Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Discover the Foods that Build Muscle Fast

By Wakelin Smith

Ensuring that you give your body the fuel it needs to build muscle is an important part of bodybuilding. Eating to build muscle is just as important as your weight lifting program or other bodybuilding routines.

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.

A diet that is low in fat goes without saying with any serious bodybuilder. Protein provides the building blocks to build that muscle. What types of protein are best? Chicken, eggs, steak (with the fat cut off), fish, cheese (especially cottage cheese), and nuts are all great sources of protein.

Calculating how much protein you should be eating can be tricky. Ask at your gym as to your daily protein requirement. It depends on your weight, and on your lean mass weight (basically the weight of all your bones and organs, minus all body fat).

Foods that build muscle include carbohydrates. So long as the carbohydrates you ingest include plenty of fibre, carbs will contribute to building muscle mass ? not body fat. Great carbohydrate based foods include rice, oatmeal, bananas and other types of fruit such as apples and pears.

Reducing fat in your diet is of course necessary to build bigger muscle on a body that appears lean and has a low body fat ratio. If you are focussing on what foods build muscle mass, you also need to bear in mind that it pays to reduce fat as well. Although proteins are essential (as we talked about earlier), it is really important to select proteins that are low in fat, or that you can cut the fat off. So eat your chicken without the skin, and go for lean steaks rather than more fatty cuts of meat. Opting for cottage cheese or other reduced fat cheeses, and low fat milk also helps reduce your fat intake.

You may argue that drinking has no effect on what to eat to build muscle. Hydration is critical to general health and wellbeing. All the more so when you are working to build muscle mass!

Knowing what to eat to build muscle is great, but if you do not combine this great new diet by building muscle mass with weight lifting exercises or other bodybuilding routines, you will not be able to build muscle fast. So you really must do both - eat foods that build muscle, and undertake bodybuilding workouts, and you will end up with a body you will be proud of.

About the Author:

No comments: