Winters is all about saying bye to your ripped physique and add some mass and bulk to your body. Winters are the best season to add the bulk you always wanted.

I have noticed that many bodybuilders fell short of their goals cos of some small mistakes they do while bulking up. These small mistakes hinder your gains and you can lose an excellent opportunity to get the dream physique you always wanted. The Workout magazine showcases how you can add some serious mass up to 12 Lbs while bulking up this winters.

Train Right

If you want to gain some serious mass during the winters, make sure that you feed your bigger Muscle groups with proper strength training. Training each muscle group with same intensity is like feeding an elephant and mouse with the same diet. Training legs daily or every alternate day and training your biceps and triceps once a week would never lead to muscle gain. They both are different muscle groups so designing a workout plan for these muscles should be totally different. Like training larger muscle group govern how many calories you burn throughout the day, but training such large muscle groups is physically and neurologically taxing, and longer recovery time is required. Whereas, training smaller muscle groups like biceps, lats, delts is less tedious and such muscles can be hit more frequently.

Boosting Hormones

High level of Testosterone and Human growth hormone plays a major part in building lean muscle tissues and improved protein synthesis. So it is important that your body release these hormones in plenty to support your muscle building goals. Addition in these hormones can severely boost your muscle growth and you can easily achieve your 12 lbs Muscle Mass goal during winters. To drastically improve the secretion of such hormones you can add high-intensity exercise with short rest periods in your workout plan.

According to a scientific study, compound, multi-joint exercises (Squats, deadlifts, benchpress, and pull-ups) have proven to improve the release of growth hormone, testosterone and IGF-1 hormone. All these three hormones are highly anabolic and help in gaining lean muscle mass. Make sure that your rest period should not be longer than 2 minutes for your heaviest sets and under 60 seconds for smaller muscle groups.

Feeding your body with right amount of calories

In order to build muscle mass it is important that your body is in a caloric surplus state. It means your body has enough calories to support your strenuous workout and recover and rebuild the stressed muscle fibers after workout.  But adding junk food to drastically increase your calories won’t work. Adding saturated fats and empty calories in your diet can even lead to muscle loss. So maintain a healthy ratio of Protein, carbs and fats, I usually use 40/40/20 ratio split for the bulking season. Also do add multivitamins and omega-3 supplements, keep a check on your micro nutrients which is usually avoided.

Add cardio in your workout regimen

So it’s off season and many of the bodybuilders think they need to avoid cardio to bulk, as cardio might lead to loss of muscle size. Let us inform you that cardio session of 30 minutes in a week is important for your bulking phase. Cardiovascular system plays a major part while you are lifting heavy weights as they don’t let you get out of breath. Several gym rats fail to complete the desired rep ranges (though they are strong enough to get those few extra few reps) as they simply run out of their endurance and rack the weight. If you want to reach to a desired rep range and put on serious muscle mass add cardio in your weekly workout plan.   Cardio also helps in improving your appetite and you  can eat more to stay in a caloric surplus state.

Add Pre-Bed Meal

You must have heard that eating before bed can lead to fat gain, this myth is doing rounds from years. Let us inform that eating before bed is the second most important meal for a bodybuilder (after post-workout meal). The major reason for adding a meal before sleeping is that an average human body burns up to 67 calories per hour after sleeping, s if you sleep for 8 hours, you might lose up to 536 calories sleeping. So if you in your bulking phase you might lose the calories you intake throughout the day to maintain caloric surplus diet.

Now eating a chocolate truffle won’t help you in gaining muscles, eating the right food will help you gain right. Never go overboard on carbs, simple sugars and fats before sleeping. Add some complex carb and casein protein which will help in releasing energy throughout your sleep.

I hope following the above suggestions with regular workout can help you add up to 12 lbs of pure muscle mass in next few months. Do share with us your winter season transformation and we will feature the best transformations on our blog.

The post How to gain 12 Pounds of Muscle Mass this Winter Season?   appeared first on The Workout Magazine.