The biggest excuses for not performing any bodybuilding training is lack of time to workout and lack of equipment. However, let's take a look at these excuses more closely.

How many hours do we have in one day? Unless I am wrong, I believe there are still 24 hours in one day. Each hour is composed of 60 minutes each. Granted, 8 of them we spend sleeping (or at least we should). Therefore, we end up with 16 hours left. Do you know what that means? It means that if we work out for an hour a day we have 16 opportunities to get a workout in. Now, if you are really tight on time, great workouts can be achieved in 30 minutes as well. Performing 30 minute bodybuilding workouts means that we have 32 opportunities to get a workout in. Can you imagine?! 32 opportunities to workout!

From my experience in working with clients, most people just want to lose fat and firm up a bit using bodybuilding. For this group of folks, certainly 30 minutes is more than enough. If people would invest this minimum amount of time into themselves, not only would the whole population look better, but everyone would also feel more energetic and have much less health problems.

Now, I can hear that the second biggest excuse for not getting your bodybuilding workouts in is: "I don't have access to a gym or equipment". My comment back is "where there is a will there is a way".

To be honest, you don't need any expensive equipment to be able to get in shape. All you need at the very least is pair of adjustable dumbbells like the Powerblocks or the Ironmaster dumbbells. They don't occupy that much space, so please don't give me the "I don't have enough space in my house" type of excuse.

In the articles below, you will find several bodybuilding routines that are short and that use minimum equipment. Implement any of them and see how your bodybuilding results will soar even though you will be spending very little of your day at the gym:

• An Advanced Body Sculpting Routine Using Supersets


• An Advanced Bodybuilding Routine for Busy Bodybuilders


• Home Gym Bodybuilding Training Routines

Traveling does not always offer the best conditions for following the bodybuilding lifestyle. Sometimes gyms are not available at the hotels where we stay at, and even worst, there may not be any gyms anywhere close to the hotel either. When this is the case, you will need to use some improvisations and come up with a way to workout even with no equipment at all.

I will use myself as an example and share with you what I did one time that I was traveling abroad and was in a hotel with no gym. The nearest gym was 30 miles away and I must admit that I was so busy the week prior to me leaving that I failed to do my due diligence in finding these things out before the trip (something that I could have done via the web).

While the situation looked grim, I looked around my room and I saw a couple of items that I could use for my workout: an extremely sturdy oak beam reinforced by iron that ran from one side of the wall to the next. And, I also had a chair. I had no cardiovascular equipment but I figured that I could do high repetitions and perform the bodybuilding workout in a circuit training fashion so that I could increase my heart rate considerably and also burn some extra calories.

Since I had trained using a lot of high volume and heavy weights at the beginning of the week when I was still home, I figured that for the weekend all I needed to do was some body weight exercises in order to maintain the muscle mass and keep the metabolism running in high gear.

With that in mind, here is the routine that I designed with the limited items I had available:

Full Body Giant-Set

• Wide Grip Pull-ups to Front on the wooden beam 7 sets of 15-20 repetitions
  
• Incline Push-ups (legs on the chair) 7 sets of 20-30 repetitions
  
• Lunges 7 sets of 20-25 repetitions
  
• One Legged Calf Raises 7 sets of 40-45 repetitions (90 seconds of rest)
  

Also, sometime in the afternoon I would perform this Giant-Set for Abs in order to further spike my metabolic rate.

Abdominal Non-Stop Giant-Set

Note: For this Giant-Set you will do one exercise after the other and when you get to the last exercise, you will start over at the beginning without rest. Perform the sequence for 3 rounds.

• Leg Raises 3 sets of 15-25 reps
  
• Knee-Ins 3 sets of 15-25 reps
  
• V-Ups 3 sets of 15-25 reps
  
• Bicycle Crunches 3 sets of 15-25 reps
  
• Crunches 3 sets of 15-25 reps
  

I performed this routine on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Since the exercises were performed without weights I figured I could get away with doing them every day. My recovery was not affected and every day I seemed to be better able to do more repetitions.

While the routine looks simple, trust me, it will send your heart rate through the roof!

I personally performed it every morning before the start of the day, but it can be performed at any time. You can also split the ab work (like I did) and do it at a different time if you'd like. If you do the abdominal workout with the full body circuit, then do one less set for each abdominal exercise (so instead of 3 sets, do 2 sets).

For more information on bodybuilding while traveling please take a look at my article on Bodybuilding Training and Dieting While Traveling

When people think of bodybuilding, the first thing that comes to mind is big arms. How many bodybuilders, me included, just started by doing some biceps curls? After all, one of the most common requests bodybuilders get is to flex their arms. And while a great physique is much more than big arms, nobody can argue that all great physiques have equally great arms!

Since I have gotten a lot of requests lately to publish a new arm routine to get the arms ready for summer, I decided to publish this week one of the latest bodybuilding routines that I have been using to train my arms. This rotating bodybuilding workout for arms is guaranteed to add up to an inch in your arms over the summer provided that you follow the proper bodybuilding diet and that you get enough rest at night.

As I was walking through the supermarket the other day I was looking at a lot of food items with labels that contained claims like: zero sugar, zero fat, low calorie, and 97% fat free. While initially one make think that the food item under question is good, upon further examination one can easily see why this is not the necessarily the case. Let's briefly discuss each one of these statements:

• Zero sugar: Based on what I saw, if an item is zero sugar, more than likely it is high in fat. So check the label! Also, be sure to check what the serving size is. Some foods may show zero sugar and one gram of fat per serving. However, the serving size may be as little as a tablespoon! So if you were to consume 5 tablespoons, then you are looking at ingesting 5 grams of fat and 45 calories!



• Zero fat: I saw a lot of things like cookies and other sweet items reading "zero fat". While that is all fine and well, look closely at the nutritional information and tell me how much sugar does the item have per serving?



• Low calorie: What exactly is low calorie? In order for an item to be considered "low calorie" it has to contain 40 calories or less. For us bodybuilders this does not mean much since for us every calorie has to be of a high quality nature. And as you can see, the "low calorie" statement does not have anything to do with the quality of the calories. And again, beware of the serving size as usually the serving sizes of these "low calorie" items are ridiculously small.
  
  
• 97% fat free: Again, this sounds great! However, what does the percentage really mean? 97% fat free means that the product is 3% fat by weight. So as a result, this has nothing to do with the percentage of fat calories per serving. So your 97% fat free product in reality may have as much as 30% of its calories from fat! How could this be? Let's look at an example. Let's suppose that a 97% fat free slice of deli meat has 30 calories per slice and only 1 gram of fat. Since we know that the 1 gram of fat equals 9 calories, then you can clearly see how if you look at the percentage of fat in terms of calories, most of the caloric content offered by the food comes from fat!
  
  And just for fun, let's go ahead and calculate a few other things. Since we know that 9 calories of the deli meat come from fat, the rest of the calories will come from protein (even though some deli meats also have some sugar in them, but for this example let's assume zero sugar). So 21 remaining calories divided by 4 (since each gram of protein has 4 calories) equals 5.25 grams of protein. Now, a male bodybuilder needs around 35-40 grams per serving and a female around 20-25. So in my case, I like to have 40 grams each meal. If I were to use this deli meat then I need around 8 servings. At 8 servings, now my fat content goes up to 8 grams, which is too high of a content in my opinion, for non essential fats (fats that are not Omega 3's). In addition, deli meats are extremely high in sodium, so that would definitely deter me from eating it.

So as you can see, buyers beware! When you go food shopping beware of deceptive food labels and claims. Stick to buying foods as close to their natural state as possible and watch your bodybuilding gains in terms of fat loss and definition sky rocket.