Cold Or Hotshowers best for Muscle Building?

Building muscle is about lifting heavy and eating more. Neither style of shower will help with building muscle.

Hot showers can sometimes increase inflammation, making workout soreness last longer. This might indirectly slow your gains if it increases your recovery needlessly.

Cold shower/ice baths can soothe inflammation. This might make you more comfortable for a while, but inflammation is a natural process and is part of recovery - it has a biological purpose and you will do best to avoid interfering with natural processes as much as possible. And cold showers suck.

Take comfortable showers, and spend your time focusing on what you do in the weight room and at the dinner table to get the most out of your muscle building.

Dose running build muscle?

A sign of your muscles building is not the amount of pain you are in post workout. This is because the more you workout the more your muscles will adapt and the less they will hurt.

And to answer your question about whether running builds muscle, the answer is yes, of course it can, particularly if you don't have good muscle tone to start with. But if you ask will running build muscle bulk or mass, then you might be disappointed in the answer.

Running is a cardiovascular exercise. The act of running increases blood flow, which stimulates the heart. Running also increases the amount of metabolic hormones released into your system Metabolic hormones will actually cause you to lose weight, as well as muscle mass.

The muscles used in running will strengthen, but they will not build - at least not to the extent that a body builder would like to see.

So to strengthen your leg muscle's and avoid losing muscle don't run for more than 30 minutes to limit the amount of metabolic hormones that are released. Shortly after your run, consume a protein shake or bar and some carbohydrates to release the all important muscle building nutrients and counteract the metabolic effect.

Good diet to lose weight and build muscle?

Building muscle whilst losing weight at the same time is very difficult, it requires a good balance of calorie control and weight training. You need to maintain a calorie deficit of about 500, lower than that and your body probably won't be willing to put on muscle. So you need to calculate how many calories you're burning in a day, including all the exercise/physical activity you're doing, and subtract 500 from the amount, that is how many calories you should be eating. Doing this will allow you to lose 1lb of body fat a week.

Within this calorie limit, you need to be eating 177g of protein every day, this is vital, if you don't have a high protein intake, you're just gonna burn muscle tissue. Having protein every 3 hours helps, but isnt vital, but it is vital that you're getting protein for breakfast, before bed, before your workout, and immediately after your workout. Also, don't be afraid of healthy fats, you need them. It's carbohydrates you'll be mainly limiting, having most of them before and after your workout.

Here are some vital compound lifts for any muscle building routine:

Squats (works the entire body)
Deadlift (works mainly legs and back)
Bench Press (works mainly chest, shoulders, and triceps)
Overhead Press (works mainly shoulders, triceps, and chest)
Pull-ups/chin-ups (works mainly back and biceps)

Here's a routine I recommend:

Monday
Squat 3x5
Bench press/Overhead press 3x5 (alternating)
Chin-ups: 3 sets to failure or add weight if completing more than 15 reps

Wednesday
Squat 3x5
Overhead Press/bench press 3x5 (alternating)
Deadlift 1x5

Friday
Squat 3x5
Bench press/Overhead press 3x5 (alternating)
Pull-ups: 3 sets to failure or add weight if completing more than 15 reps

3x5 means 3 sets of 5 reps. Start with very light weight to learn proper form. Increase weight by 2-5kg on exercises each workout. Add 3 sets of abdominal exercises at the end of each workout if you like. When the weights get heavy, do progressively heavy warm-up sets to reach your working weight.

Tips for building muscle?

There are 2 components to muscle building - lifting, and diet.
For lifting, to build muscle, you need to build strength. This means lifting heavy weights for a low number of reps. Go Google "Stronglifts 5x5", I highly recommend it as a beginner lifting program. You can learn a lot about proper form and lifting in general from the website, and if you stick with the program as it is written you will notice a difference fairly quickly. The plan is aimed at cutting out many of the activities that don't actually benefit you, things that people tend to do in the weight room but don't understand why they do them.

Your diet must be healthy, balanced, and have enough of everything. The dietary component isn't about protein. Your body can only use so much protein, no matter how hard you are lifting. But working out regularly burns a good deal of energy during workouts, boosts your metabolism between workouts (burning even more energy), and consumes other resources in greater amounts as well (vitamins, minerals). When trying to gain muscle, you have to increase all components of your diet.

Supplements are not needed until you are much stronger, and even then you may never need them if you eat healthy and work hard in the gym.

Building muscle mass?

You should do weight lifting, but it depends on what type of muscles you want.

If you want big bulky manly muscles then every time you weight lift you have to do a lot of sets with a little bit of reps with higher weight than you would be comfortable with. For example, lets say you are doing bicep curls and you are curling 50 lbs (and its a little heavy for you). You are trying to build muscle mass so you would do 10 curls 5 times. Do this from 4 to 6 days a week, and each week add some more weight.

If you want toned muscles then you would do a little bit of sets with a lot of reps and weight that you are comfortable with. For example if you are doing bicep curls and you are trying to tone your biceps then you have the weight that is comfortable for lifting and you would 20 curls 3 times. Each week add a little more weight, reps, and sets. Do this 4-6 times a week.

After your done working out then eat protein. Protein bars are always helpful, and steak, chicken, pork, anything with meat.