This is a guest post by Adrian of 36 Pounds

Gaining muscle is not about who has biggest biceps, lifts most weight, has the biggest chest or looks the best in the mirror. While you will definitely look and feel better as well as stronger, there is more to this!

1. More Self-Confidence

Gaining muscle and therefore looking better improves your self-confidence. Why? Because you’ll be happy with yourself when you can look at the mirror and see a great body. And when you’re happy with how you look, you feel better, can do bigger things and approach more girls. And, of course, having muscle does attract more women.

What’s more, you get stronger and feel safer in the streets. People look at you differently and you have a better chance of defending yourself if necessary.

2. More Respect

People respect you more when you aren’t a skinny-ass weakling with a body of a chick. Being very skinny or very fat makes you invisible to others. You might be the nice guy, the good friend, but never the sexy man (on a lot of cases however, there are skinny guys who manage to be great with women despite their physique or lack of).

3. More Mental Toughness

Your will and mental toughness improves dramatically if you push yourself and don’t wuss out. Let’s say you are squatting with some big weights. You’ve done 4 repetitions and it’s starts to get very tough and it looks like you can’t do one more repetition. There is that whiny voice in your head that starts saying: Don’t do it anymore, just rack it up!

However, you CAN do another repetition; you must do it! Push yourself to the limit! Do one more rep even if it burns a lot! And every time you do this, you are a little step closer to having am uch stronger will and mental toughness.

4. Teaches You to Set Goals

Men need to set goals. They need something to aim for! Without it we’re doomed. Like ships without steering, they’ll hit some rocks, sink and drown. Without goals, a man is weak and can NOT attract ladies (why? Because he has to live life bigger than oneself and have things more important than women!) And how do Gyms help?

Well, you have to set goals when training too. From setting your big goal (the weight you want to be at, the visual picture in your mind how you’d like to look), to setting small workout goals (to squat 200lbs for 5 sets and 5 repetitions for example).

And once you do reach your end goal, once you achieve that great looking, strong and healthy beach body you want, you’ll feel like you can achieve everything you want! It’s that powerful!

Hopefully, you guys enjoyed the post! I am a huge believer in improving your life through lifting weights and getting the body of your dreams. I’ve set out to prove it myself and to help other guys do it (my actual goal is to help 1000 skinny guys get Strong, Healthy, Great Looking Beach Body).

If you need help and advice on gaining muscle, visit Adrian’s blog at 36 Pounds!

Dieting is hard. It’s a tough committment that many people can’t make. However, if you ever want to live healthy and have good physique, you might want to start changing your eating habits right now. Problem is that it’s easier said than done.

When I started changing my diet, it was tough man. Real tough. Especially living on an university campus, finding healthy food was difficult and often expensive (or so I thought). I ate nothing but chinese food, burgers, fries, pizza, pasta and all that shit daily.

The more I kept eating this way, the shittier I started to feel in general. I finally stepped up and got my diet in check.

Immediately change your portions.

This is something you can do right now. As in, this instance. You don’t need to eat until your stomach can’t hold anything more. Remember, the size of your stomach is about the size of your fist. Try not to expand it any further.

Eat until you’re satisfied, not until you’re full. If anything, drink more water so you feel full quicker. It’s gonna suck but within the first 3-4 days, you’ll adjust.

Make a slow transition.

Face it, unless you have the willpower of a buddhist monk, chances are you’ll utterly fail if you make an abrupt transition to eating healthy. That’s why you should start slow and take it one step at a time. I started eating lettuce in my burgers (how insignificant), then slowly started to eat broccoli.

Eventually I started to drink water exclusively instead of soda and juice, and from then on I ended up on a balanced diet of good stuff. You just have to eliminate and replace things little by little until it just becomes habit.

Get an enforcer.

Eating well in one meal is easy but you have to keep it up. The temptation to eat poorly is irresistible and we break our habits often. On campus, my roommate was my enforcer. He made sure that I wouldn’t slip since I had a tendency to do so.

There were so many times that I’d try to sneak in a donut or large fries and he’d snatch it away from me. I won’t lie, I got into a ton of confrontations with him whenever he just threw away my food infront of me. A month or so later, I was fairly glad he did.

When we can’t do something ourselves, it’s okay to ask somebody for help.

Imagine the results.

What would you look like 4 waist sizes down? What about with 6 packs or more? Imagining the results have been a great source of inspiration for me. What could be the benefits be if you started to eat healthy and getting fit? More energy? Girls noticing you more?

Think of all the possible benefits and concentrate on them. You’ll grit and bear it and force your way through your diet for a while until it becomes habitual. Plus, when you start to see results, they’ll inspire you to keep on going.

Any of you doing any diets? What kind of pitfalls did you guys encounter and how did you get through it?

Want to take a step in improving your health right now? Drink a glass of water. While you’re doing that, throw away all soda and juice in your fridge while you’re at it. Water is the only beverage you should be drinking, and you should be drinking it fairly often.

The amount of reasons you should drink water is quite long. After all, our planet and our bodies are full of it. Make a habit out of drinking a lot of water daily, and watch how much better you’ll start to feel. Here’s a bunch of benefits that water brings us:

Helps lose weight

If you’re serious about exercise, you should know that water helps to flush out the by-products of fatty breakdowns in our body. Not only that, but there’s a hierarchy of things that water is responsible in our bodies. You see, if there isn’t enough water to dillute the body’s waste products, kidney stones form (trust me, you NEVER want this. Ever.).

As the kidneys start to mess up, the liver steps up to the plate to help. As this whole drama unfolds, the liver gets stretched too thin and is unable to perform all of its important functions properly, putting fat burning in the back seat. If you want to prevent any of this from happening, you might want to take a trip to your kitchen or water fountain.

Flushes away waste products

As mentioned earlier, water flushes away waste products. That’s the purpose of the kidney actually. Kidneys flush out toxins such as lactic acid, uric acid and urea out of our bodies. Why is this important? These are the things that make you feel sick and sluggish. They can also hinder performance in the other systems in your body. Drinking water regularly keeps us toxin and pollution free, and makes us feel better.

Curbs hunger pangs

Half the time that you think that you’re hungry, it’s just you being thirsty. If you have the urge to eat something soon after you just had a meal, drink a nice glass of cold water. You’ll feel refreshed, rehydrated and just ready to do stuff.

Just tastes damn good

If I ever got lost somewhere and had one thing to drink for the rest of my life, I’d easily pick water. Not only because y’know, it’s water and you need it, but it tastes really fucking good. Honestly. Nothing in this world has the power to make you feel damned good instantly than a nice cold glass of water. I’m getting thirsty just thinking about it.

I drink water with pretty much every meal and I don’t think I can drink anything else. It’s just so awesome.

If you regularly go to the gym, you have access to many different tools and equipment. However, if it’s a rainy day or you just don’t have any access to a gym, here are some great workouts that you can do that only require your body and a room.

Push-ups

Push-ups develop the pectorals and triceps as well as parts of your back and shoulders. It’s the quintessential upper body workout and you can do it wherever you want. The amount of variations in Push-ups make it extremely versatile so if you want to concentrate more on a section of the pecks or develop the triceps even further, you can switch to either decline push-ups or military press.

Chair dips

Also great for developing your triceps are chair dips. They’re like regular dips, but you do them with a chair or a table or anything that you can grab. Place both of your feet together straight in front of you with your heels resting on the floor, and then just do a dip normally. You can adjust the difficulty of this workout by bringing your feet closer or farther from your body.

Squats

Squats work your butt and your thighs and are great for your hips as well. Simply hold out your hand and just sit down. Don’t sit all the way down; just enough so it’s like you’re sitting on an imaginary chair. These will kill you if you don’t work out these muscle groups enough. Girls like a guy with a nice butt, so you should be squatting every day.

Shadowboxing

For me, 5 minutes of non-stop shadowboxing feels the same as jogging for 20 minutes. It’s an excellent cardio workout to boot and it’s highly intense. There are some nice shadowboxing videos on Youtube for you to learn forms and combos so definitely check those out. I can tell you that my body is always sore during the day after I shadowbox. Make sure you stretch thoroughly.

Sit-ups/Crunches

Like push-ups, these are also very versatile. You can just do the standard crunches and sit-ups for a good overall core workout or you can target specific areas like the oblique muscles. One mistake you should avoid while doing these is pulling your neck. Remember, concentrate everything on your ab muscles to pull yourself up, not your neck or your lower back.