Plateau course
Lesson 3
I'm not going to write this long drawn out intro for the attached article because It's pretty self explanatory. If you think that ramping up your exercise alone will give great, ripped leanness… sorry Not going to happen.
If you are getting out of a plateau or are making sure you never have to take a look at your kitchen. It could be holding you back from results that you deserve.
Making Meals For Weight Lifting Easy With These 3 Muscle Food Factors
Whether you like it or not, nutrition is the keystone to fully achieving your weight lifting goals. The only problem is that nobody can seem to agree with how much people should eat, what people should eat, etc... It really gets ridiculous. However, there are 3 muscle food factors that you need to know about no matter what you eat.
These are what I like to call the nutritional muscle fundamentals...
Key 1: Calories
These tiny little pieces of measurement cause the most turmoil through the fitness/dieting community. What do they measure? Energy! Calories are simply a measure of energy that your body uses to function.
Many of the top diets, I consider to be the fad diets, base their entire strategy on nothing more than counting calories. The two biggest ones in the nation go even further and assign you the food that you can and cannot eat.
However, in the respect that calories are super important to your progress, they are 100% dead on. Everything you do when you lift weights comes down to 2 things…
1. How many calories you consume in a day
2. How many calories you burn in a day
To keep this real simple and not textbook like, you need to burn more calories than you consume. When you burn more calories then you consume, you will loose weight. A great percentage of that will be body fat. However even that topic can get very confusing.
If you consume more calories than you burn, you will in turn gain weight. Your body will store the extra energy. It will store some of it in your muscles, but a lot of it will be stored as fat cells.
Well the goal here is to loose body fat and develop muscle. On an overview basis, to drop body fat consistently (aka proper levels), you need to find out how many calories you use on both workout days and non-workout days. To get a good estimate of this, you can use a BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) Calculator which is free on many sites.
At this point you want to consume just below (a few hundred calories) what you burn. These levels will fuel muscle development, but because you are still burning more calories… you are eliminating body fat. It is honestly a guessing game and a game of balance.
 Yeah chow down on those carbs kid! |
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Key 2: Carbohydrates
Just when you think it is safe to eat again, the carb craze strikes and shakes up all the meals you have for weight lifting. Even though carbs have been a main point to diets and low carb diets have bee studied for over 50 years... nothing has brought the low carb diet to light like the Atkins Diet. Carbs like everything in nutrition can be bad in excess and in limited amounts.
For muscle development, carbs are 100% necessary. Again, to keep things simple, carbs eaten before and after your workouts help to fuel your muscles and keep them in their development building phases. Carbs when broken down create glucose, which is one of the main fuel sources of your body. Muscles feed off of glucose.
To complicate the waters, carbs (or excess carbs) at off times can be detrimental to your progress. When muscles are not using them, they are converted into… body fat!
So use them, you need them!... but do your best to try and get the majority of your carbs in meals that take place before your workout.
Key 3: Protein
To weight trainers, whether you are a bodybuilder, a guy looking to get ripped by lifting weights, or a weight training woman… protein is highly used by all. There are people who make fun of fitness people because they use protein and there are people who use way too much protein.
The myths, truths, and recommendations vary greatly and no real 100% decision has been made to what is optimal. One thing is sure… too much protein is a bad thing as is too little protein. Since you are different from your "normal" person, you require more protein. Your muscles need more to grow and need more to sustain themselves.
So don't listen to the naysayer's that say protein supplements are not needed. They think only in terms of the general public. You are not like the general public.
Protein is used by the muscles to help them repair since you just tore the heck out of them weight lifting. This protein helps your muscle repair faster… providing them plenty of protein really helps this process. You don't NEED protein supplements to accomplish this, but you do need some extra sources of protein in your diet.
To keep this as simple as possible… too much protein can cause toxic ketones in the body. Chemistry talk aside, these cause your kidneys to work overtime eliminating them from the body. Your body results in water loss, dehydration, muscle loss, and bone calcium loss.
You really don't have to worry about this unless you are consuming way over 1 g or more of protein per 1 lb of body weight. A lot of resources will say that you need to do just that... 1 g of protein for every 1 lb of body weight. That should be your maximum.
As you can see that balance is the key not only during your weight lifting routines, but also for the meals you eat for weight lifting. Use your ever-improving discipline to watch your calories, your carbs, and your protein. Use the tracking software to keep track of all of these. It will help make sure you get what you need.
A great side effect is you will be more conscious of your diet and you will eat a lot more nutritious foods. That is a great habit to be in.
Additional Audio:
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