A GOOD BALANCE OF NUTRITION PROTEIN AND CARBOHYDRATES IS ALWAYS A MUST
A good balance of nutrition is always a must no matter what are the needs for different athletes, same for steroid bodybuilders. Weightlifters will often seek protein while endurance athletes often take it for granted in search of more carbohydrates, but without a balance, neither will succeed in their goals. We have yet to reach a definition of exact protein needs, but we do know that for an athlete,the need is more than the RDA states, which is 0.4 grams per pound of body weight. In fact, you could double that to arrive at a decent intake of protein.
Just because you get plenty of protein doesn’t necessarily mean that your body has a good environment for adding new muscle. If you don’t have the right balance of protein and carbohydrates, then you could be hindering your gains. Those who do intense exercise or endurance training, with a diet consisting of an insufficient amount of carbohydrates would derive much of their energy from burning protein (there isn’t much energy in protein) thus, that protein that is allocated as an energy source would not be used for muscle repair and growth (which is why protein is so important to bodybuilders). You must have carbohydrates available to your body for use as energy so that your body will not have to resort to using its protein as an energy source. Carbohydrates keep protein available for repair.
WHY THE RIGHT BALANCE OF PROTEIN AND CARBOHYDRATES IS NECESSARY?
Protein is composed of smaller molecules called amino acids. The body first breaks a protein down into its amino acids in order to build various structures such as muscle. Glutamine is the most abundant amino acid that composes muscle. That’s why we call carbohydrates “glutamine sparing,” because your body will burn the carbs as fuel instead of using the muscle’s glutamine as fuel for muscular contractions. If not provided sufficient carbohydrates to be used as the energy source in fueling muscular contractions, the muscle will actually “eat” its glutamine (and therefore its muscle mass), as energy. It’s very easy to work the muscle right off of your body. Over training doesn’t always result in muscle soreness. Over training could simply mean that energy to fuel workouts is coming from existing muscle tissue rather than from your food.
The biggest mistake in amateur bodybuilding is working out too hard and/or too long. Stored energy (glycogen) can only fuel a workout for about an hour. After that, workouts are being fueled mostly by the break down of muscle glutamine for that energy. Of course, you will burn fat too, but you don’t want to loose muscle in the process. Why would someone who just wanted to loose fat care if he looses a little muscle in the process?
Muscle is the only thing you have in your body to burn stored fat. It takes a lot of energy just to sustain muscle. At a resting state, the more muscle you have, the more fat you are burning. One of the dumbest things that people will say when they see an extremely muscular person is “yea, one day that will all turn to fat.” If you have enough muscle it will be almost impossible to get fat! Because the more muscle on your body, the more fat you will be burning at any given second of the day. If you have enough muscle, you can eat almost anything you want and hardly ever have any of that food’s energy transferred into adipose, the storage place for bodyfat.
GAINING STRENGTH WILL ALSO INCREASE THE AMOUNT OF BODYFAT THAT IS BURNED.
The more muscle weight you gain, the more fat you will burn, and the more muscle strength you gain, the more efficient your muscles are at burning fat. It is possible to be very strong and not have a lot of muscle. That’s why you may see some skinny guy that is extremely strong out bench press someone a lot bigger than he. He doesn’t have any fat because his muscles are strong and therefore efficient at fat burning.
Calories have developed a negative connotation over the past couple of years mostly due to the bogus diet fads that get scammers rich while the uneducated that follow the plans get worse off than before and become unhealthy. A calorie is only a measure of the amount of energy stored in food. But, that energy may or may not be stored as fat (discussed later in detail). Muscle taxes the body for calories. If someone doesn’t get the energy required to fuel their muscles from that, they will loose muscle mass. If someone starts to lower his/her calories, he will reach a certain point where there aren’t enough calories to support his body’s muscle mass. At that point one is considered to be in a “catabolic” state. That means the muscles will revert to using their glutamine as energy, especially during a workout. If you are working out, you will have to consume way more calories to sustain your muscle than if you were sedentary. Muscle burns more calories when it is being used than when it is in a resting state. That’s why working out is the best weight loss plan. Those muscles are craving energy when you work them, and a certain percentage of that energy will come from stored bodyfat. So while working out a your body burns way more bodyfat due to the muscle’s need for energy. When you loose muscle, you loose the only tool you have to burn fat. So why go on a low calorie diet?
LOW CALORIE DIET PLANS ARE SIMPLY COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE.
Muscles will burn bodyfat for their energy source, but they are also going to use a sufficient amount of muscle glutamine due to the limited influx of calories from your food. So yea, you loose weight, but you loose muscle, then what? You’re suddenly more overweight than you were before you first started this “diet” because you no longer have the means by which to burn the fat. These diets are like giving someone five five-dollar bills for their twenty-dollar bill. Calorie constriction is an extremely counter-productive theory solely designed to sound good so someone can sell a book and get rich.
“Well, you have to consume less calories than you burn to loose weight, right?” To those uneducated in this area it would make sense that to loose weight you would have to take in less calories than you burn. In other words, people think that if you burn 2500 calories per day, you must consume 2499 calories or less in order to loose weight. Well, that seems simple. But this is the worst thing that you can do unless you want to wreck your body. You must take in way more calories than you burn! If you hear someone claiming this as the backbone for his or her diet plan, run from it! After reading this you can see why some people can eat anything and never put on a pound and why other people can’t. Applying what you’ve learned about catabolism will help you to understand that you can destroy any chance of becoming physically fit.
