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How nutrition plays vital role in Body building?

How nutrition plays vital role in Body building?

September 2008

It is common knowledge that the key factor for body building is nutrition. Nutrition is what gives us the raw materials for replenishment, energy restoration and physical fitness. Without a good balanced and nutritious diet, your aim of maintaining a robust body will never be achieved. A good nutrition program requires smaller and frequent food intakes throughout the day instead of larger quantities at infrequent intervals. When you feed your body several times a day, there is the possibility your metabolism increasing leads to act as fat burners. Therefore, for your program to effectively work, you will have to eat between four to six meals at 2-1/2 to 3 hour intervals. Nutrition is one of the most critical subjects in bodybuilding and physical fitness in general. We need to understand not only what roles carbohydrates, proteins and fats play in our diets, but also in what ratios and quantities we need to consume them in order to gain lean muscle mass and shed unwanted body fat .

The meals must be balanced and contain carbohydrates, protein and fat in the correct ratios. The ideal nutritious food should have 40% Carbohydrates, 40% Protein and 20% Fats. It is also very important that the calories are cycled as this will prevent the metabolism from getting used to a certain caloric level that may cause stagnant results. Therefore, bodybuilders concentrating only on muscle mass should follow 5 days of high calorie diet with two days of lower caloric intake. Bodybuilders wanting to lose fat while building muscle at the same time should follow 5 days of lower caloric intake with 2 days of higher calorie food. Those of you involved in activities like marathon running or heavy physical work need to adjust your calories upwards mainly in the form of carbohydrates in order to support your higher levels of activity.

As is well-known Carbohydrates are the body's main source of energy and sustenance. When you ingest carbohydrates your pancreas releases a hormone called insulin. Insulin grabs the carbohydrates and either stores them in the muscle or stores them as fat. Insulin also grabs the amino acids (protein) and preserves them inside the muscle cell for recovery and repair. Most people are obese because they were following low fat/high carbohydrate diets, continually eating an overabundance of carbohydrates. In recent years, carbohydrates have been condemned by the diet professionals little realizing that they too play an important role in body building nutrition. Potatoes, for instance, hailed as the ultimate example of what not to eat, contain potassium, essential to cleansing the muscles after exercise to prevent stiffness and soreness. A bodybuilder need not fear carbohydrates which fuel and replenish muscles.

Too many carbohydrates cause a huge release of insulin. When there is too much insulin in the body, your body turns into a fat storing machine. Therefore, it is important that we eat no more carbohydrates than necessary and that we eat the right amount of carbohydrates. Now that we have talked about the importance of having just the right amount of carbohydrates, let's talk about which are the best sources of carbohydrates.

Carbohydrates are divided into two types.

• complex carbohydrates
• simple carbohydrates

The complex carbohydrates give you sustained energy while the simple carbohydrates give you instant energy.

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• How nutrition plays vital role in Body building? (Sep 2008)

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