Diet Plays Important Role in Muscle Building

Being fit is very essential for a person these days, especially with the kind of decadence human fitness is going through. And in order to stay healthy, exercise and diet are indispensable to man. The exercise part of fitness is mostly taken care of by activities such as running, cycling, swimming, weight lifting, etc. However, all these exercises are invariably dependent on our diet, which is principally important in muscle building, i.e. weight lifting. In fact, what we eat before and after a gym session constitutes of equal if not more importance than the weightlifting activity itself.

Proteins are good, carbs are better!

The foremost thing that a novice muscle builder should keep in mind that is that he needs his fill of carbohydrates to make him last through a rigorous workout. Most people are easily victimized by the myth that carbohydrates can instantly add up on the calorie count consumption. The next part of this myth is that proteins would provide you with the adequate amount of energy for making it through your weights session.

For the first part of the myth, it is true that carbohydrates stack up on the calorie count, but so do all other nutrients as well. Factually, carbohydrates are actually what keep you going through a long session. The reason for this is because they use very little oxygen to break into glucose. While proteins and other nutrients are hard to break down for the body, so it takes much longer for these nutrients to break down. This means that it is perfectly possible for you to not find enough energy to sustain yourself through a workout in spite of loading up on proteins, as they probably have not been broken down into energy by the body yet.

Fats for endurance, protein for recovery

According to experts who’ve studied the interaction between human exercising and diet for years now, proteins are best used after a workout session. This is because proteins have the innate qualities of repairing muscles after a heavy workout session. If you have a good amount of proteins in your body before a workout, chances are that you may not last for an entire workout session, but your resultant muscle soreness would definitely be healed by the intake.

Another popular myth that a lot of people suffer from is that fats are bad for health, and end up blowing the body out of proportion. While this may be true if they’re consumed on a regular basis without any amount of exercise whatsoever, but the application of this myth in case of a regular weightlifter who eats a decent amount of fats daily as well, is highly improbable. The reason behind this is that fats act as a fuel for your body when it engages in vigorous activities like sprinting, weightlifting, etc. So, quite contrarily to what many people think, fats are actually good for you, if you are aiming at a heavy workout.

Eat before you train

Many people believe in not having any food at all before commencing a work out or training session. This is strictly not recommendable because in such a situation the body stands to lose out on important compounds and enzymes such as the amino acids, which take very long to build and accumulate in the body. Moreover, exercising on an empty stomach won’t prove fruitful in the short run as well. People undertaking heavy exercises such as weightlifters can readily tell the difference between the results of a workout session that was undertaken with an empty stomach, and the one which wasn’t.

A very simple way of putting this point across would be: ‘food is energy’, as we’ve all studied. However, what we don’t think on, or we forget is that to gain energy, one has to expend certain amount of energy as well, which is only possible if you have food in your stomach. Therefore, eat well, train hard, and don’t forget to marvel at your end result.