Six Pack Abs

All right, so you want to get physically fit at the gym, and lift heavy weights. If only weight lifting were as simple as pumping the weights up and down.

Nutrition plays a very large part of recovery and growth. Bodybuilding diets are constantly changing due to the increase of your muscle mass, if you put muscle on you have to eat more, if you lose muscle you need to eat less. So how do you keep an eye on what is happening inside the body?

Watching your weight daily is important if you are trying to increase your mass. If your weight is going down or staying the same, you may need to consider eating more. If you find yourself gaining a lot of weight you need to take a closer look at what you’re eating. Be careful, while you can expect to gain fat while attempting to gain muscle, you should keep an eye on it to ensure you don’t gain too much fat.

Another good method of checking which is going up, muscle or fat is to use a set of body fat calipers. By using the calipers every two weeks that will show exactly what is happening, if muscle is going down due to not eating enough then that will show with the calipers and you will need to eat more. If the calipers show that bodyfat percentage is going up then you need to eat less.

Decent gyms should offer a set of calipers, which should give you true readings as to the results as long as you ensure the same person takes measurements each time. Using the callipers and finding the millimeters and your bodyweight you can use the chart and find the percentage bodyfat you have.

If you take your bodyweight in pounds and times it by the bodyfat percentage then that will come out with your total bodyfat. Then take this figure from the total bodyweight and that will give you a figure for your fat free mass. The figure is not all muscle but includes internal organs, bones, etc, but just use the figure as muscle for our calculations.

After these two figures have been worked out, you should keep notes of your total body fat and free mass. You can then compare these measurements in the future to check if your body fat percentage has increased. You’ll discover that with proper food consumption and balanced exercise and nutrition, the amount of mass without fat increases while bodyfat total decreases. If you don’t eat enough, your muscles and fat free mass will decrease, but your body fat will increase.