ive heard sometime ago that you must eat alot of protein to gain muscles.
but how can i have muscles like bruce lee, if you eat alot with protein you get alot of fat.
And how can i gain muscles like bruce and broad lats like him without weights?
and what do i must eat? how much train and what pelase help me people.
There are two kind of muscles... im not a physician, but i know there are red muscles used to lift weight, and white muscles for rapid movements. All those muscles you see in Bruce's body are white. He concentrated on speed and cardiovascular resistance instead of becoming a slow mass of red muscles. This is better because you can think about a ryno trying to hit a rabbit, for the ryno the task is impossible, but for the rabbit there are many opportunities to hit and bite. Bruce also concentrated on technique, so he could punch at least two times harder than a common person.
Well, Bruce did also do weight training (injured his back), however the best thing bruce did was vary his training. I have also read a quote from Linda Lee, that bruce was into his fresh juices of things like vegtables and fruit. He would just blend them!
All it takes is training and eating right!
Make sure you vary your training though!
Good luck!
"Hello
ive heard sometime ago that you must eat alot of protein to gain muscles.
but how can i have muscles like bruce lee, if you eat alot with protein you get alot of fat.
And how can i gain muscles like bruce and broad lats like him without weights?
and what do i must eat? how much train and what pelase help me people."
If you want to gain muscle, you have to eat 4 grams of protein above your maintanance caloric level. How much is your maintanance caloric level? One gram of protein per pound in body weight. If you weigh 200 pounds, you need 200 grams of protein a day plus 4 more to ensure growth. Your body can absorb no more than 30 grams of protein in one sitting. Anything more gets stored as fat or flushed out of your system through stool or urine. So make sure to strive for 30 grams of protein spread over 6 small meals a day. If you need more, then eat one or two more meals. But several small meals a day is the ideal. Reason for this is the traditional 3 meals a day are eaten so far apart that when you eat, you will eat more in one sitting and thus the food will make you fatter. Plus fewer meals a day sends a signal to your metabolism that it is not needed to break down food as often so it is not as fast as it could be if you were constantly putting small amounts of food in your body throughout the day. You don't feel hungry this way since food is almost always in your system, since you are eating smaller meals you won't get fat, make sure each meal is very low in fat, salt, and sugar if possible, and since you are constantly eating, your body's metabolism is constantly working which means it will work harder to burn fat away.
Bruce Lee got his muscles through a variety of exercises. His cut and endurance from his muscles was due to his cardio, martial arts, and isometric training. The size of his muscles was due to specialized weight training. Putting it simply, you are not going to get that much muscle from doing push ups and flexing them in isolation movements all the time. You need to lift heavy weights to stimulate your muscles to grow. 4 sets of each exercise is enough to stimulate the angle of the muscle to grow. For instance, if you want to develop your mid-lower chest, you do 4 sets of bench press....heavy enough weight where you can only do it 6 times. Breathe in through your nose when lowering the weight and breathe out through your mouth when pressing out. You will also gain more from the exercise if you do it slow. Obviously your muscles will get tired from the first rep and you might not be able to 6 with the same weight when it comes time for your second rep. So what you do it pyramid the weights down. In other words, take off 5 pounds from each side each consecutive set you do so you can keep doing only 6 reps. 6 reps is good enough resistance where you are not only doing one and getting no endurance from it and you are not doing 13 or 15 which is too light and would be a waste of time.
So eat 6 small meals a day if possible...spread apart 2 and a half hours apart, lift weights every day or every other day, and for cut, run on the days you don't lift weights. Count your calories. As far as weightlifting goes you have 3 options:
1. Join a gym - you have a ton of machines and weights to use. But the draw back is you can only lift when it's open, and you might have to wait to use the equipment when other people are in line waiting to use it.
2. Save your money and buy your own equipment. This is what I did. (it's expensive but it's worth it. No lines to wait in to do your exercises. Although you might not have a spotter.)
3. Go to a friend's house that has weights.
If none of these options are available, get a job and then they will be available. Until then, if those options are out of reach for now, do tons of push-ups, sit-ups, run every day or every other day for half an hour, pull ups, stretch everyday, and try wrestling your friends or buy some boxing gloves and head gear and go punch each other. LOL
This message has been edited by Lenmaster on Mar 8, 2004 6:17 PM
What everyone has said is correct, but I wanna touch on getting muscles like Bruce. It just isn't gonna happen, because Bruce's genetics were Bruce's genetics. Even Brandon couldn't get lats like his dad's. Now, that isn't to say you can't get ripped like Bruce, but it definitely won't look the same. You may get wide lats, but they won't look the same as Bruce's. It depends entirely on you genes, so if you can't get those nice, sinewy muscles, blame your parents.
One excellent 3rd generation JKD instructor, coming up.
1-1.5G protein is probably all you will need. You won't get fat from eating a lot of protein unless what you ate had a lot of fat on it. I think excessive protein can hurt your kidneys though. Make sure you drink lots of water. I don't see why you wouldn't want to use weights but you can get strong from bodyweight exersizes. This site might help you with that: http://www.trainforstrength.com/ If you want to get strong do 1-5 reps and do not train to failure or overtrain. Do 2 or 3 exersizes for each bodypart. If you want size do 6-12 reps and you might want to do more exersizes for each bodypart and work to failure. Don't worry too much about supplements, most of them won't help you that much.
"There are two kind of muscles... im not a physician, but i know there are red muscles used to lift weight, and white muscles for rapid movements. All those muscles you see in Bruce's body are white. He concentrated on speed and cardiovascular resistance instead of becoming a slow mass of red muscles. This is better because you can think about a ryno trying to hit a rabbit, for the ryno the task is impossible, but for the rabbit there are many opportunities to hit and bite. Bruce also concentrated on technique, so he could punch at least two times harder than a common person."
-chronodragon
There are three kinds of muscle fibers; type 1 slow twitch, type 2a fast twitch, and type 2b fast twitch. You can't change how much of them you have in your muscles and you probably wouldn't want to. Type 1 slow twitch fibers are red, type 2a fast twitch are red, and type 2b fast twitch are white. White muscle fibers are not for rapid movements like you said, they are for endurance. A lot of what you said didn't even make since, for example, "He concentrated on speed and cardiovascular resistance instead of becoming a slow mass of red muscles." What the hell is cardiovascular resistance? You should read these articles: http://www.abcbodybuilding.com/magazine/musclefibers.htm http://www.abcbodybuilding.com/magazine/musclefiberspart2.htm http://www.abcbodybuilding.com/magazine/musclefiberspart3.htm
Lenny: 13-15 and higher is not a waste of time. Slow twitch fibers grow better with them. Growth in fast twitch fibers for 6 reps is good but for slow twitch it sucks. You're also not getting too much endurance.
As I said, im not a physician... the white and red muscle story is what i heard long ago, but at least i wasn't that far from the truth. Anyway, in Bruce Lee's Fighting Method: Training, it says that he mostly concentrated on endurance and speed, and that punching power came from technique... the punch that starts from the hip, driving thru the opponent instead of pushing, and so.
John you said:
"Lenny: 13-15 and higher is not a waste of time. Slow twitch fibers grow better with them. Growth in fast twitch fibers for 6 reps is good but for slow twitch it sucks. You're also not getting too much endurance."
13-15 reps are good for legs when it comes to lifting to gain muscle, not upper body to gain muscle. Your legs carry you around everywhere you go so it takes more for them to respond. Reason for this is you have overload your muscles and force them to respond. If you don't overload the muscles enough, the muscles will not be stimulated enough to respond. If you want endurance and speed, then punch the double end striking ball, punch the speed bag, punch with light weights, run, wrestle, box, and everything else out there. But if you want to gain muscle you have to keep the reps low and the sets high. It's in all the bodybuilding and heath magazines. Chicks do high reps cause they don't want to get big. They just want definition. Guys usually lift cause they are small and want to get some size on. You're not going to get that by laying on a bench all day doing easy benches. And you are not even going to get massive either cause that depends a lot on genetics. I am 6' and used to weigh 165. I now weigh 190 from lifting and I am not a big guy. I follow the same schedule I recommend to everyone else. I am medium built. If you have ever seen the movie Spider-man when he wakes up and looks in the mirror and he's got muscles...that's like my size. He's not huge but he's got a good build on him. I have been lifting since I was 13 and swapped notes with bodybuilders and heath gurus so I know what I am talking about. And lastly, if you want to know about Bruce Lee, he was fast as hell right? Guess what he did when he lifted? 5 to 6 reps on his upper body. There is something to that man. Trust me.
Excessive protein is eliminated when you go to the bathroom but more importantly your body uses calcium to do it taking it right from your bones making them weak and leading to osteoperosis.
Did you know that a glass of carrot juice has two times the amount of calcium as a glass of milk? And did you know that a glass of spinach juice has ten times the amount of calcium as one glass of milk? Where do you think the cows get their calcium from when they produce milk? To make carrot juice or spinach juice, you need a Juicer machine.
As to the other subject referring to too much protein: Yes, you have to be careful taking too much...I don't mean a few grams over...I'm talking about how bodybuilders eat....like 4000 - 5000 calories a day LOL. Too much protein over time can lay a heavy burden on the kidneys and can produce kidney stones. And you don't want to have pain taking a piss cause little stones are blocking your uretha passage. So if you are going to eat a lot of protein, eat only a little over your maintanance level of caloric intake and drink a lot of water throughout the day because water flushes out any wasteful protein not used by the body. Also cranberry juice helps flush out the urinary tract, kidneys, and bladder wonderfully.
Here's my suggestion on weightlifting. It's not for serious body builders but for lazy people like me who want to get toned. Pick the specific body parts that you want to see improvement on. Work those areas. You can add all the exercises to target tons of areas on your body if you wish. I've known lots of people, myself included, who would be on an exercise kick and start going to the gym and working out like a madman. After some time one gets bored, doesn't want to go to gym or just doesn't want to put all that work into it. If you have a core group of muscles that are your main goals then you can continue to just work those and they don't take much time to do at all.
Here's what I do. I have two 10 lb & 20lb weights and a push up bar. The main muscle groups that I concentrate on are my chest (push ups), biceps (curls), triceps (curls), shoulders (lateral raises) and stomach (crunches). I work arms and shoulder on Mon,Wed & Fri and the pushups and situps on Tue,Thu & Sat. It doesn't take me more than 10 minutes to finish the exercises. That's it. It's simple, straight forward and doesn't take much time. The key is to continue exercising and not quit. You wont improve overnight. Some people who join gyms burn out too quickly because they're overwhelmed by the 101 different exercises, muscle groups and time it takes to work out.
So I would suggest to join a gym if you can but know which groups of muscles you wish to target the most. On days that you are too lazy, tired, stressed to go to the gym then you can just target those muscle groups at home with a few simple weights. If you give up your gym membership entirely then a simple exercise routine may be right for you.
Bruce Lee ate like a horse and lifted weights like an Olympian. I don't think he could get any bigger, I don't think there are many HUGE Chinese muscle men on this planet, and so the result of a Chinese man lifting weights is Bruce Lee. Bruce Lifted just like the guys you see at your local gym, he did the Bicept Curls, Military Presses, Dead Lifts etc... He just trained every part of his body very consistently, and to maintain that body, he took protein supplements, drank lots of milk and ate hearty. In addition, you cannot exercise a few hours a day with out losing body fat... Bruce did many cardio type exercises such as Jogging, Biking, Skip Rope and Martial Arts. Therefore, unless you have a high burning metabolism and you eat right and train hard, then you will never look and perform like Bruce Lee.
"If you want Bruce Lee type results, you got to put in the Bruce Lee type time in your training" Ted Wong
Lenny: I didn't know you were talking about upper body. But still all muscles have some of both types of fibers so wouldn't it be a good idea to do more than one range of reps? Just because Bruce Lee trained like that doesn't mean it's the best way.
John, yeah I know you are talking about fast twitch and slow twitch muscles. I am saying slow heavy weights will not slow you down as long as you practice speed training alongside your bodybuilding program. Just cause Bruce did it, doesn't mean it's right? I know what you are saying and I won't deny what is for one person may not be for another. But you have to understand some truths are universal for most anyone. As long as you don't have a medical condition, or a disability, you will get bigger if you eat several small high protein meals a day and lift heavy (low rep and high sets). How do I know this? Everyone who has done this type of training for at least two months and been consistent has shown results....my own body being the first guinea pig LOL. Plus I read a lot and get my info from various sources about gaining muscles (newspaper, muscle mags, health mags, certified trainers, etc.). It is one of the consistencies that I have found regardless of where it came from.
I think every one here has given some great advice. The most important thing is to find a work out that works for you and to stick with it. Results don't happen overnight. And as far as trying to get a body like Bruce Lee or anyone else for that matter takes time and dedication. The best way, although not inexpensive, is to join a gym and hire a personal training. The next best thing is to buy some good magazines, books or videos on weightlifting. Join a local inexpensive gym, like a YMCA or Boys Club. If you can afford it, maybe a few dumbells or a home gym. Visit websites specifically geared to body building and ask questions on those forums. For some people bodybuilding is a way of life and they have an encyclopedic knowledge of weightlifting, health and nutrition. It would be good to seek those people out for further advice on the subject. Good luck.
