Wednesday, November 26, 2008

The Right Way to Create a Bodybuilding Diet

By Ricardo d Argence

All right, so you want to get physically fit at the gym, and lift heavy weights. If only weight lifting were as simple as pumping the weights up and down.

An important aspect of both repair and growth is nutrition. Bodybuiding diest are always changing for the simple reason muscle mass increases, putting muscle on means eating more, losing muscle means you will need to eat less. How do you stay on top of what is going on inside the body?

First you will want to monitor your weight and see if your goal of adding muscle is causing your bodyweight to increase. If the weight is stay as it is, then we need to look at increasing the food taken in. You are eating too much if your weight is increasing and if your stomach is growing. Be careful, as initially your weight will increase with lifting, and you want to monitor for increased in the dreaded fat.

Another good method of checking which is going up, muscle or fat is to use a set of body fat calipers. By using the calipers every two weeks that will show exactly what is happening, if muscle is going down due to not eating enough then that will show with the calipers and you will need to eat more. If the calipers show that bodyfat percentage is going up then you need to eat less.

All good gyms will have a set of calipers and as long as the same person does the measurements every time you should be able to get a true reading as to what exactly is happening. Once you have obtained the amount of total millimeters and your bodyweight, the chart that comes with the calipers will show what bodyfat percentage you are.

If you take your bodyweight in pounds and times it by the bodyfat percentage then that will come out with your total bodyfat. Then take this figure from the total bodyweight and that will give you a figure for your fat free mass. The figure is not all muscle but includes internal organs, bones, etc, but just use the figure as muscle for our calculations.

You should record and keep the figures you calculated for total body fat and for fat free mass. When you have your measurements taken you can check to see if the percentage of bodyfat has increased. If you do the correct exercise and eat correctly then your body fat will go down. And with the decrease of body fat, you will find that your muscles and fat free mass will go up. If you are not eating correctly you will discover that your fat free mass, muscle is decreasing and the bodyfat is increasing. - 16083

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