Author Article Directory

Bodybuilding routines must include eating to build muscle as a component of an overall bodybuilding program.

Working with weights in the gym forces your muscles to work, but guess what? Working your muscles expends energy, and energy is replenished by your food. Correct nutrition also helps heal muscle injury that often occurs while you are working out. You may not even know you have caused injury to your muscles, but your body knows, and your body needs fuel from food that helps build muscle in order to repair that muscle.

Most people, when thinking of the types of food that helps build muscle, immediately think of eating a low fat diet. For sure that is correct, but probably the most important type of foods that build muscle are foods containing high levels of protein. Foods like meat, fish, chicken, eggs, cheese and other milk products.

There is an optimum amount of protein that your body needs for building muscle effectively. Do you know your lean body mass weight? Yes? Great! If you do not know your lean body mass weight, you will need to apply one of the formulas that calculate this.

Carbohydrates are also important foods that build muscle – or rather carbs are important components of foods that build muscle. Choose foods that are high in carbohydrate that are also high in fibre – oatmeal, rice, and potato are all good.

You are now probably aware that drinking more than 1-2 drinks of alcohol (in any form) per day is NOT good for you. Here’s why:

* Body treats it like estrogen, which is your enemy

* Delays fat loss.

* Filled with empty calories.

* Spoils the quality of sleep.

* Dehydrates you (main cause of hangovers)

* Surely bad for your liver.

My professional recommendation: Don’t drink at all if you want to achieve ultimate muscle gains and get lose as much fat as possible.

Though let’s accept it. This is the real world, and you most likely to drink as much as the next guy (the younger you are the more you probably like to drink). Thus here’s some tips to keep your muscle building and fat loss on progress when you opt to “indulge”:

Drink Lots of Water

Loads of the bad stuff that comes from drinking can be restrained with water consumption. Alcohol dehydrates you, therefore drink plenty of water before, during (if possible) and certainly before hitting the sack. Moreover, alcohol helps your body do away with great amount of toxins you just doused it with in the form of alcohol.

Avoid Sugary mixers

Refrain from sugary mixers in your hard alcohol. Consuming sugar while drinking alcohol is the worse thing you can do for fat gain.

Do away with carbs

There actually are people who wonder whether alcohol negatively affects their muscle building activities. Yes, alcohol definitely affects your work out in a negative way.

A key ingredient in you diet when you exercise if protein, you should not interfere with this. Unfortunately, alcohol impairs protein synthesis. Protein synthesis is the process where amino acids are joined together to create complete proteins, consumption of alcohol has been shown to slow this process by 20%.

The level of testosterone in the body is another factor in muscle building. If you are a woman and you are looking to build muscle mass, you will notice that woman develop lees muscle mass than men. Because of the low levels of testosterone, woman have 15 to 20 times less than men do. What does that have to do with alcohol? Alcohol not only decreases testosterone, it also increases estrogen.

When yo drink alcohol your kidneys retain large amounts of water so they can process the toxin. Yes, the body recognizes alcohol as a toxin. The body can become dehydrated when this happens.

Nerves control muscles and nerves produce the stimuli to contract muscles from electrolyte minerals dissolved in water. Further more water lubricates the joints and protects them from injury during workouts.

Drinking alcohol robs your body of key vitamins. Alcohol depletes Vitamins B, C and A; in addition to calcium and phosphorous. If you consider the most important vitamins to develop healthy muscles are B and C, that is just one more reason that drinking alcohol while building muscle is such a big deal.