Your diet and nutritional choices can be a deal maker or breaker with regard to your training goals. The average person has symptoms of short term memory loss and schizophrenia when it comes to contemplating their day to day eating habits. Few people if any write down what they eat or record their dietary intake of macronutrients, those that do usually work for the IRS and are not someone you would hang out with. "I really do eat well, really do," says the well intentioned overweight and undernourished person. "I just don't know why I don't have energy to do anything," she says when asked about working out.
Let's do some fitness math:
155 lb person could burn 10 calories with one minute of burpees.
(1) 2 inch brownie square has 243 calories
To burn off the excess calories of consuming the brownie mentioned above, you will need to do 24 minutes of burpees.
Is that brownie worth 24 minutes of burpees
If you sleep 8 hours each night, current thinking has you eat every 2-3 hours. So that would mean about 5 meals or more. You could define a meal as an appropriate source of protein, healthy carbs and healthy fats. Now your training goal could include weight loss or body transformation and we can’t get into that now. So let’s just assume this blog is about the proper and simple nutrition patterns for a person training to get stronger and / or increase their total body conditioning.
What & When?
What are you eating? Can you say for sure? Can you estimate how many grams of protein you have had in a day? After looking closely at my own nutritional habits, I realized I was under consuming protein and healthy fats. There were several days where I had around 50-75 grams of protein. For my body weight (215 lbs), I should have around 150-200 grams of protein…duh! Well, I wasn’t planning my meals or meal supplements, so I end up injured. Without protein, you cannot repair from your training (period). For optimal injury repair and active recovery, the dietary protein necessary is 1.5-2.0 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. So take a little spiral notebook or your fancy West-Coastish iPad and record what you eat for a week. Don’t change your habits, just write it down. The sit back and review it. This is how you should start your nutritional planning.
When are you eating? The timing of your meals can be as important as what you are eating. As I noted earlier, eating every 2-3 hours can be considered optimal. It’s not more complicated than that. If you aspire to lower body fat, limit your intake of carbohydrates 3-4 hours before sleep. There is some high-science logic that believes your body doesn’t handle carbs well at the end of the day, trust that foolish logic. The earth may well be round after all. Also, if you have to have carbs, make it low glycemic index carbs. If you don’t know what the glycemic index is, check here.
What should you do after the workout?
Some authorities would say you can wait as long as 60 minutes to have your post-workout nutrition. They would also probably find it normal for their prom date to go home with another guy. That being said, ideally I believe your post-workout nutrition should occur ASAP. Especially for those of you who only drink water during your workout. Try to get your post-workout shake at about the 10-15 minute mark after training once you have caught your breath and can stand without falling.
Post-workout nutrition should supply protein and carbs to replenish the exhausted reserves and promote the healing process that follows training. Your post-workout nutrition will also replenish glycogen stores and diminish the negative effects of exercise induced cortisol release.
Take a look at what you’re eating. You may find that you are not giving your body the necessary nutrients to repair.
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