Building a Successful Diet Part 5: Bodybuilding Nutrition

Today’s post will be wrapping up my “Building a Successful Diet” series. Today’s topic of interest: Maximizing your nutrition in order to minimize your need for supplements. When doing research for this post I noticed there wasn’t very much information on this topic! In this post I will be going over some popularly used sports supplements and I will be letting you know what sources of food I found to be high in these supplements. If you haven’t read Part 4 click here:

Building a Successful Diet Part 4

The first supplement I immediately researched was glutamine! Glutamine is a very powerful amino acid that is used for recovery of the muscles. In my opinion glutamine is by far better than creatine! Glutamine allows for noticeably quicker recovery after your workouts, as well it will reduce soreness after your workouts. When I supplement with glutamine, I try to get about 15 grams of glutamine throughout the day in approximately 5 gram dosages. So what are some good natural sources of glutamine? Well of course any protein source is good for obtaining amino acids, but we can’t be eating meat ALL the time! Spinach, sunflower seeds, and parsley are all good sources of glutamine. Just be sure to note that heat will destroy the amino acid glutamine, so these foods are best when eaten raw. Yes, Popeye had it right kids, eat your spinach! One article I read from Spinachwords.com claimed that 1 cup or 7.5oz of spinach had approximately .75 grams of glutamine in it. Now this isn’t a whole lot, but this is a very good way to supplement your glutamine intake for the day.
Sunflower seeds are a great source of glutamine, but I also found they were a great source of arginine as well (a two for one!). One article I read recommended you eat a half cup of sunflower seeds throughout the day. A half cup of sunflower seeds will bring you 3 grams of glutamine!

Every website I looked at that gave suggestions for good sources of glutamine pointed me straight to parsley. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find out exactly how much glutamine parsley contained. However I did find out this, parsley contains a flavone called apigenin. According to Dr.’s Donald R. Buhler and Cristobal Miranda of Oregon State University a flavone is a type of flavonoid. In a nut shell flavonoids are natural occurring compounds found in fruits and vegetables that have diverse biochemical and antioxidant effects. So what is apigenin’s biochemical effect? Apigenin is supposed to help block bad estrogen from inhibiting the body’s use of testosterone. Apparently this has a strength-boosting effect. According to an article I read entitled: “14 Natural Anabolics: Power Foods that Act Like Supplements” apigenin can be found in 10mg dosages in supplements. So how much parsley do you have to chow down on to get the amount that is in supplements? Get this, one tablespoon of chopped parsley will suffice!

The next popular supplement that we all know and love is creatine. There are so many myths and misconceptions out there about creatine it isn’t even funny. Believe it or not your body actually needs creatine! In fact your body when it doesn’t have enough creatine from dietary needs, will actually synthesize its own creatine. When I supplement with creatine, I try to get about 5 grams before my workout and 5 grams after my workout. Creatine is a naturally formed substance and is pretty easy to find. In one pound of lean beef you will be able to find 5 grams of creatine. You can also find creatine in fish such as salmon and tuna, and any type sashimi is also a great source. In salmon you will find 4.5 grams of creatine in one pound. Fish is probably the better source, because it also contains a high amount of the amino acid methionine, which is used in the synthesis of creatine.

Next on the list is arginine. Arginine is used to increase the nitrogen levels in the body, which in turn vasodilates blood vessels allowing for greater blood flow within the body. This greater blood flow allows for more oxygen and nutrients to get to your muscles in order to provide energy during your workout. The increase blood flow also is beneficial to your muscles when they are recovering after your workout. When supplementing with arginine I try to get about 3.5 grams before my work out and about 3 grams before I go to bed at night. Again any protein source is great for getting amino acids, but what other foods can you eat that are high in arginine? The answer is nuts and seeds! The best sources would be pumpkin seeds, peanuts, and sesame seeds. Other good choices would be almonds, walnuts, and hazlenuts. I found in my research that a 100 gram serving of these seeds and nuts can contain anywhere from 2-4 grams of arginine. Unfortunately a 100 gram serving of nuts is going to contain a lot of fat, not to mention eating this amount of nuts everyday could get expensive. Still though a little bit is better than nothing! Plus you will be getting a great amount of arginine from all the protein you eat during the day. But don’t worry I have one more way you can get arginine.

Your body can produce arginine from another amino acid, citrulline! Citrulline is becoming a popular ingredient in most NO supplements, due to the body’s ability to produce arginine using it. The addition of citrulline will also make your NO supplement very expensive. But guess what? There is a food that is an incredible source of citrulline, watermelon! The article I mentioned before: “14 Natural Anabolics: Power Foods that Act Like Supplements” stated that you could eat 24 ounces of watermelon pre-workout. This would provide you with 20 ounces of water, 50 grams of carbohydrates, and most importantly 3 grams of citrulline! 3 grams of citrulline should be plenty for your workout, this amount can be found in a lot of supplements.

Continuing on with the topic of keeping your nitric oxide levels high, there is also a vitamin that will help with this. I’m talking about vitamin C! Vitamin C will keep nitric oxide levels high in the body, and is essential in protein synthesis. Vitamin C is also of course a great antioxidant, and when taken will reduce soreness in your muscles after your workout! When supplementing with vitamin C I try to get about 3,000 mg throughout the day in 500 to 1000mg dosages. Let’s think here where can we get vitamin C from? Hmmm… Were you going to say oranges and other citrus fruit? Well yes you are correct in thinking that, but you might be surprised to hear that yellow bell peppers have three times the amount of vitamin C per weight as an orange! In fact according to an article I found at HealthAliciousNess.com oranges ranked number 9 in foods with the highest concentration of Vitamin C. You can view the article

here.

Another supplement taken by bodybuilders, which is a staple in every supplementation program, is a multivitamin! Now I don’t suppose you could replace a good quality multivitamin, but there are some foods that are vitamin dense. As I was doing research for this post search after search for foods that were high in certain vitamins and minerals, I would always get dark leafy greens! Spinach, Swiss chard, turnip greens, kale, collard greens, and arugula are all LOADED with vitamins! Another vitamin dense food I came across was dried fruit. Basically the fruit maintains all the vitamins it had when it was fresh, but watch out because they are loaded with calories. Dried fruit might be a good addition to
your diet if you are trying to gain weight.

Now that you have all this knowledge of what to add to your diet to make it more balanced, you need to do one more thing. When you don’t take steroids and you don’t take supplements, every little BIT counts! You must not forget about digestive health! Eating all of these healthy foods will not do your body any good if your digestive system isn’t working efficiently. Not to worry, there are a few things you can add to your diet to improve digestion.

First off you will need to add digestive enzymes to your diet. Digestive enzymes will help break down your food in order for it to be used. Foods that contain digestive enzymes are pineapple, papaya, and figs. The second thing you will need to do is increase the good bacteria in your intestines. Promoting the growth of good bacteria keeps your intestines healthy, and when your intestines are healthy they break down and absorb more nutrients! Yogurt is a great source of probiotics as well as fermented foods such as sauerkraut and kimchi. The third thing you will need for digestive health is plenty of fiber! As I went over in Part 2 fiber is very important because it keeps everything in your intestines moving. One source of fiber you might find of interest is grapefruit. Grapefruit contains a great amount of fiber called pectin. Pectin is particular great at slowing the digestion of carbohydrates (a characteristic of fiber I went over in Part 2). When trying to lose that stubborn stomach fat trying adding three glasses of grapefruit juice throughout your day! The fourth and final thing that is a must for digestion is probably one of the most anabolic substances! What’s this magical substance you’re wondering? It’s water, water, and more water! Sorry it isn’t some sort of special “super-food”, but yeah water will make or break your diet. Your body needs plenty of water in order to aid digestion. My suggestion is to drink 8 to 16 ounces with every meal!

With this arsenal of information you should be armed and ready to go to make a very successful diet. As you have read here, there are many foods to eat, from all different food groups. You really need to eat a variety of things every day to get everything your body needs. The best thing to know when trying to follow a strict diet is that you can’t possibly get everything you need to eat everyday so it’s always good to change your diet up from week to week so you are not deficient in any areas. Also any serious lifter could never completely throw out a supplementation program and substitute it by eating regular food. I really don’t think anyone on Earth could be capable of this. So get out there, diet hard, lift even harder, and get huge!

The Gym Maniac

Building a Successful Diet Part 4: Fat

Continuing on with my “Building a Successful Diet” series I will be blogging about the dreaded macronutrient FAT! Just hearing the word makes people cringe and slowly look down at the mass sitting on top of their stomach. Fat has built up quite the bad reputation over the years, with so many overweight Americans dropping dead from heart problems, it’s no wonder we fear fat so much. I’m not here to preach about the dangers of too much fat. I’m here to explain why fat is important in your diet, and how you can use fat properly and in a healthy way. If you haven’t read Part 3 yet click here:

Building a Successful Diet Part 3

A lot of diet advice you will hear is to cut fat and fat is horrible for you and blah blah blah etc. The truth is that fat is extremely important as well as CHOLESTEROL. I know this post is supposed to be about fat, but fat and CHOLESTEROL just go hand-in-hand. I have read up on fat a lot and there seems to be some conflicting information out there. Some say nuts are a good source of fat, some say they’re a bad source. Some say eat avocados others say avoid them. The best advice I can give you is to eat what you want and pay attention to how your body responds to what you eat. In my opinion fats from plants like nuts and avocados will do you good. As far as sources of fat from animals I think they are useful just not in large quantities.

With animal fats you have to worry about SATURATED fat. SATURATED fat will lower your GOOD CHOLESTEROL (HDL) and raise your BAD CHOLESTEROL (LDL). In addition to SATURATED fat, animal fat also contains CHOLESTEROL. Contrary to popular belief your body actually needs and will use cholesterol! Yeah it really will! Your body uses CHOLESTEROL in order to produce hormones such as TESTOSTERONE. Your body also uses fat to produce HORMONES as well, this is why fat is important in a diet, and should not be cut from the diet all together. If you keep fat out of your diet, many studies have shown your TESTOSTERONE levels will take a nose dive.

Another way to utilize fat in a beneficial manner is to slow the digestion of carbohydrates. Why would you want to do this? Well, when you slow the digestion of carbohydrates by consuming fat, your body won’t need to have a drastic insulin spike in response to the carbohydrates. So also contrary to popular belief, consuming a “reduced fat” food item is worse for you than eating the same food item with all the fat still in it! When you take fat out of food, making it “reduced fat” or “fat free” your body will end up having a greater insulin release when the food is consumed. Since fat slows the digestion of carbohydrates taking fat out of the food allows for the carbohydrates in that food to digest more quickly. With a quick spike in insulin comes a proportionate drop in insulin or "crash" causing your body to go into fat storage mode. Essentially you end will end up gaining more fat than if you had eaten the food with the regular amount of fat!

Already I have mentioned several sources of fat: nuts, avocados, and animal fat from meat. There is also plant based oils and dairy. So what is the difference between all of these fats? Well you can organize the different types of fats into three main groups: SATURATED fat, UNSATURATED fat, and TRANS-fat. As I said before you will want to avoid SATURATED fat, but a little bit won’t hurt you. You can identify SATURATED fats, because they are generally solid at room temperature. UNSATURATED fat can be divided into two categories: MONOUNSATURATED fat and POLYUNSATURATED fat. So what’s the difference? Basically the difference is on the molecular level having to do with carbon chains and how they’re bonded. UNSATURATED fats can be identified as being liquid at room temperature. TRANS-fats are chemically altered UNSATURATED fats. Your body will have no use for TRANS-fat and you should avoid consuming this type of fat altogether. TRANS-fat will not only raise your BAD CHOLESTEROL levels, but it will also lower your GOOD CHOLESTEROL as well. TRANS-fat can be identified on
many of your food labels as partially HYDROGENATED OIL.

So how should you plan fats into your diet? First off you should eat a small amount of fat in the first couple of meals of the day. As you progress later into the day you should be eating slightly more fat. Your last meal or two should have the majority of your daily fat in it. You should be eating a lot of fat and very little carbohydrates. You need fat at night to slow the digestion of carbohydrates and protein at night in order to gradually feed your muscles throughout the night. Another reason to consume fat at this time is that your body produces a lot of anabolic HORMONES at night and needs the fat in order to produce these HORMONES.

As you can see fat plays a vital role in your dietary needs. Remember fat is a calorie dense macronutrient and there is no reason to consume large amounts of it. SATURATED fat should be limited, TRANS-fat should be avoided altogether, and MONOUNSATURATED fat should make up the bulk of your dietary fat intake. This will conclude part 4 of my “Building a Successful Diet” series. Be sure to catch part 5 where I will be discussing the best ways to get the nutrients you need to build muscle!

Building a Successful Diet Part 3: Protein

Continuing on with my Building a Successful Diet series, my post today will be all about Protein! Yes protein, the building block of rock hard muscle! There are so many different sources of protein which one is the best? I will be able to answer these questions and much more in the following. If you haven’t had a chance to check out Part 2 of my “Building a Successful Diet on Carbohydrates click here:

Building a Successful Diet Part 2

So I’m not sure if you know this but not all proteins are created equal. Literally, comparing protein sources is like comparing apples to oranges! I’m sure you may have heard whey is the best protein, or is soy a far superior protein, maybe casein? The truth is there is no superior protein. Each protein has different qualities that are beneficial depending on your nutritional needs. For example: whey is a great source of protein, it is easily absorbed and digests relatively quickly. It has what is called a high biological value. Biological value is the amount or percentage of a protein source that is actually utilized by your body. Other proteins, such as protein from wheat, aren’t digested as well and have a low biological value. So going from the easiest usable protein to least usable source of protein would be: whey, milk, eggs, fish, chicken, beef, beans, grains. I know beef is low on the list but it is still a good source of protein, just not as good as chicken. So now that we know that not every source of protein absorbs the same, why not just eat the best absorbing one? Well that’s just one dimension of protein. Your body needs different sources of protein and can benefit from different protein sources at certain times during the day.

First thing when you wake up a good source of protein to take is whey. Your body just went about eight hours without food and needs protein now! Your body will start breaking down muscle to feed itself, if it doesn’t get a source of protein quickly. Since whey is a fast digesting protein this is a perfect source for this need.

A lot of people like to eat eggs for breakfast. Eggs are a solid source of quality protein and are great because it is one of the few sources of protein that has a complete essential amino acid profile that your body needs. Essential amino acids are amino acids your body can’t produce naturally and thus you need to get them from other sources. It’s important to get all the amino acids your body needs, because if you’re deficient in one area it can affect other processes in your body in a negative way.
Other sources of protein such as chicken, fish, beef, nuts, beans, and grains are good throughout the day. Your body needs some real food; you can’t just chug down protein shakes all day! These are great protein sources because they provide your body with plenty of vitamins and mineral it will need.

A great protein source to have pre and post workout again is whey. Your body needs the amino acids during your workout to feed the muscles and to keep them from going catabolic. You will also need more amino acids to keep your muscles from going catabolic again post workout. If you have the money an even better source of post workout protein is another version of standard whey isolate, hydrolyzed whey! Hydrolyzed whey is a more broken down version of whey making it quicker and easier to digest.

Finally at night you’re going to want protein that is going to help you recover and protein that is going to digest slowly. When you go to sleep at night, this is your body’s time to recover. You will need a slow digesting protein source at night, because your body is going without food for eight hours. During this time your body will start cannibalizing itself, to get the protein it needs to recover if it doesn’t get fed. So you need a protein for recovery and a protein to keep your body from cannibalizing itself. A great recovery protein source is soy isolate. Due to soy isolate’s high glutamic acid content, it is a great protein to have post workout or before bed time. Glutamic acid is the amino acid L-glutamine. L-glutamine is an extremely fantastic amino acid that has amazing recovery capabilities for your body! The protein you want to digest slowly while you sleep is casein. Although soy is a slow digesting protein, casein is definitely slower. Casein is something you will want to ingest right as you’re going to bed, some bodybuilders will even wake up in the middle of the night just to have a casein shake!

As you can see each and every protein has its own role in helping your body recover from working out. As I said before there is not one protein that is better than the other. You need to utilize each protein to your advantage to gain the maximum benefit each protein has to offer.

If you enjoyed this post please remember to follow me on Facebook and Twitter!

The Gym Maniac

Building a Successful Diet Part 2: Carbohydrates

So continuing with Part 2 of my “Building a Successful Diet” post, today’s post will be all about the proper utilization of carbohydrates. You will need to consume certain carbohydrates at different times of the day, and good understanding of glycemic index will be helpful in taking advantage of your body’s natural processes. If you haven’t read Part 1 click here:

Building a Successful Diet Part I

The first thing you will need to understand is how to utilize your body’s insulin spikes. There are different times of the day you want to take advantage of spiking your insulin. Why on Earth would I want to do that you say? Insulin is a powerful anabolic hormone that helps your body utilize testosterone and growth hormone that would otherwise go to waste if not taken advantage. So the name of the game is to spike your insulin when you have high hormone levels. So when are your hormone levels the highest?


When you go to sleep at night your body repairs itself by elevating your hormone levels. When you wake up your hormone levels start to fall again. So as soon as you get up in the morning it’s a race to get something in your stomach to spike your insulin in order to take advantage of your high hormone levels. Another great time to spike your insulin is right after your workout. Partly to return your glycogen levels back to normal before your muscles go catabolic, and partly because your hormones are again at high levels. This is where having a good knowledge of glycemic index comes in handy. You can always look up the glycemic index of foods online. Here is a link to a list of commonly consumed foods and their glycemic index ratings: http://www.diabetesnet.com/food-diabetes/glycemic-index

So what if you’re out and about and don’t have a chart to reference the glycemic index of foods when you’re grocery shopping? A good way to estimate how your insulin will be affected by different foods is to simply “eyeball it”. The more processed a carbohydrate source is, the higher in glycemic index that food will be. For example wheat bread vs. white bread.

With wheat bread you can actually see the grains, and see that it is a much less processed product than white bread. White bread is higher in glycemic index, because in order to make it, the wheat is ground down completely. Cereals like Cheerios you might think would be good for you because it’s made with oats, but if you ever crushed a Cheerio it turns into dust, there are no grains. So Cheerios have a high glycemic index rating. Basically the more your body has to work to digest a carbohydrate, the more slowly that carbohydrate will be turned into usable blood sugar, and the less of a response your insulin will react to the consumption of that food.

Other than the two exceptions where you eat high glycemic index carbohydrates, for the rest of your diet you are going to want to stick with lower glycemic carbohydrate sources. If you ate high glycemic carbohydrates all the time your insulin levels would constantly be up and down causing your body to store fat when the insulin is down. Eventually your body would lose its sensitivity to insulin releases causing your body to go pre-diabetic. So as you can see you want low glycemic carbs throughout the day. The low glycemic carbs will allow your body to store up glycogen (usable blood sugar) in your muscles which is what they use for energy during your workouts. The low glycemic carbs will also allow your insulin levels to keep steady so the carbs aren't stored as fat.

Another way to help control insulin is eat more fiber! There are two types of fiber soluble, and insoluble. The type that helps your body from having a higher insulin spike is soluble fiber. The soluble fiber slows the digestion of the food reducing the body’s need for releasing a greater amount of insulin. Insoluble fiber is great to add to your diet too. This is the type of fiber that adds “bulk” to your food and keeps things moving through your intestinal tract. Adding insoluble fiber to your diet will keep your digestive system healthy and happy, which is very important. Your digestive system is where your body gets all of its nutrients from, which in turns feeds your muscles! So you need to be sure and take very good care of your digestive system, and that my friends is a whole other post all together.

One little tip before I go: A great post workout drink when you can't get the protein and the carbs? Chocolate milk! No joke chocolate milk gets the job done! I read up on a study where cyclists were told to ride for a certain amount of time, maybe two hours or something. Then one was given water, another was given a sports drink, another chocolate milk, and another a protein and carbohydrate fortified recovery drink. Then they were told to get back on their bikes and ride till they “bonked” (a term used by endurance athletes describing when they completely run out of energy). The cyclist that drank water dropped almost instantly, the sports drink cyclist dropped out a little later, and the other two went a little while longer, ending up pretty much tying. So yeah chocolate milk is awesome. Apparently the combination of carbs and proteins found in chocolate milk are extremely conducive to recovery.

A Simple Diet for Simple Goals

So I wanted to write a follow up post for those of my readers who aren’t interested in following such an involved diet. The following diet is a good general outline of how to and what to eat in a more simple diet. This should be geared toward people who don’t have ambitious body transformation goals. This

Alright so I’m going to give you choices of what to eat. You will need to eat 4 maybe 5 meals a day if you can. Five is better than four of course but whatever your schedule will allow you should do, because the point of the diet is to be able to do something you can live with. Don’t make it so hard that you mess it up, get discouraged, and quit, just like you may have heard before, K.I.S.S. keep it simple stupid!

Meal 1 Breakfast
This is the most important meal of the day! You absolutely HAVE to eat breakfast! This is the meal that will get you metabolism revved up for the day and will allow you to burn fat. This should also be your biggest meal of the day, and it will be ok if you have something sugary with breakfast but don’t go overboard with it.
Breakfast Items:
Fruit – bananas, oranges, apples, blueberries, strawberries, etc.
Oatmeal – it would be best to get old fashioned oats and sweeten with honey or agave nectar, but if you don’t like that just get those little packets that are flavored
Whole Grain toast – you can put whatever you want on it I would steer towards jelly/jam instead of fats like peanut butter or butter if you want to use fats use just a little
Eggs – you can eat some egg whites, but if you don’t like them you can have scrambled eggs with a ratio of one whole egg for every egg white
Cereal – you can always eat cereal just be sure to find one not sugary like Kashi cereals, and be sure to use skim milk

Meal 2 Snack
Make sure you get a snack; this will keep your metabolism going!
Fruit – fruit is a good snack because you can usually take it with you
Yogurt – yogurt makes a good snack just be careful of all the sugar I think you can find a low-carb yogurt
Veggies – veggies are a good snack because you get fiber, and they fill you up just be aware that they have little caloric value meaning they don’t have a lot of calories
Dried fruit – dried fruit is good but pricey and don’t go overboard with dried fruit because there is usually a good amount of carbs in a little fruit

Meal 3 Lunch
Time to start putting in a little more protein into your daily diet, I usually eat some meat, some salad, and a yam or something for lunch.
Meat – Chicken, tuna, fish, lean steak these choices are better than lunch meat, but you can have lunch meat on a sandwich if you want
Carbs – yellow potatoes, yams, whole grain bread, whole grain pasta
Fruits
Veggies

Meal 4 Snack
For your last snack I would try to incorporate more fats into you snack and less simple carbs. You can have some of the things you would have in your first snack just be easy on the carbs and try to get your calories from protein or fat.
Nuts – walnuts, almonds etc. peanut butter maybe have some ants on a log!

Meal 5 Dinner
If you get hungry after dinner eat a small healthy snack but do not eat within three hours of going to bed. You need to really cut the carbs at night and if you get hungry eat something high in fat maybe some peanut butter or hummus. Also one trick I have heard of doing is drink a big glass of water then brush your teeth, you won’t want to eat after brushing your teeth.

Meats – chicken, fish, lean beef (lean steak or even lean ground beef)
Carbs – brown rice, multigrain pasta, etc
Veggies
Nuts

Just some little tips when dieting: Its all about portion control, basically just eat a little bit just enough not to be hungry. You should be able to fit your meal easily on a small plate. Until you know how much to eat, just eat a little, take a break, drink a large glass of water, wait ten minutes and if your not hungry, quit eating! You’re going to be eating four or five meals so all of them will be small. If you drink, I would limit or cut out alcohol out of your diet as well. Don’t even think about eating anything out of the freezer section, that crap is all processed and not good for you and full of calories. If you think you have done well for the week you should have a cheat day, but I find my diet is more effective if I try to do well for two weeks then take a cheat day. Try to make better food choices, it’s the little things that you do that make a big difference. Once you diet for a week or two you will probably notice that you keep eating the same things over and over again, you should find new things to eat because your body will get used to eating the same things over and over.

Building a Successful Diet Part 1

So my next few posts will be an entire series of posts. I will be talking about nutrition. For my post today I am going to do a quick overview of a healthy diet, and will try to give some advice so that all my readers can benefit. The next few posts will go into depth on how to utilize macronutrients such as carbohydrates, protein, and fat. If I can do enough research in time to do it, the final post will go into detail on utilizing certain foods to get the most out of their nutritional value in order to minimize the need for supplements. I am very interested in this topic, because I am currently not using any supplements and can not afford them.

Ok so let’s talk about a proper healthy diet. As far as the diet goes it should be pretty simple. Five to six meals a day is good for most people, but some of you just starting the habit of eating like this may want to stick to four to five meals instead, and that’s still ok. Believe me this is nothing, some people on hardcore weight gain diets may eat as much as 8 to 10 meals a day! As far as how much protein, carbohydrates, and fat you should eat per meal, I have found for myself at 5’7” and between 165 to 180lbs., the following has worked for me to add muscle: 30 to 40 grams of protein per meal, 40 to 60 grams of carbs per meal and 10 to 13 grams of fat per meal. There really is no exact science to figure out how much you need to eat per meal. I generally use two different ratios in figuring out how much protein, carbohydrates, and fat I need to eat per meal, depending on my goals. So the first of the two ratios I use is 2:2:1. Two parts of your daily calories come from carbohydrates, two parts come from protein, and one part from fat. This is a ratio I would use if I was going to try trim down and lose fat. The second ratio is 3:2:1, three parts from carbohydrates, two parts from protein, and one part from fat. This is the ratio I would use to gain muscle.

Alright so some of you who are new to calculating calories this could get a little complicated so pay attention closely! Let’s say for example you need to eat 3,000 calories per day for your diet. So using the 2:2:1 ratio above, 1,200 of your daily calories need to come from carbohydrates, 1,200 calories from protein, and 600 calories from fat. So how many grams of each macronutrient will you need? Well 1 gram of carbohydrates is equal to 4 calories, 1 gram of protein is equal to 4 calories, and 1 gram of fat is equal to 9 calories! So 1,200 calories from carbohydrates is equal to 300 grams, 1,200 calories from protein is equal to 300 grams, and 600 calories from fat is equal to almost 67 grams of fat. Now that you have an idea of how much of each macronutrient you need to consume, you need to figure out how many total calories you will need per day.

You can use all the scientific calorie calculators in the world and never really know exactly how many calories to eat. Calorie calculators can be used as a guide to get a close amount of calories you will need, but really it’s a trial and error process. I would use this calorie calculator from Bodybuilding.com: http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/macronutcal.htm as a basis and adjust the amount of calories you will need per day from there. It calculated 2,970 calories for me, but with my metabolism and workout intensity I know I need at least 3,400 calories to maintain my weight. So I would start off eating as many calories as the calculator suggests and monitor your weight and fat percentage and adjust your diet from there. Once you find out what your body needs to maintain your weight it should be easy from there. If you want to cut fat subtract about 500 calories from your daily needs and use the 2:2:1 ratio to calculate your macronutrient needs. If you want to gain muscle add 500 calories to your daily needs and use the 3:2:1 ratio to calculate your macronutrient needs.

At this point I’m sure you’re wondering, “Ok, but what the heck should I eat?” Every meal should have some sort of lean protein source, some sort of grain for carbs, and a fruit or vegetable for fiber, in order to get fats you usually won’t have to add any to your meal, but you should cook with some good fats, such as olive oil, canola oil, or peanut oil. I will be elaborating more on what to eat in my later posts on each of the three macronutrients.

Any questions or comments will be greatly appreciated! Remember to “Like” me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter!

The Gym Maniac

The Maniac's Workout

So for my blog post today I figured I would go through a brief overview of my workout plan. If you haven’t viewed my bodyspace.com profile yet it can be found at: http://bodyspace.bodybuilding.com/wrestler236/. You can find my goals and stats on here such as weight, body fat percentage, body measurements, and lifting stats. My goal right now is to be able to drop my body fat percentage from 11% down to 8% and to be back up to 170 lbs from my current weight of 161 lbs. I want to do all of this by January 31st, 2012. This is about 11 weeks from now, and I am already into my second week of working out.

The workout I’m on now has me doing:

Monday – Chest, Back, Biceps, and Triceps

Tuesday – Quads, Hamstrings, Calves, and Shoulders

Wednesday – Abs and Cardio

Thursday – Chest, Back, Biceps, and Triceps

Friday – Quads, Hamstrings, Calves, and Shoulders

Saturday – Abs and Cardio

Sunday – Rest Day

This workout seems very involved, but is actually fairly low in intensity, which is just what I need for starting to get back into shape. The lifting sessions only take 45 to 60 minutes. I am doing 2 to 3 sets per exercise with a rep range of 10 to 12 reps per set. I’m taking a 90 second rest between exercises and I superset exercises together of opposing muscle groups. i.e. chest and back or biceps and triceps. This workout is fairly easy to get me acclimated to lifting again and will increase in intensity every two weeks.

I am training my abs two days a week for right now, but will step it up to three days a week when I feel ready. I am training them on a separate day and will be doing lower reps with resistance to strengthen my core. I need to strengthen my core since I haven’t worked out in awhile. This will give me a solid base to perform exercises that require heavy weight when I get ready to do these exercises later. Your core is the most important area on your body. A strong core will enable you to handle more weight, which in turn will mean more muscle. I train my core on a separate day so that I can devote all my focus and energy that day on my core, in order to obtain better results.

As for the cardio, two days a week is all I will need. I have a very fast metabolism and any more than this will make it difficult for me to gain muscle. I may add in another day of cardio down the road if I feel like I’m not losing enough fat. For my cardio I am doing intervals. Right now I am doing about a 40 second sprint followed by low intensity jog for about a minute and a half. I will do a 3 to 5 minute warm up and a 3 to 5 minute cool down. The total amount of time I spend on cardio during a session right now is about 15 minutes. This is why I love doing intervals, I can get all the cardio I need to kick-start my metabolism in a cool 15 to 20 minutes.

As for my diet right now, I really haven’t started dieting. I eat pretty healthy already and I am eating 5 to 6 meals a day. I will eventually need to clean up my diet in order to reach my goal. Right now I am monitoring how my body is reacting to my workouts and I will change my dieting accordingly. I will eventually start keeping track of all my calories I’m taking in and monitor my carbohydrate, protein, and fat intake. Being able to monitor and listen to how your body is reacting to your diet is essential to shaping your body. I am slowing changing my diet, because this is a great way to ease myself back into eating lean and having a strict diet. Most of you will find this to be extremely helpful when starting a new diet. If you start out changing a little at a time you are way more likely to follow a diet than jumping full steam into something completely foreign.

If you have any questions, comments, or would like to suggest a topic please feel free to comment below!

The Gym Maniac

The Importance of Having Goals

I almost thought about skipping this post, because even though it’s not the most interesting it’s still very important. I want to talk about setting goals. Setting fitness goals is extremely important. Without goals and some sort of direction, you have very little chance of becoming successful. Strong goals are the foundation of a successful fitness program. So where do we start?

First off you need to identify what you want to achieve. You can’t have that blanket New Year’s resolution response, “I want to start working out!” that will get you nowhere and will give you nothing to achieve. Do you want to lose weight? Gain weight? Put on muscle? Take off fat? Look good in a bathing suit? Get in shape for a sport? Realizing what you want to achieve is going to give your workouts direction so you don’t end up quitting the gym after a couple weeks.

The next step is to identify your motivation. What is your motivation? This could be anything! Very few people have strong intrinsic motivation, (motivation that comes from within). Maybe you want to workout, because you love it and you like the way it makes you feel and it’s fun for you. Very few people say this and that’s ok, but you should at least have some sort of intrinsic motivation. After all what’s the point in making a lifestyle change if you don’t like it? There is none! Most people that read this are going to find their motivation extrinsically, (motivation that comes from external factors). Examples of this might be: (my personal one) you have been that scrawny little shrimp all your life and you’re sick of it!, you want to be able to fit in an old pair of jeans, or maybe you want to live healthier and longer to be able to enjoy being a part of your loved one’s lives. Whatever the case, you need to find the motivation of your goals to give them validity.

The secret to having success when setting a goal is to make your goals SPECIFIC! I can not stress this enough! So many times I hear people’s general goals: “I want to lose weight.” “I want to gain muscle.” “I want to look good in my bathing suit for Spring Break.” “I want definition.” It’s unfortunate in our society today that people think all they have to do is say the magic words, “I want to lose weight.” and it happens. This method of goal setting is ingrained into the minds of the countless lost souls of society’s fitness failures, and unfortunately it’s a completely useless form of goal setting. Do not fear though, because The Gym Maniac is here to set everyone straight! So how can we make these goals more specific?

Well for example: “I want to gain 10 lbs.” is better than, “I want to gain weight.”

“I want to gain 10 lbs. of muscle by February.” Is even better, and “I want to gain 10lbs. of muscle while maintaining my current body fat percentage, in time for Valentines Day, February 14^th, 2012.” is better yet!

Having specific goals will give your workouts purpose and meaning and you will be more likely to keep to your workout plan when you give yourself an end point.

In keeping with making specific goals, you also need to keep specific how you are going to achieve these goals. For instance say someone wants to lose 40 lbs. They need to be specific in how they are going to achieve this. Maybe go to classes at their local gym twice a week and work with a personal trainer twice a week. They will also need to come up with a specific diet program. This is the part in which you may need to consult with a health professional in order to do this.

Another factor you will need to take into consideration is a time limit for your goals. Many people may find this easy, because a lot of fitness goals coincide with a specific date: “By spring break”, “By such and such’s wedding”, “By this important date”. But for those of you who are not trying to meet fitness goals for a specific event you need to come up with a timeline. It is important to put a time limit on what you are trying to achieve, because it gives you that sense of urgency and motivation to get it done. Think if you told some construction workers to build you a house and to get it done when they can, it would never get done!

Keeping your timeline in mind as well as, what you want to do, and how you are going to do it, you must also make everything reasonable. It wouldn’t make much sense to set a goal to gain 20lbs of muscle in 2 months. That just isn’t reasonable. You also want to make your goals challenging. A goal to lose 10 lbs. of muscle in 4 months is way to easy! When setting a goal make sure that you will challenge yourself, but at the same time it is very important to know your limitations. Part of knowing your limitations is realizing how much work you are willing to put into achieving your goal. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you can go from not working out to joining a gym and attending five to six days a week. You will undoubtedly burn yourself out before you get a chance to achieve anything. It takes a long while to get used to any habit and you need to give yourself the time to make the changes in order to be successful.

Lastly now that you have all these goals in mind you need to write them down! What’s the use in all of this brainstorming if you don’t write any of it down? Writing your thoughts down will help you visualize and bring validity to your goals. They will get ingrained into your mind and you will also be more likely to remember them. You can even write them down and put them in a place you look all the time. Maybe a dresser drawer, where you put your alarm clock, the bathroom mirror, or maybe the refrigerator. Whatever the case may be this will give yourself a reminder of what you want to achieve everyday! Another method that helps, that I like doing is to tell people what you plan on achieving. This gives yourself some sort of accountability to other people to achieve your goals. You are going to look pretty silly when Fred at the office comes up to you three months later and says, “How’s that workout going Bob?” and you have to say, “Uh well… I… Uh…” Wouldn’t you rather be able to say, “Splendid! I’ve been losing a lot more than I thought already and I feel great!”

Developing goals are going to be the number one factor in your fitness success. This is something that is going to make or break your entire workout regimen. Without goals you will have n direction. So remember to find your motivation, make them specific, give yourself a time limit, and be reasonable when developing your goals.

Good Luck!

The Gym Maniac

Welcome to "The Maniac's Gym"

Hello, and welcome to The Maniac’s Gym.  My name is Paul, but as my close friends call me when I’m in, talking about, reading about, or dreaming about the gym, it’s “Maniac”.   

A little bit about me and how I got into fitness first. My older brother got a Weider weight bench for Christmas one year when I was very young. Watching my brother, I became fascinated with lifting and getting stronger, because I didn't know there was a way I could change my body. Later I got into wrestling in the 7th grade, and once I got to high school I was amazed at the changes that I was responsible for in my body. By the time I was a senior I was hands down one of the strongest wrestlers in my weight class of 125lbs. (Although not nearly the best.) I choose not to further my wrestling career through college. During my first year in college, wrestling season came and went and I was absolutely lost. I didn't know how to fill the time I normally spent wrestling. I started off throwing weight around in the gym not really knowing what I was doing. Eventually I started reading bodybuilding books and was able better train myself with my newly acquired knowledge. I am continuing to mature and develop my knowledge and skills towards working out and obtaining the body I desire.

Which brings me to what I am up to now, I vowed back in 2009 that I would consistently workout for a year straight.  None of this workout for a few months then quit for a few months business.  Well, one year turned into two years and I absolutely loved every day of it!  Then in April of this year a series of events had me put my workout life on hold, and now I’m looking to get back on the horse again!

Here is a couple pictures of me one year ago..

And these are some pictures of me now…

I’m so distraught, back in April I was at my peak at the end of a mass gain phase.  I was 195lbs and only about 13% body fat.  I was the biggest I ever looked and stronger than ever.  Unfortunately I’m about 160lbs now and still about 13% body fat.  I had dreams of doing my first bodybuilding show, but all of that is out the window at this point.

This blog is going to chronicle my climb back to where I was before, and along the way I’m going to share with you my tips, tricks, and secrets regarding my diets, supplements, and workouts.  So follow along with me as I post my progress and how I’m doing what I am doing each and every week.