How to eat when you're trying to bulk up

Building up your muscle mass can be difficult, but consuming the correct types of foods can greatly increase the chances of you being successful. A greater muscle mass is created by breaking down the existing muscle, and then providing your body with the protein and nutrients required to rebuild them with thicker muscle fibers. Exercise is essential, but proper diet is as well.

    A high protein diet is your best bet when getting buff. It is recommended that you intake 1 gram of protein per pound that you weigh, so if you weigh 190 pounds, you would eat 190 grams of protein daily. It is also important that you are consuming complete proteins, rather than incomplete proteins which are commonly found in plants. You will want to stick to the proteins found in fish, eggs, dairy, and meat. Soy and beans can also be a good source of complete proteins, or you can add a protein supplement to your diet if you would find that easier. Whichever way you chose to intake your protein, it is extremely important to drink lots of water along with it. A high protein diet can put a large strain on your liver and kidneys, and proper hydration can help to prevent any serious damage. 

  It is best if you spread out your protein intake. Avoid consuming all your protein in one sitting, and add it to many smaller meals throughout the day. If you are consuming all of your protein at once, your body will not have a chance to use it all up. Your goal is to maintain a high blood protein level throughout your day and night. Drinking sport drinks that contain carbohydrates and proteins during your exercises can also help you spread out your protein intake. You should also consume a high carbohydrate bar or shake within thirty minutes of exercising to replenish your body’s glycogen. Glycogen is essentially your muscle’s energy source, and is found in carbohydrates. Muscle cannot be rebuilt without it, and giving your body that boost of glycogen right after your work out will help.

    Be sure you are consuming lots of vegetables in your diet as well. Broccoli and spinach will provide you with the vitamins your body requires to stay healthy and the more leafy green vegetables like lettuce will ensure you receive enough fiber to keep everything in working order. Avoid sugary processed foods like white bread and cookies whenever possible because they can actually interfere with your body’s glucose levels and affect your immune system. When building muscle it is essentially important to keep your body balanced by consuming everything your body requires and by staying away from the foods that will hinder your progress. 

   Eating properly while building muscle mass is crucial, and the proteins and carbohydrates you consume will be your body’s building blocks for bulking up. Without the proper building blocks your body cannot rebuild the broken down muscles after a work out. Do not forget to constantly hydrate as well, because on a high protein diet, it’s nearly impossible to drink too much water.

Some useful tips to improve your workout performance

Once you’re started a workout program or an exercise routine, one of your main motivations should be to increase performance. For a runner it is important to run farther and faster. Bodybuilders will want to add more weights to increase strength and muscle mass. For a slightly overweight person guess what it important? … many things but you get the point: efficient aerobic exercise, better diet, etc.If a better performance is not one of your main workout goals then you may be focusing too much on results, which are really lacking if your overall performance is lacking. Note this is not a science, but it is my opinion. You can leave comments and let me know what your opinions are!

Breathing

Enhanced exhalation while exercising can increase lung capacity which means your will be able to get more oxygen. With more oxygen in your lungs your heart has to do less work to keep your blood oxygenated. There is also a better muscle efficiency due to greater blood flow. Deep and conscious breaths can significantly help with improving heart and lung efficiency.Keep in mind that conscious deep breathing techniques don’t have to be done during cardio exercise or any other exercise only. It is a good idea do them while you are resting. This is in fact one of my warm up instructions from my trainer about five years ago.

Keep a variable pace during the workout

Having the same pace during the whole workout is not only monotonous, but may not be exactly make a well-balanced workout program. With aerobic exercise for example, metabolic pathways that are responsible for energy generation during anaerobic metabolism are not exercised properly. That doesn’t mean, however, that aerobic exercise is not efficient; aerobic exercise is probably highly valuable part of your program alone. Same thing goes for bodybuilding. Strength training and exercise sets until failure can be helpful.

Don’t ignore cooldown

After a long and intensive aerobic training you definitely want to leave some time for cooling down. It is not a good idea to stop abruptly. You want to have the blood continue to circulate and slow down gradually. This way metabolic waste that is build up during exercise will have time to redistribute properly. So instead of stopping to catch your breath, keep moving for another 10 minutes until you’ve cooled down.

Sleep

Sleep is important for recovery. Sleeping every night around the same time and getting at least seven to eight hours of sleep is an optimum. If you workouts or performance is not doing so well, maybe you’re not getting enough sleep.

Don’t overtrain consistently

If you are continuously doing aerobic exercise and your pulse is higher by 5-10 beats than what it should be then you may be overtraining. This is different from keeping a difference pace during workout. I would say this will not help if you are consistently overtraining. Overtraining can cause fatigue and your workouts are less desirable because they will be hard. Overall, you are not producing better results if you are trying to burn some more energy and get out of the exercise sooner.