GRIPAD ® Blog

A Muscle Building Diet: Foods that Can Help Create Muscle Mass

Your resistance training regimen and the muscle building diet choices you make as you train will both be influenced by your long term workout goals. If you’re trying to gain strength and improve your athletic performance, you’ll want to focus on blending resistance and cardio, lifting lighter weights, and increasing your reps. But if you’re working on building big muscles fast and you aren’t especially concerned about strength and agility, your workout regimen and your diet should both take this into account.

For big muscle volume, use the burn down method, which involves lifting heavier weights to the point of failure. Focus on lower reps, higher weights, and nutritional choices that can quickly rebuild overtaxed muscle tissue. Here are a few healthy workout diet tips for muscle growth and repair.

Muscle Building Diet Choices

1. Load up on plenty of protein, but make sure you’re choosing the right proteins and avoiding the ones that can stand in your way. Look for lean meats like fish, chicken, turkey, and eggs. Nuts like almonds and walnuts can also help you build muscle fast without adding fat.
2. Skip red meat like beef and pork. No matter how much fat has been trimmed off the edges, these meats are still loaded with fat, and it isn’t the good kind. Excess fat won’t help build muscle tissue and can actually contribute to the subcutaneous layer that, for example, keeps your six pack abs from showing. You don’t need to do more crunches; just lay off the cheeseburgers.
3. Choose whole grain and unprocessed carbs, like oatmeal, whole grain bread, and legumes. Before you eat something from a package, take a quick look at the label. If you see more than about twenty ingredients, or if high fructose corn syrup appears at the top of the list, just put it back on the shelf and choose something else.

Having a Hard Time Finding Workout Gloves For Women?

If you’re having a hard time finding weight lifting gloves that fit your hands, match your style, and stand up to your tough workouts, you’re not alone. In spite of all the varied weight lifting gloves and workout gloves on the market today, women are still at a bit of a loss in the search for appropriate hand protection. Why? We aren’t sure.

More women than ever before are engaging in hard core resistance training, and these women are ready and willing to spend money for a the right pair of workout gloves. But manufacturers haven’t been very quick to respond. Traditional workout gloves still tend to be too large, too ugly, too pink, or unable to withstand the long term wear and tear of serious workout routines.

Gripads: The Workout Glove Alternative for Women

But now there’s Gripad. Gripads are designed for both men and women, and since they don’t cover and constrict the entire hand, our women’s Gripads are designed to fit perfectly. They don’t feel clumsy and oversized, and they don’t restrict your range of motion, since they simply slide on over the fingers and form a soft, durable barrier between gym equipment and your palms.

Gripads are also tough. Their design is fun and stylish, but don’t be fooled. Gripads are made of super-durable, feather-light, moisture wicking neoprene. So they draw moisture away from your hands while providing a non-slip grip that stands up to countless demanding training sessions. Best of all, Gripads don’t collect moisture and sweat like traditional workout gloves. While you’re training, your hands can move and breathe naturally, so your palms are protected but your technique isn’t comprised.

The gear you choose can have an enormous impact on your workout results. So before you leave for the gym, make sure you have the right shoes, the right clothes, and the right hand protection. Take your Gripads!

How Effective are Your Weight Training Gloves?

Are your weight training gloves helping you get the most out of your workout? Or are they holding you back? Like any other element of your gear, your weight training gloves should contribute to your progress and offer returns equal to or greater than their cost. Above all else, your workout gear should be functional, stylish, and durable enough to stand up to whatever rough treatment you deal out.

Do Your Weight Lifting Gloves Make the Grade?

Ask yourself the following questions. If you answer no to any of them, consider tossing those old gloves and grabbing a pair of moisture-wicking neoprene Gripads.

1. Do your gloves constrict your range of motion? Traditional weight lifting gloves can inhibit your movements in subtle ways you might not even recognize until you think about it. But any restricted motion, especially in your hands, can interfere with your lifting technique and hold your progress back. Gripads slide on easily and cover only the palm, leaving the rest of the hand free.

2. Do your weight training gloves collect moisture? Gloves that cover the entire hand can accumulate must and sweat and prevent the skin from breathing properly. This means discomfort, mildew, smells, and bacteria growth. Gripads wick moisture away and allow your hands to sweat and breathe naturally.

3. Are your weight training gloves wearing away and falling apart? Your weight lifting gloves should work as hard as you do. Choose a form of hand protection that lasts through one tough workout after another. Slide on a pair of Gripads and then forget about them. They’ll still be there at the end of this workout. And the next, and the next after that. Just toss them in the wash and then back into your gym bag as good as new.

Workout Tips for Women and Men

For both women and men, a healthy workout begins with motivation, a plan, the right gear, and a supportive lifestyle. Are you trying to get in shape in time for beach season? Are you looking for ways to build strength and improve your athletic performance? Maybe you just want to lose a few pounds or add muscle volume to your chest and arms. Consider these goal-specific workout tips.

Workout Tips: Building Muscle Volume

If you want big muscles, lean toward heavier weights with fewer reps. Lift till you reach the point of failure, take a two second break, and grab the weights again. Consult a trainer for area-specific body sculpting tips.

Workout Tips: Slimming Down

Remember that weight loss is a function of caloric intake versus caloric output. Choose workout moves that elevate your heart rate and keep it elevated. Meanwhile, skip the soda, processed foods and red meat, and increase your intake of water, green vegetables and colorful fruits.

Workout Tips: Building Strength

To gain strength in a specific muscle group, focus on lower weights and higher reps. Make the most of your technique and keep the tension focused within targeted muscle areas as you complete each move. For workout tips and helpful moves specific to your sport, consult with your coach or trainer.


Workout Tips: Getting Healthy

Any amount of exercise during the day can reduce your risk of a cascade of diseases like diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, and even depression. All of us should be moving in a way that elevates our heart rate for at least fifteen minutes every day. If you aren’t quite there yet, start small and work your way up. Just don’t stop moving. For a healthy workout, stay balanced by blending cardio activities with resistance training.

Muscle Building Tips for Both Size and Strength

If resistance training plays a strong role in your workout routine, it’s a good idea to make sure your training goals are clear. Muscle tissue responds differently to different exercises at various levels of intensity, and once you clarify your goals, you can choose the exercises (and even the nutrition plan) that can help you get where you need to be. Are you trying to build muscle strength? Or do you care more about volume and size? Here are a few workout tips that can be applied to specific muscle building goals.

Muscle Building Workout Goals

For a muscle building plan focused on size and mass, rely on the burn-down or drop set lifting approach. This means lifting heavier weights at lower reps. The fastest muscle building strategy comes from lifting until you reach the point of failure, or until you’re entirely unable to continue. After a short pause, continue until you reach the failure point again.

Strength Building Workout Goals

If you’re trying to increase muscle strength and agility and you don’t care much about getting big, focus on lower weights and more reps. Make sure you’re creating resistance in the rails, or supporting small muscle groups that contribute to core stability, balance, and speed. Building muscle strength can be great for your athletic performance, but if you pursue this method, you may never get the bulky, muscular look of a professional body builder.

For both types of muscle building goals, remember to get plenty of sleep, stay hydrated (choose juice or water), and eat several servings a day of lean protein. Legumes, fish, poultry, eggs and nuts can support the muscle building process and help your muscle tissue recover from the miniscule damage caused by high intensity resistance training.

Safety Guidelines for a Healthy Workout

Enthusiasm, high energy, and a willingness to push past your limits can be great attributes to bring to an effective workout session. But careless mistakes and sloppy technique can lead to slower results, and can sometimes cause injuries that can send us to the sidelines. A few core weightlifting tips and guidelines can help you find ways to safely channel your energy and get the strength-building impact you’re looking for.

Weightlifting Tips for a Safe and Effective Workout

1. Protect Your Rotator Cuffs

   The rotator cuffs are the small muscles that curve around the joint between our collarbone and upper arm. These muscles allow the shoulder to rotate in every direction, but they can easily become damaged, and the ligaments and nerves connected to them can be pinched by our bones as we move, which can lead to pain and other problems. For an effective healthy workout of the shoulder area, keep your arms in front of the level of your ears during flies and overhead lifts. Keep your arms from moving too high or too far back behind you, and stop doing any move if you feel tingling or numbness in the shoulder area.

2. Protect Your Lower Back

   As with your shoulders, don’t place your lower back in any high stress position that feels unnatural or causes pinching, tingling, pain or numbness. Stop immediately if you feel any of these things. Don’t twist or jerk your lower back, and try to build a strong core to protect this sensitive area and provide 24 hour support to the spine.

3. Protect Your Knees

   As our legs get stronger and our bodies become heavier, our knee joints stay the same size. So large heavy bodies have more power to tax, strain and injure the sensitive ligaments and tendons that allow our knees to function. For a safe, healthy workout that includes squats or lunges, don’t allow your knees to move further forward than your toes.

Do You Need Better Hand Protection?

The right hand protection can offer essential support for your workout and help you find a faster path to great results. But what should you look for in a pair of weightlifting grips or exercise gloves? Great weightlifting grips provide four essential components of workout support. Make sure all four play a role in your choice.

Essential Features of Great Weightlifting Grips

1. Safety and a Strong Grip

   You need a pair of gloves or grips that help you gain a tight, controlled grasp of heavy bars and equipment. Your gloves should fit perfectly and shouldn’t confine your range of motion in any way. Ideally, you should be able to slide them on and forget you’re wearing them for the duration of your workout.

2. Hand Protection

   Your weightlifting grips should also protect your hands from abrasions, blisters and scrapes. This can prevent minor injuries and infections, but it can also support your results, since we tend to favor injured hands without even realizing we’re doing it. This can compromise our technique.

3. Cleanliness

   Gloves that cover the whole hand not only restrict our range of motion, but they also collect sweat and moisture, which can lead to mildew, bacteria, and unpleasant smells. Unlike regular weightlifting gloves, Gripads moisture-wicking neoprene weightlifting grips allow your hands to breathe and move naturally without sweaty confinement. The pads can also protect your hands from the germs that accumulate on shared gym surfaces.

4. Durability

   The weightlifting grips you choose should stand up to abuse and work as hard as you do. Gripads are made of feather-light, super tough neoprene that can survive the most challenging reps and sets. When your workout ends, just toss the pads in the washing machine and they’ll come out clean and good as new.

Nutrition for An Effective Workout Plan

Building an effective workout plan involves more than just choosing the right equipment and setting weight lifting goals. A healthy workout should be supported by a healthy overall lifestyle, which means at least six hours of sleep every night, adequate stress management, and a workout diet that provides all the nutrients necessary for strong muscle development. Use these tips to build your healthy workout on a foundation of good nutrition.

Workout Diet Tips:

1. Most of our caloric intake (which should remain under 2000 calories per day) consists of well-chosen carbohydrates. Your carb sources should be minimally processed and derived from whole grains. Consider whole grain toast in the morning, oatmeal with fruit for lunch, and plenty of pasta with tomato sauce if you plan to engage in endurance workouts or sustained activity for longer than two hours.
2. The second key building blocks in your workout diet should come from proteins, fruits, and vegetables. Protein supports muscle growth, but make sure your protein comes from lean sources like poultry, fish, nuts and legumes and skip the fatty red meats like beef and pork. Eat as many leafy green vegetables and colorful fruits as possible, five servings per day at a minimum.
3. Fats are essential to a healthy workout diet, but as with other elements of nutrition, your sources can mean the difference between great and mediocre results. Choose olive oil, fish oil, peanut oil, and other oils derived from plants. Try to avoid fats derived from animal products like lard, butter, and fatty meats. Milk is a great source of protein and nutrients, but choose milk with a lower fat content, like one percent or skim.
4. Stay hydrated, but whenever possible, reach for water. During bouts of intense activity, sports drinks can replenish lost carbohydrates, but this effect usually doesn’t make much of a difference until after two hours or more of sustained activity. For a healthy workout diet, avoid soft drinks altogether.

Try Weight Lifting Grips for Better Hand Protection

When you’re lifting weights or engaging in serious resistance training, the right hand protection can mean the difference between an effective workout that gets results and a painful, unproductive ordeal. For those who are committed to intense training plans, lifting with no hand protection at all just isn’t an option. Direct contact with bars and equipment can lead to abrasions and blisters that can become painful or even infected, and along the way these small injuries can compromise technique and interfere with our progress.

Weight lifting gloves are a step up from nothing at all, but they’re not an ideal solution. Gloves can constrict the natural range of motion in our hands, which can lead to improper lifting and poor results. They can also collect sweat and mildew, which can smell bad and feel unpleasant. Our skin needs to breathe, especially the skin of our hardworking hands, and it isn’t kind to subject our hands to the clammy, claustrophobic environment of a sweaty lifting glove.

The solution? Gripads. Gripad weight lifting grips offer hand protection even better than gloves, and they don’t restrict your range of motion or get in the way as you lift. These durable little weight lifting grips simply slide on over the fingers and remain securely in place, no matter what kind of abuse comes their way. Gripads are made of nearly indestructible, moisture wicking neoprene that stands between your palms and your equipment without encasing your entire hand. So you receive the best possible hand protection while still allowing your skin to breathe naturally. Gripads are lightweight, washable, snug, and strong. Once your Gripad weight lifting grips are in place, you can forget all about them and focus on your resistance training goals.

What to Wear for an Effective Workout, from Running Shoes to Weight Lifting Gloves

Your gear can be a very important aspect of your workout, and the items you bring with you to the gym can sometimes mean the difference between great and mediocre results. Quality gear can also mean the difference between a fun, pleasant workout experience that leads to good memories versus a negative gym experience that can dampen your motivation down the road.

So how can you make sure your gear is supporting your goals? Start by taking a look at your clothing.

What to Wear When you Work Out

If you engage in high impact cardio activities, your shoes should be in excellent shape and should be carefully chosen. Long distance running shoes should be replaced every six months, even if they still look fine. The cushioning can become compressed over time in ways that aren’t visible, but this compression can increase the impact on your joints as you run. For less intense activities, shoes don’t need to be replaced as often, but they should still be chosen to match the sport you play the most.

Your pants, shirts, socks and outerwear should be made of either natural fibers or moisture-wicking synthetics. They should fit tightly enough to stay out of your way, but not so tightly that they constrict your range of motion or prevent your skin from breathing properly.

If you dedicate a portion of your workout to weight training or resistance work, make sure your hands are adequately protected. But skip the gloves, which can trap moisture and collect mildew. Instead, use strap-on pads specifically designed for weight training.

Flexible, moisture-wicking Gripads are made of durable neoprene and they cover only your vulnerable palms, not your whole hand. This means your skin can breathe and your hands don’t feel constricted as you lift. Gripads also have a non-slip grip that can help you maintain a safe grip on heavy bars, ropes, and other equipment.