Dietary Requirements For Weight Training
A key aspect of workout routines to build muscle, is making sure that you eat enough calories to allow your body to grow. This is an element of muscle building that a lot of people underestimate in terms of its importance. Which is not ideal as many people work really hard in the gym, but without the right diet, much of this hard work goes to waste. Below are some tips on diet for putting on muscle.
There are three main sources of calories, along with drinking enough water, that are critical to putting on muscle, as you need to get enough calories for both training, and to fuel the tissue building after the workout. The 3 types of calories are carbohydrate, protein and fat.
Carbohydrate is the main fuel for training hard in the gym and is stored as glycogen in the muscles. If you don’t eat enough carbohydrates then you will run out of energy to push the muscle contractions which is critical to the muscle building process. You need to have around 500 to 600 grams of carbohydrates a day. A simple formula to work out your personal carbo needs is 3.6g carb x body weight in pounds = the number of carbs you need per day. So 170 pound person needs 3.6 x 170 = 612g per day.
The next group is protein. Protein is the basic building block for muscle, and is critical after a workout for the actual muscle building process. Protein requirements are around 0.8g per pound of body weight per day. So using the previous example 0.8 x 170 = 136g of protein required per day for a 170 pound person.
The final food group to mention is fat. The goal for most people is to put on lean muscle, however fat is an essential nutrient needed for muscle development, and therefore needs to play a part in the diet. There is some debate as to how much fat you need, but most people agree its somewhere between 20% to 30% of your daily calorie intake. The good thing is, that there is a fat content is most foods, and in many cases you will get your fat requirements just from consuming the foods you need to hit your protein and carbohydrate needs.
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