Building Muscle Requires The Right Food
It’s pretty simple – it doesn’t matter how you work out…if you don’t eat big, you won’t get big.
If you want to get big, you have to make sure you eat enough. You’ve heard it a million times, and it’s true – gaining weight and losing weight is all about calories in vs calories out. Gaining weight will happen if you eat more calories on average than you burn up. However, you’ll lose weight if you burn more than you take in. It can’t be made any easier to understand.
Most of the time, that scenario is only brought up in discussions of weight loss. They usually don’t want to get fatter, so putting on body weight is why they’re hesistant to take in more calories. Most of the time, that’s how it goes. But all the same principles apply when you talk about building muscle.
You’ll never get heavier (from fat or extra muscle) if you’re not eating enough. Don’t expect to build big arms or add lean muscle when you don’t eat enough. It just won’t happen. Imagine if you tried to build a skyscraper with only one load of bricks. It just won’t be enough.
Priority number one should be making sure you’re taking in enough calories. Some bodybuilding magazines would have you eating 8000-9000 calories per day, and there’s no need for that. If you want to be pleasantly surprised, start by just adding an easy 500 extra calories per day to your diet. 500 calories each day isn’t as much as you think – no need for insane increases in food intake.
If you’re really small and have a fast metabolism, you could even go for 1000 extra calories per day.
Once you know you’re eating enough, now it’s time to make sure a bunch of that food is protein.
Protein essentially is muscle. When you break protein down, you get amino acids, and it’s amino acids that make up muscle. So if you take in protein, you’re ingesting the exact substance that your body uses to build new muscle. As a result, you better eat enough protein.
But there is no need to do too much. Some of the prescriptions I’ve seen are crazy – 400-500 grams of protein each day, 2-2.5 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight…that’s crazy. That’s stupid.
Only a given amount of protein can even be digested by the body, first of all. So if you’re taking in too much protein at any one time, then your body will never be able to take advantage of it all, and just get rid of it as waste. What’s the idea behind this? It’s actually a big strain on the body to try to digest that much. You can actually overwork your digestive system, by trying to make it do too much when consuming that much protein. Then think about your kidneys that are flushing your entire system due to the increased protein intake. It is very rough on the body when this is done for years. There’s no real sense in trying to make yourself stronger and healthier in one area, only to be breaking yourself down in another area…you know?
A good recommendation would be to determine what your desired bodyweight is, and consume 1-1.25 grams of protein per pound of desired bodyweight per day.
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