. I can stop working out for a few months (like what's been happening lately ever since I started dating full-time) and gain some fat here and there, but my lean mass doesn't go away (unlike those false gains from L-arginine and creatine, which is mainly water retention). Also, I can just go back into the gym anytime and return to my old poundages within a week or two.

As for overtraining, I admit that it has the possibility to dampen recovery rates, but again this is a conventional wisdom of most muscle mags. Recovery will still be okay if your nutrition and diet is kept in check. If you juice up on whey protein at least 3 to 4 times a day (in doses smaller than the recommended serving), you'll be surprised at how high your energy levels are throughout the day and how fast your recovery rates are. The other stuff is creatine - it really really helps with recovery because it somehow minimizes lactic acid damage during workout in the first place.

Check out stuff from Pavel Tsatsouline and Frederick Hatfield for proper scientific approach towards resistance training. Also check out this PDF over here: http://www.asep.org/files/OttoV4.pdf

The most important thing is that we'll have to workout with plenty of intensity and keep raising the bar for ourselves in order to reach further.

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Added on January 14, 2008, 11:20 pmOh yeah, full body workouts are great!! Each of my gym session consist of compound workout for the entire body.. I don't practice those "arms day", "chest day", "legs day" stuff. It works for some people but it doesn't work for me. Also, compound movement workouts have been the best method for me to increase the power behind my punches and kicks, and they help me maintain my overall flexibility. Explosive compound movements like squats with dumbbell raises, or barbell clean-and-press, etc. are excellent as fast-working cardio exercises too. They seem to work far, far better than jogging or pedaling on the stationary bike.

This post has been edited by jswong: Jan 14 2008, 11:20 PM

Thanks dude, I think it really will help me a lot...

Fascinating stuff, thanks for the info guys. Not really into body building at the moment as I'm working on losing weight, but am doing weights to build muscle mass and this thread has given me some invaluable insight.

I have been steadily eating more rice and more meat nowadays. I have read that you can eat so much protein but without the carbs its all down to waste. Anyway, I will continue increasing my daily intake as long as my tummy remains the same size. I don't give a damn now about reducing my tummy, muscle growth optimization is the key. I am puzzled on how I can lift 3x heavier than when I first started out but physically I don't see my muscle growing shit.

nono, have you notice that those lion dance pp are all short, its coz they have to take all the drum... heavy drum each time they wana perform.... trust me, built ur body when you are 20... after full development..