Hugo Rivera New Site

In this video blog I discuss the secret to weight loss and why in order to lose weight you need more than just take a pill or buy an ab machine. (more…)

In this video blog I discuss the pros and cons of Bodybuilding supplements, the supplements I take and the brands I personally trust.

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This week I answered the following natural bodybuilding question:

I know that it is the deltoid muscles that give you the really nice tri-dimensional look above the biceps and triceps area, but what I don’t know is if I will lose the definition while I am trying to build them.  Is it possible to build muscles and get cut at the same time doing natural bodybuilding?  Will building muscle in the shoulders make me lose the definition forever?
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One of the main reasons I was able to lose 30 lbs in 3 months was because I did not get tired of 3 delicious fat burning meals.  You may wonder how in the heck can 3 meals help you burn fat and be delicious at the same time.

Well, the answer is simple when you stop and see what these meals were.  I applied a little known trick to my daily diet and before I knew it, presto I had lost my stomach fat and had a chiseled mid section.

Enough about how great of results these meals have given me, let’s look at what they are and how they can do the same for you as they did for me.

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Lose Fat Under The Pecs and Increase Your Bench Press

Today I answered the following natural bodybuilding question:

Natural Bodybuilding Question:

How can I lose fat underneath pecs and increase bench press?

Right now I am 18, weigh about 130 and can bench max 130. How could I increase this and also get rid of the fat underneath pec? Decline? Specific please

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Bodybuilding supplements are actually a subcomponent of the nutrition component on the formula described above. That is the reason you do not see them as part of the formula. However, because I remember how curious and easily convinced (and misled) I was on this subject back when I was 14 years old, I decided to cover this topic first.

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Real food is by far the most important component of a bodybuilding diet. There are so many nutrients that real food contains, many of which have not even been discovered yet, that you would be doing yourself a disservice by limiting the amount of real food that you are eating.

In addition, real food has what is called a “thermic effect”. A “thermic effect” is the impact that real food has in your metabolism. Because real food requires digestion, your body burns more calories in processing it; as opposed to shakes which are already pre-digested.

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One of the keys for teenagers (or any other bodybuilder for that matter) to have bodybuilding success is nutrition. Nutrition is what gives us the raw materials for recuperation, energy, and muscle growth so having the proper bodybuilding diet plan is essential. Without a good bodybuilding diet, your dreams of achieving your ideal body will never be reached.

In order to lose body fat and achieve good gains in muscle mass, your nutrition program needs to provide your body with quality nutrients in the form of carbohydrates (which serve to provide energy), proteins (which provide the amino acids to repair muscle tissue and other tissues in the body), good fats (which support healthy hormonal production) and finally water (as most of your body is made up of water).

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Typically, when a bodybuilder reaches 10% body fat, in order to keep the process of fat loss going in the right direction, we need to use some metabolic trickery.  While at this point, the instinct of many bodybuilders is to eliminate carbs from their bodybuilding diet and go on a ketogenic diet, this is not the best strategy in my opinion.

While eliminating carbs from your diet initially brings about some results in the way of less water retention and a sudden drop in weight, the body immediately puts itself into an emergency state and thus begins to take measures in order to lower its metabolic rate. It will do this through a reduction of thyroid hormone production (which is the hormone responsible for keeping the metabolism high) and the only way to bring this production back up (and thus, boost the metabolic rate) is through an increase in carbohydrate intake. So instead of just eliminating carbs from the diet, a better way to accomplish fat loss when already at 10% body fat is through the use of an advanced technique called carbohydrate cycling.

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The Glycemic Index (or GI for short) is a measure of how quickly your blood sugar rises after ingesting a carbohydrate. Basically, once you consume a carbohydrate and it gets digested it gets turned to glucose (blood sugar). Blood sugar is used by the body to manufacture ATP (Adenosine Tri-Phosphate), which is the molecule that the body uses to power up all of its functions. You can think of ATP as your body’s fuel, as without ATP, your organism would not be able to function.

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