10 Myths About Bodybuilding

1.Supplements Are Necessary for Bodybuilding
Most people think that supplements are necessary for body building as many professional body builders take supplements but it's not true.Introducing supplements will only make a 10% difference at best, if your traning, nutrition and lifestyle are operating on the optimal end of the spectrum.Supplements work in synergy with traning, nutrition and sleep habits. The only thing those supplements advertisements will deliver is a lighter wallet.

Powders are nothing more than crushed up food and are loaded with artificial flavoring, preservatives, and lots of chemicals. Shakes may assist you in reaching your goal calories but don't kid yourself into believing that they will have the same anabolic effect as food. Don't let any supplement ad convince you otherwise.Preservatives, flavors and sugar basically turns your insides into a toxic waste dump.It's a choice you can take supplements if you want but you certainly don't have to.

2. You should alternate between low intensity phases and high intensity phases
Your muscles only gets bigger as a result of applying most fundamental principal progressive overload. When a muscle is subjected to a degree of unaccustomed stress and effort, muscle adapts to the added stress by growing larger. Remember that your muscles will only enlarge if you give them sufficient reason to. Ask yourself "How will your muscles grow if you reduce the overload for a low intensity phase?" No new muscle can be built because there is no overload.If you are training light you're wasting your time and body's resources. If the intensity is decreased for a number of days, strength and muscle mass gains will deteriorate very rapidly. If you're going to rest then rest; If you're going to train hard train hard.
Many magzines tells that progressive overload is as simple as doing more sets, more reps and more weight, nevertheless, it's partly true. If doing more sets was the answer, then high volume workouts, found in bodybuilding magazines, would be the key, and you would probably already be massive and ripped. Doing more reps is definately out of question, because every lady who lifted their pink colored weights with high reps would be muscular. And simply lifting more weight is not the answer because I know guys who can lift a lot of weight a few times and they are not the bigger guys.

3.If you're not getting bigger blame it on your genetics
The fact is we cannot choose our parents. Blaming your genetics is an excuse for the lazy. The genetics are not the problem- the problem is you! but ,if you're really genetic cursed, you'll always have to work a little harder to keep up to par. By training smarter and harder you can overcome most obstacle and conceal your shortcomings.

4.If you don't see results after few years take steroids
If you want to get bigger, you must give your muscles a reason to grow. Most people have heard this but they aren't aware about the second part of the equation - recovery. Your muscle gains are 100% responsible for overloading them with more weight and reps, but as intensity increases over the years so does your need for more rest.
Certainly, taking steroids will help you but at the expense of health risks like cancer, impotence, hair loss and heart disease etc. Steroids increase your hormone production above normal levels, they allow you to be sloppy with your recovery, diet and train carelessly and still make significant gains. Taking drugs will cure your problem because you'll be able to train more often and recover quicker - but why? would you rather not just take more rest days to ensure recovery? would you not just train smarter and a little bit harder instead of taking steroids?

5.I'm Traning to Sculpt, Tone, Shape and Define
Most people belive that they can literally shape or define a muscle, however, it's not true. Your muscles have an origin and insertion point, influenced by your genetics, and those factors will determine how a muscle is shaped.
There is no such thing as toning a fat arm. You either get rid of the fat and make it more defined or you build muscle and make it bigger. Your body can do one of four things - gain or lose fat and gain or lose muscle. The shape of your muscle is determined by your genetic makeup. When you work a muscle, any muscle, it operates on the "all-or-nothing" principal, meaning that each muscle fibre recruited to do a lift.

6.High Reps Equal Getting Cut and Low Reps Equal Mass

Muscle cuts are a reflection of two features on the body: pure muscle size and the low levels of body fat. If you want to build massive muscles get ready to apply the fundamental principal of progressive overload. And if you want to get cut and ripped be prepared to drop your body fat levels. Your muscles are either growing, shrinking or staying the same. If you want your muscle to grow simly exose it to progressive overload.


7.You Must Train to Failure for Best Results

Training to failure means going to the point in a set where you are physically incapable of going just one more rep is preached as the most promised rule to make continual muscle gains. Your body's primary function in life is to survive it will adapt only to the point where your body has sufficient defense to whatever element it's exposed.
Your muscles are designed to respond and to adopt to stress. Force them to do extra work and they adapt by getting bigger. Once your muscles perform more work than your previous workout your mission is accomplished. You have achieved progressive overload and it is time to move on to the next muscle group. There is no honor in continuing a Nazi torture session for another 45 minutes on the same muscle after it has already surpassed its previous work threshold. This leads to wasted energy that could be utilized growing muscle and result in a delayed recovery.

8.Train Instinctively and "Listen to Your Body"

Do competitive long distance athletes train without their stopwatch? Do swimmers work out without measuring the distance and time of each interval? Of course not. So why would someone trying to build muscle favor an ineffective and unproven tool that can lead you astray? Building muscle is based on improving the intensity of the workout progressively in each session. So why complicate things by following this 'inner compass' that has no idea of the difference between 9 reps with 225 lbs in 30 seconds and 13 reps with 185 reps in 45 seconds? Aside from listening to your body and hearing your mind say stop, can you really decipher which was more intense?


9. Getting a Pump is Necessary for Muscular Size

The muscle pump is described as when you put your muscles under an extended period of constant tension. As your muscles stretch and contract they become gorged with blood, making them feel tighter and fuller.Getting a muscle pump isn't necessary for muscle growth. Doing 100 reps with a light rep will create a huge pump, but will this make your muscle grow? of course not! Distance runners get a pump in their legs when they sprint up-hill.Do they get big muscle? No!
The main problem with training for the pump is that it leads to muscular fatigue and not muscular overload. Muscular fatigue is when you lift moderate weights for higher reps and you can not complete the set because of the burning sensation caused from the lactic acid buildup which results from a lack of oxygen to the muscle. If you get a good pump then it's okay but it's not at all necessary for muscle growth. Don't neglect the fact that you are taxing and depleting your central nervous system, hormonal system and immune system.


10.Yesterday Was Chest Day, Today Is Leg Day and Tomorrow is Arm Day

Splitting up a routine is fine and has some benefits but it is also the fastest way to over-train and burn out. Remember that you don't get stronger in the gym - you get stronger and bigger when you go home, rest, sleep, eat and are fully recovered. To super compensate from your previous workout your muscles aren't the only things that must experience a full recovery.

Myths About Meditation

1. Meditation is too complicated.

Meditation is too complicated.

Meditaion seems complicated because there's a lot to learn in the begining,such as controlling your thoughts, empty your mind etc.it does take a while to learn the basics, but most of it isn't that difficult.Just get yourself a good book on the subject, and you'll be off to a great start.I recommend picking up a copy of "8 Minute Meditaion".

Don't let the initial lerning curve get you down. You only need to learn this info once.If you set things up right, the ongoing practise of meditaion doesn’t have to be a nightmare.

2. You Have to Have Asolute Silence to Meditate.

Most people think meditation can only be done properly in absolute silence, such as on a mountain. But that's just not true.

Meditation is about allowing "what is".

How to decide which carrier is for you?

Suppose you have multiple interests. Suppose you like painting, teaching, writing, yoga and singing. Choosing one of them as your carrier means denying others permanently.How will you choose one of them as your carrier?

Sometimes young people are paralyzed when faced with choosing a lifetime career. Picking one thing means denying yourself everything else. What if you have a lot of different interests?

Pick one career and get started. Go into it with the expectation of mastering it, but also feel free to move onto something else when you get bored. A career switch will often give you much more growth than staying in the same line of work for decades.

Consider Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest geniuses of all time (if not THE greatest). His interests included painting, sculpting, engineering, architecture, science, geology, anatomy, flight, optics, gravity, and lots more. This variety of interests served him well because he was able to use his scientific knowledge to improve his art (more realistic and precise artwork) and his art skills to improve his science (detailed drawings and diagrams).

Instead of trying to follow 10 different interests at once though, try to focus on one or two at a time. But keep open the possibility that you can switch down the road. So if you love art and music and medicine but can’t find a way to combine them into a single career, try pursuing one in your 20s and 30s, one in your 40s and 50s, and another in your 60s and 70s.

As you age your priorities will shift. There’s a strong chance that the career you choose at age 20 will be a lot less interesting to you at age 35. Even if you have to take a massive pay cut to do something else, it may be worth it for the experience. The money isn’t going to make you happy anyway if you no longer love what you do.

Let your career become a dynamic experience instead of a static one if that appeals to you. The people around you will probably whine a lot when you switch careers, but don’t let that bother you. There’s no honor in sticking to a path that doesn’t have a heart.

How to Suppress Negative Thoughts

Suppose you have a bad habit of dwelling too much on the same negative thoughts. And suppose there is no outward physical association associated to them. It's just negative thinking, like "I'm an idiot" or "I cannot do this" or "I'm going to be a bald-head".How do you break a habit when it's entirely in your mind?

There are actually quite a number of ways to suppress negative thoughts. The basic idea is, however, the same to replace the old thought with a new one. If you resist the negative thought, you will reinforce it and make it even worse.

Here is a little method that I use to suppress negative thoughts. Instead of trying to resist the negative thought you will redirect it. In this method we take the energy of negative thought and re-channel it into a positive thought. With a little practice whenever the negative thought occur your mind will automatically flow into the linked positive thought.It's similar to pavlov's dogs learning to salivate when the bell rang.

Here how it works:

Lets assume your negative thought is a subvocalization, meaning that it's like you hear a voice in your head that says something you want to change, like, "I'm going to be a bald-head" or " I'm an idiot". If the negative thought is visual or kinesthetic( a gut feeling), you can use a similar process. In many cases the thought will manifest as a combination of all three( visual, auditory and kinesthetic).

Step 1: Turn the negative thought into a mental image.

Take that little voice, and turn it into a corresponding mental picture. For example, if your thought is, “I’m an idiot,” imagine yourself wearing a dunce cap, dressed very foolishly, and jumping around like a dork. See yourself surrounded by other people all pointing at you while you shout, “I’m an idiot.” The more you exaggerate the scene, the better. Imagine bright colors, lots of animation, rapid movement, and even sexual imagery if it helps you remember. Rehearse this scene over and over in your mind until you reach the point where thinking the negative thought automatically brings up this goofy imagery.

If you have trouble visualizing, you can also do the above in an auditory fashion. Translate the negative thought into a sound, such as a jingle that you sing. Go through the same process with sound instead of imagery. It works either way. I happen to prefer the visual method though.

Step 2: Select an empowering replacement thought.

Now decide what thought you’d like to have instead of the negative one. So if you’ve been thinking, “I’m an idiot,” maybe you’d like to replace that with “I’m brilliant.” Choose a thought that empowers you in a way that disrupts the disempowering effect of the original negative thought.

Step 3: Turn the positive thought into a mental image.

Now go through the same process you used in Step 1 to create a new mental scene from the positive thought. So with the example “I’m brilliant,” you might imagine yourself standing tall, posing like Superman with your hands on your hips. Picture a giant light bulb appearing just above your head. The bulb turns on so bright that it’s blinding, and you see yourself yelling, “I’m bbbbbrrrrilllllllliannnntttt!” Again, keep rehearsing this scene until merely thinking the positive line automatically brings up the associated imagery.

Step 4: Mentally chain the two images together.

Now take the images in Step 1 and Step 3, and mentally glue them together. This trick is used in memory techniques like chaining or pegging. You want to morph the first scene into the second scene. The NLP swish pattern would have you do a straight cut from one scene to the next, but I recommend you animate the first scene into the second. A cut is very weak glue and often won’t stick. So instead pretend you’re the director of a movie. You have the opening scene and the closing scene, and you have to fill in the middle. But you only have a few seconds of film left, so you want to find a way to make the transition happen as quickly as possible.

For example, one of the hecklers in the first scene might throw a light bulb at the idiot version of you. The idiot you catches the bulb and screws it into the top of his head, wincing at the pain. The bulb then grows into a giant bulb and turns on so bright it blinds all the hecklers. You rip off your dorky clothing to reveal a shining white robe beneath it. You stand tall like Superman and yell confidently, “I’m bbbbbrrrrilllllllliannnntttt!” The hecklers fall to their knees and begin worshipping you. Again, the more exaggeration you use, the better. Exaggeration makes it easier to remember the scene because our brains are designed to remember the unusual.

Once you have the whole scene worked out, mentally rehearse it for speed. Replay the whole scene over and over until you can imagine it from beginning to end in under 2 seconds, ideally in under 1 second. It should be lightning fast, much faster than you’d see in the real world.

Step 5: Test.

Now you need to test your mental redirect to see if it works. It’s a lot like an HTML redirect — when you input the old negative URL, your mind should automatically redirect you to the positive one. Merely thinking the negative thought should rapidly bring up the positive thought. If you’ve done this correctly, you won’t be able to help it. The negative thought is the stimulus that causes your mind to run the whole pattern automatically. So whenever you happen to think, “I’m an idiot,” even without being fully aware of it, you end up thinking, “I’m brilliant.”

If you’ve never done visualizations like this before, it may take you several minutes or longer to go through this whole process. Speed comes with practice. The whole thing can literally be done in seconds once you get used to it. Don’t let the slowness of the first time through discourage you. This is a learnable skill like any other, and it probably will feel a bit awkward the first time.

Give this process a try the next time you notice yourself dwelling on a negative thought. I think you’ll find it very empowering. And feel free to share it with others who could use a mental pick-me-up.