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!

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.