1. Facial Analysis Diet

Developed by scientists in Germany, this diet proposes the theory that your face is a strong indicator of what is going on in the rest of your body. By determining what type of face you have, and therefore knowing whether your body is controlled by your thyroid, liver, prostate, etc., you are given a lists of foods to eat and a list of foods to avoid. Proponents say that not only will you lose weight quickly, but your overall health will improve. Kate Winslet reportedly uses this method.

2. The Baby Food Diet

Yup, just what it sounds like. The thinking behind this diet is that not only will that little jar of baby food provide a nice small portion size, but also that it is free of additives and full of vitamins. Potential downfalls include the possibility of binge eating later to make up for portion size designed for, well, a baby. Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston have been linked to this diet.

3. The Grapefruit Oil Diet

Stars like Jennifer Lopez and Carmen Electra are known to carry a vial of grapefruit extract with them. Why? Supposedly, it gives off an aroma that activates liver enzymes that break down fat and promote weight loss.

4. The Fish Facelift Diet

If you’re up for eating salmon three times a day, you can achieve a natural facelift without going under the knife of the plastic surgeon. Already proven to ward off heart disease, the Omega-3 acids found in the fish also are said to stimulate nerve function, flush out the skin and get rid of wrinkles and sagging. Celebrities such as Kim Cattrall and, again, Jennifer Lopez are said to be proponents.

5. The 7 Day Color Diet

Some people might call this OCD, but this diet promotes eating only foods of a particular color per day of the week. Each color is said to have properties and benefits that, when comprehensively combined throughout the week, promote overall wellness. Colors include: Blue – to aid in healthy aging (eat blueberries, raisins, etc.); Purple – similar to blue (eat blackberries, grapes, etc); Green – cancer prevention and visual health (eat pears, all green vegetables, etc.); White – heart and bone health (eat white peaches, cauliflower, etc.); Yellow – heart health and healthy immune system (eat bananas, yellow tomatoes, etc.); Orange – skin health and vision (eat carrots, peaches, etc.); Red – maintain memory and urinary tract health (eat apples, tomatoes, etc.). Christina Aguilera has been linked to this diet.

6. The Cabbage Soup Diet

This is a classic fad diet, in that it claims significant weight loss in a short time with no long-term commitment. This diet claims you can lose 10 pounds in a single week, through ingestion of a low-calorie soup, which, in its most common incarnation, includes onions, peppers, tomatoes, celery and cabbage. Since experts on nutrition claim it is nearly impossible to lose that much fat in one week, most believe the majority of weight lost is water weight, meaning it will easily be gained back. Celebrity fans are said to include Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jamie Pressley.

Bodyweight Movements

The easiest way to build muscle mass without the use of weights would be to start with the compound exercises you normally use, and find ways to complete these movements without the use of the machines and benches and free weights upon which we have become so dependent. Body weight squats are easy – and sissy squats done upon the toes are even more effective. Push-ups work the chest, and pull-ups in any doorway or swing set work the back muscles. Look around – you’ll find ways to emulate most exercises without weights.

Sprinting

Many competitive bodybuilders use sprinting as part of their weekly training regimen in order to completely saturate the quadriceps with blood and activate those fast-twitch muscle fibers which are very difficult to safely stimulate with weight training. Hit the 40 yards for 10 to 15 sets, and your legs will certainly see some new growth! Just remember to adequately stretch to avoid injury.

Abs of Steel

Weights are normally not used when working the midsection, so building muscle mass without weights should be a breeze when it comes to the abdominal muscles! You should be training your abdominals 3 to 4 times per week using crunches, lying leg raises, and side twists to target the upper, lower, and side abdominals, respectively. When they’re sore – let them rest. When they’re healed – train again!

Isometric Resistance

Train your biceps using towel curls, and triceps using towel pressdowns, with your free hand providing the varying resistance required to deliver a pump. If you have a buddy nearby, have him provide manual resistance for movements such as leg extensions and leg curls. It can be done! Find ways to scorch all your muscle groups using towels, walls, door jams, and buddies.

Moving Objects

Many movers and other people in fields where they lift heavy objects will admit that building muscle mass without weights has come easy for them. If you can’t get to the gym on back day for deadlifts, pick up your couch 10 or 12 times. You’ll have an unbelievable lower back pump. Many early athletes used paint cans and milk jugs for the manual resistance they needed to grow. Use your imagination and be creative, and you will grow without weights!

Dane Fletcher is the world’s most prolific bodybuilding and fitness expert and is currently the executive editor for BodybuildingToday.com. If you are looking for more bodybuilding tips or information on weight training, or supplementation, please visit www.BodybuildingToday.com, the bodybuilding and fitness authority site with hundreds of articles available FREE to help you meet your goals.

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One of the questions I get asked most frequently is, “how do I big build muscle mass in my shoulders?” I usually answer this question by listing the following two exercises. Firstly, the best all around shoulder building exercise is the barbell hang clean and press. You perform this exercise by bending over with a barbell in your hands and a shoulder width grip. Start with the barbell just above your knees and be sure to maintain perfect posture with your head in line with your spine, chest up and back arched. Initiate the movement by driving your hips forward and shrugging your shoulders. Pull the bar to your upper chest and catch it there by dipping at the knees slightly. Immediately press the bar straight up overhead to lockout.

Do one or two heavy set of 5-8 reps, rest 90-120 seconds and then, if you really want to fry your shoulders, do a backoff set with a lighter weight for 10-20 reps. This will smoke your shoulders and build them up better than just about anything else.

The other best shoulder exercise you can do if you want to build cannon ball sized delts is a handstand pushup. This is as difficult as it sounds but can be modified for novice or intermediate lifters. The easiest way to work up to a handstand pushup is to start by simply holding the position for time while you keep your feet up against the wall. Work to increase your time each week and eventually you will be able to start doing partial reps. Allow your feet to slide up and down the wall and aim to increase the range of motion each week. Eventually you will be strong enough to do a single full range rep, going down until the top of your head lightly touches the floor. From there you will work up to doing a set of 5-8 reps.

After you can do that you will need to add greater range to increase the difficulty of the exercise. To increase your range of motion place your hands on two boxes and lower your head down between them. Once you can do a set of 5-8 reps like that, with your head going all the way down between the boxes, you will have powerful shoulders that would make the Hulk turn the other way if he saw you coming. Do 2-3 sets once per week with 90-120 seconds rest on a different workout day than the one in which you do the hang clean and press.

Jason Ferruggia is a world famous fitness expert who is renowned for his ability to help people build muscle as fast as humanly possible. He has trained thousands of clients during his 14 years as a professional fitness coach, including more than 500 athletes from over 20 different sports. Jason has written hundreds of articles for numerous top rated training magazines and websites and has authored four fitness books. He is also the head training adviser for Men’s Fitness Magazine where he also has his own monthly column dedicated to muscle building. For more great muscle building information, please visit http://www.musclegainingsecrets.com

The CNS controls everything; if it’s fried your performance is going to crush your mass building efforts. So you have to be careful about CNS intensive methods and allowing for proper recovery of the CNS. CNS intensive training methods are the max effort method in which you are lifting extremely heavy weights for a max or near max attempt and the dynamic effort method in which you are lifting light weights very fast. Sprinting and all types of plyos are also CNS intensive activities.

Ideally, you never want to perform two CNS intensive workouts on back to back days. The nervous system needs adequate recovery and although you may not be sore the next day after a CNS intensive workout, that doesn’t mean that you are ready to train.

So if you do a 1 rep max squat on Monday you need to do something like repetition upper body work and/or some light running drills or cardio or whatever on Tuesday. What you don’t want to do is sprint, jump or lift heavy again. You should ideally separate CNS intensive days by 48 hours. Therefore if you have to incorporate sprints into the weekly schedule it is usually best to do them as a double session on your max effort days. So on Monday morning you would run your sprints and then on Monday night you would do your max effort squats. If you are really pressed for time you could do a short sprint workout outside and then walk into the gym for your max squats.

If you are simply training for bodybuilding this is not as important but if you are training for strength/performance this rule needs to be taken under strict consideration.

While CNS recovery is important to consider I should also point out that it has gotten to be a very hot topic recently and I think some people may be taking it too far. Actually, I know they are taking it too far. It’s good to constantly make advances and stay up to date on the latest scientific discoveries and apply them to our training but we never want to get too caught up in this either. If your schedule doesn’t work out perfectly with the structure of CNS intensive days and non CNS intensive days, don’t freak out about it. When we were growing up we didn’t know anything about this and we were all ok. I used to jump, trying to touch the rim at least fifty times per day in high school. And when I finally got there, I continued to jump fifty times per day trying to dunk for the next few years. That was high intensity plyos being done 365 days per year and you know what happened? My vertical went up.

Walter Payton was probably the greatest running back of all time and he famously did hill sprints every single day of every off season. Would he have been better if he skipped a day between? Who knows? But the point I am trying to make is that you have to always be aware of and take into consideration the science, but never be afraid of hard work and breaking the rules when you have to; we don’t live in a perfect world. The guy who works harder than anyone else will always have an advantage over the science geek who worries about and plans his training to the T. It’s like Rocky versus Ivan Drago…

Years ago nobody ever discussed or heard of CNS fatigue or adrenal fatigue and now everybody and their mother is worried about it and is p*ssy footing around like a bunch of school girls. Get over it. If you drink too much coffee and don’t always get ten hours of sleep and get stressed out on occasion and train harder than everyone you know, it aint gonna kill ya. You’ll be fine. I don’t know who is writing this stuff but I keep getting questions about it and now I feel bad that I ever mentioned it in the first place. It just gives the weak another excuse to remain weak.

Yes, CNS and adrenal fatigue are real issues and you should be concerned about avoiding both of them by trying to adhere to the rules I listed above. But the reality is most people just need to learn how to train harder and smarter and stop making excuses.

Besides, rules are made to be broken. Right?

Jason Ferruggia is a world famous fitness expert who is renowned for his ability to help people build muscle as fast as humanly possible. He is the head training adviser for Men’s Fitness Magazine where he also has his own monthly column dedicated to muscle building. For more great muscle building information, please visit www.musclegainingsecrets.com

Training to failure has long been a much debated subject amongst fitness professionals. Many experts tell you that if you really want to build muscle mass you have to go to failure on each and every set you do while others will warn you to avoid training to failure at all costs. At different points in my career I have been on both sides of this fence as I am continually experimenting with more efficient ways of getting bigger and stronger.

Years ago I recommended that everyone go to failure on a regular basis if their goal was to rapidly increase muscle mass. I knew that hard work and high intensity were needed to bring about dramatic improvements in size and strength. This worked out incredibly well when I was training all of my clients with low volume workouts. Eventually I got away from low volume and started experimenting with a slightly higher approach for various reasons. The problem, however, is that you can’t train with high volume and high intensity. When you are doing a large number of sets there is absolutely no way you can take each of them to failure without severely burning yourself out.

After realizing this I immediately started advising all of my clients against going to failure. I told everyone to stop their sets with a rep or two left in the tank but not to ever take it all the way to a point of momentary muscular failure.

This worked fairly well but the fact remains that everyone who is serious about training, and really wants to increase muscle mass rapidly loves to train HARD! So what was happening was people were ignoring my advice and continuing to go to failure on at least 80-90% of their sets. The honest truth is that I ALWAYS go to failure, or very close to it, no matter what volume of training I am using. I don’t know any other way to train and could never stand to give it less than 100% effort when I’m in the gym. To me, and everyone I know who lives to lift heavy weights, that way of training is a lot more fun than going in and trying to hold back. I don’t want to hold anything back, I want to lay it all on the table and give it all I have.

Because of this fact I have steadily lowered my training volume recommendations over the last few years. Nowadays I rarely ever advise doing more than 12 sets per workout if your goal is to increase muscle mass. When you keep your volume this low you can train as hard as you want and safely go to failure on every set without ever worrying about frying your CNS or overtraining. This makes your workouts more fun and more productive. Not to mention, shorter, for all of you who are pressed for time.

When I say you can go to failure on every set I mean that the set should end when you can no longer complete another rep in good form. I don’t want you to literally fail in the middle of a rep as this can be potentially dangerous, especially if you do it on a squat or a bench press when you don’t have a spotter around. What I want you to do is work as hard as you can but stop the set after you grind out one last slow, brutal rep that requires all the effort you can muster without causing yourself to have a nervous breakdown or having your eyeballs pop out of your head. At that point the set is over; do not attempt another rep because that is when you get into overtraining territory.

That’s all there is to it. Remember, low volume plus high intensity is the exact formula needed to increase muscle mass rapidly.

Jason Ferruggia is a world famous fitness expert who is renowned for his ability to help people build muscle as fast as humanly possible. He is the head training adviser for Men’s Fitness Magazine where he also has his own monthly column dedicated to muscle building. For more Training to Failure tips, check out http://www.musclegainingsecrets.com/

When I first started training, I didn’t know any better so I went to the gym and did all the machine exercises and isolation movements that I saw everyone else doing. I figured these would all lead to building muscle mass and I would be huge in no time.

My dad knew a steroid-using Italian guy named Tony who owned a gym and competed in several bodybuilding shows. He asked Tony if he could write me a program and Tony obliged. I was bursting with excitement and thought this would be the difference maker in my training. I met with Tony at his office one day, and in a scene that could have been straight out of an episode of The Sopranos, he interrogated me about my muscle building program. I gave him a piece of paper with my workout on it and he took a long, hard look at it.

“Here’s whatcha gonna do. And I don’t wan any a’guments. You do dis and you’ll grow. Ya undastand me?”

“Yeah, definitely. No problem.”

He pulled out a legal pad and scrawled out my new training program. It was loaded with all of the exercises that all the top name bodybuilders in the magazines were always shown doing. Stiff arm pullovers, concentration curls, leg extensions, cable flyes, you name it—they were included.

I took my new program, thanked Tony, and left. The next few weeks would surely be an amazing time for me, I thought. The growth that I was about to experience would be dramatic, I just knew it.

But nothing happened.

You know why? Because those exercises suck, that’s why. Sure, the volume was too high for my limited recovery ability at the time, but if he had me doing the right exercises, I might have experienced some kind of gains.

Choosing the right exercises could ultimately be the difference between lightening fast muscle gain and absolutely no muscle gain whatsoever. No matter how well thought out your workout plan is, if you use the wrong exercises, it will be completely useless. Even a bad training program will yield some results if you are using the right exercises. For these reasons, exercise selection is one of the most important components of any muscle building system.

So how do you choose the best exercises?

The best mass building exercises are always multi joint, free weight, compound exercises that use as much muscle mass as possible and allow you to use heavy weights. This includes movements like squats, deadlifts, chin ups, dips, overhead presses and rows. If you are desperately seeking fast muscle gain, the last thing you should ever waste your time doing is using machine or isolation exercises during your workouts. These exercises are great at producing that burning feeling that so many people love and can often lead to a great pump, but they do very little to pack on massive size or build real world, functional strength.

For a very unique, scientifically advanced rating system which gives you a complete list of the best exercises on the planet, proven to lead to insanely fast muscle gain and mind blowing strength visit MuscleGainingSecrets.com now.

Jason Ferruggia is a world famous fitness expert who is renowned for his ability to help people build muscle as fast as humanly possible. He is the head training adviser for Men’s Fitness Magazine where he also has his own monthly column dedicated to muscle building.

If you want know how to gain weight and build a thick, muscular back there are three mass building exercises that you need to become very familiar with. Those exercise are chin ups, rows and lastly but most importantly; deadlifts. If you did nothing but those three exercises faithfully you would end up with a thick and impressive looking back.

When it comes to uncovering the secrets of how to gain weight you need to realize that the back muscles make up a huge portion of your total musculature and that developing them will add countless pounds to your frame.

So how do we go about developing all of the muscles of the back? Firstly we have to address the traps which start at the neck and go all the way down to the mid back. These can be worked most effectively with dead lifts, shrugs and hang cleans. Deadlifts can be done for anywhere between one and twenty reps. Shrugs are best kept at 6-12 reps and cleans should usually be done for six reps or less.

Next on the list are the smaller muscles around the shoulder blade area which are the infraspinatus, rhomboids, teres major and minor and rear deltoids. These muscles work during all forms of rows. If you are really looking to get the most bang for you buck and to work as many muscles as possible then stick with big compound rowing exercises like dumbbell and barbell rows. These will work most muscles in your back. But if you are more advanced and want to isolate and directly target some of these smaller muscles you can do that with face pulls, bent over lateral raises, scare crows and external rotations. These smaller isolation type exercises are not necessary but can help prevent imbalances and can put the finishing touches on a well muscled back. Unlike other isolation exercises like leg extensions and concentration curls, these exercises actually do serve some purpose and are effective at building size and strength and preventing injury. When utilizing some of these smaller isolation exercises be sure to keep the reps in the 8-12 range as that is what seems to work best for these muscles.

The lats are next and are the muscles that stick out under your armpits and give you the appearance of width. They make up a great deal of the total back musculature. To really increase the size of your lats and thus the width of your back, focus on all variations of chin ups and the occasional higher rep set of pulldowns.

Lastly we have the erector spinae which is basically the lower back musculature. This area extends from the top of the glutes up to the traps. A well developed set of erector spinae really stands out and lets people know you are way more than all show and no go. There is no better lower back exercise than the deadlift and its variations. Some other great erector spinae builders are good mornings, back extensions and reverse hypers. These exercises should be done for 6-20 reps, while deadlifts can be done for 1-20 reps.

While everything written above is important and should be considered, you could ignore all of it and just deadlift on a regular basis and still develop a very impressive back. Whenever someone asks me how to gain weight I tell them to eat a lot and do deadlifts. Deadlifts are the king of the back builders and work every muscle group. If you are pressed for time, stick with deadlifts. If you have more time to dedicate to building a big back do two sets each, twice per week of some type of deadlift or lower back exercise (deads should only be done once per week as they are very tough to recover from), shrug, upper back “isolation move,” compound row and chin up.

Jason Ferruggia is a world famous fitness expert who is renowned for his ability to help people build muscle as fast as humanly possible. He has trained thousands of clients during his 14 years as a professional fitness coach, including more than 500 athletes from over 20 different sports. Jason has written hundreds of articles for numerous top rated training magazines and websites and has authored four fitness books. He is also the head training adviser for Men’s Fitness Magazine where he also has his own monthly column dedicated to muscle building. For more great muscle building information, please visit http://www.musclegainingsecrets.com