The following are the top ten tips for improving your athletic performance:

1. For general athletic prowess, do more than one sport. For example, mix climbing with skateboarding and basketball. Choose some sports that are similar, so they reinforce each other, but also sports that complement each other by developing different areas.
    
2. For a particular sport, practice the sport. If you want to be an elite climber, for example, confine your sports to climbing and only similar activities. Ballet--or any dancing--is excellent training for climbers. So are most martial arts.
    
3. Learn more about your chosen sport(s). Read books about your sport, train with others who are outstanding in the sport, and so on. Find an older person who is "retired" from the sport and consider having that person coach you--the results may amaze you.
    
4. Lift weights to develop muscles, bones, ligaments, and tendons. One myth in some sports training circles is weight training will make you slow or throw off your coordination. That may be true if you exercise on machines. With free weights, that isn't true, provided you engage in a full range of motion and stick to standard bodybuilding principles and practices.
    
5. Practice balance and coordination drills. The more balance and coordination you have, the more you will shine as a natural athlete. You will be faster and have more economy of motion, plus you will have more power and less chance of injury.
    
6. Get adequate rest. When you are 20% sleep-deprived, you have the mental acuity of a person who is drunk. When you have enough rest, your reflexes and agility are at their peak. But rest also entails sufficient recovery time between training sessions. Muscle growth occurs during the resting phase, only. You need rest between drills, as well--when you tire and your form becomes sloppy, continuing to drill will train your body to execute a given movement in a sloppy and inefficient manner.
    
7. Don't deliberately eat toxins. Eliminate refined "foods" from your diet, and do not drink "soft drinks" (osteoporosis, fat gain, and esophageal cancer in a can) at all.
    
8. Stay lean. A man with double-digit fat is far too fat. Drop the fat, and performance goes up. Every woman will need to determine her individual body fat target--what's optimal for one may be suboptimal for another.
    
9. Engage in an intelligent program of nutrition. Ignore the fads. Eat more leafy green vegetables, and you automatically increase nutrient density while lowering caloric density. See our many diet articles on this site.
    
10. Engage in an intelligent program of supplementation. At the very least, get  a good meal replacement powder (MRP). Use this for foundational nutrition three times a day (eat 3 small "whole food meals" and three small MRP shakes, and watch your Adonis body emerge). We prefer the Optimum Nutrition MRP shown at the top of our MRP page. Other worthwhile supplements include CLA, HMB, and creatine. Watch those "athletic bars"--most of them are junk-laden calorie binge bars. We have reviewed every bar on the market and found only a few that are good.

Building lean muscle mass is not easy. It takes incredibly hard work, dedication, and the right nourishment for your body. In short, you need a system. We provide that. We've put together this selection of highly-effective selection of supplements to give your body the nutrients it requires to pack on those thick muscles!

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HMB

HMB is my favorite supplement, because it flat out works. The FDA won't allow us to come out and say this stuff actually does what we know it does, because it's a "supplement" and all supplement promotions can only say something "may" do this or that. Try it for yourself, and you'll see the FDA isn't doing you any favors in regard to HMB.

Do you know that, before coming to the market for bodybuilders, HMB was used to help burn victims recover? Yep. It's got a great track record.