Bodybuilding Nutrition Guide For Beginners
If you have just decided to start lifting weights and build up some muscle, then no doubt you will have read lots of stuff about various different weight training exercises, however, here’s the thing, nutrition way more important than the training.
You may liken the weight training to the red stuff at the end of a match and the nutrition to the wood of the match. You need the red stuff to light the match, but utimately it’s the wood that fuels the flame. I use this analogy to emphasize the importance of nutrition in bodybuilding, there’s no point doing lots of training if you don’t then eat right, as you will never see any muscle gains!
So what is the most important nutrient for bodybuilding?
The building blocks of all our muscles are protein. Protein can be found in all meats, eggs, milk, fish and certain beans. If you want to build muscle, the you’ll need to consume 2 grams of protein for every kilogram of your bodyweight. So if you weight 100kg, you’ll need to eat 200 grams of protein a day, simple.
The next most important nutrient is carbohydrates. You need this for energy, the body breaks down the carbs and stores it as glycogen in the muscle, which is used in anaerobic activity (such as weight training). So if you cut carbs out, you’ll have no energy in your muscles and your workouts will suffer.
Last of all, you need some fat in your diet. Now, there are good and bad fats, so make sure you get plenty of good fats and try and cut out the bad fats. Good fats are unsaturated fats and bad fats are saturated fats. Fried food is high in saturated fats, so any fried food is best avoided.
To get the best out of your weight training, you eat some protein and some carbs at least two hours before your workout, and if possible, eat a similar amount of protein and carbs immediately after your wokout (or at least within an hour or so).
And how often should I eat to gain muscle?
The general rule of thumb with bodybuilding is that you need to keep your body in an anabolic state, ie, where you always have nutrients flowing round the body. To achieve this, you need to throw away the old habits of eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, and instead try and eat 6 smaller meals a day (or roughly eat something every 3 hours).
This can be daunting to begin with, and it is also counter intuitive, as you might think it would be better to eat three big meals a day. By eating smaller meals, your body can absorb the most amount of nutrients from each meal meaning you get more benefit from the same amount of food than before. It also encourages your body not to store fat, as the body assumes it will always have regular food being consumed.
When you eat larger meals, especially when the calorie intake from a large meal is far in excess of the energy needs of the following few hours, the body has no choice but to store the excess calories as fat, which is another reason to eat lots of smaller meals.
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