What is proper nutrition for your goal?
Nutrition is 70% of goal-oriented exercise. Whether your goal is to get stronger, get bigger, get leaner, or lose weight, consistency with proper nutritional intake plays a huge role in obtaining that goal. It’s not as simple as “eat less” or “eat more”; are you eating the right foods and hitting the right ratios of proteins, carbs, and fats that are most effective? If you feel like you’re spinning your wheels with workouts it’s likely that food is the problem. Keep a food log to help determine where issues lie. Pay close attention to ratios, and if you don’t know what they should be, ask a fitness professional for help.
Proper nutrition is individual
The tricky part is finding the ratios that work for YOU. No two people are the same and what works for one person might not work for another. That’s why a professional is so valuable in determining what works for you. There’s nothing worse than feeling like you work your butt off during countless workouts and are getting nowhere. A place to start: eat real food with ingredients you can pronounce! Eliminate processed, chemically-laden “food”.
Proper nutrition for your goal also involves tweaking your ratios every so often so that your body doesn’t adapt to the same thing. When your body adapts, progress toward your goal may stall. This is called a plateau. Bust through plateaus by changing up your nutrition and/or workouts!
It is important to remember you cannot out-train a bad diet. Dietary compliance needs to be 90% with a 10% dietary diversion – these diversions are your cheat meals. Cheat meals can help a person feel not deprived and are a very useful “re-feed” to restore muscle glycogen levels.
Finding what’s effective can take some trial and error but it’s important to stay the course, obtaining a goal is a long term process but well worth the effort!