Protein And Bodybuilding :
Many body builders and weight lifters are overly
concerned about what they eat and what food supplements
they take. If you want to grow larger and stronger
muscles, you should concentrate on lifting weights,
but you can help muscles grow larger by understanding
how what you eat affects how you recover from
hard exercise.Just exercising will not make you
strong and it will not help you to grow large
muscles. If exercise made you strong, marathon
runners would have the largest muscles. The only
stimulus to make muscles larger and stronger is
to stretch them while they contract.
When you
lift a heavy weight, your muscles start to stretch
before they start to contract. This tears the
muscle and causes soreness on the next day and
beyond. If you rest and let the muscle heal, it
will be stronger than before you stretched it
lifting weights.This training principle of stress-and-recover
is so strong that you can enlarge a muscle by
lifting weights even if you are fasting, losing
weight and all your other muscles are getting
smaller.
In one study, obese, un-athletic women
were instructed to restrict food and lift weights.
They averaged a weight loss of more than 35 pounds
in three months and gained a lot of muscle.Training
for sports is done by taking a hard workout and
then having sore muscles on the next day.
Then you take easy workouts or you take off
until the muscle soreness disappears. You improve
by taking hard workouts and your muscles grow
and heal while you recover on your easy days.
Of course, if you could recover faster from a
hard workout, you could do more work and be a
better athlete. Scientists have known for years
that you recover faster by eating carbohydrates
immediately after you finish your hard workout.
Other studies show that eating extra protein on
the day that you take hard workouts helps you
recover even faster.
Eating extra protein reduces
muscle damage during hard exercise. Eating carbohydrates
along with a protein building block called leucine
helps you to recover even faster.Chronic muscle
fatigue in athletes is associated with low blood
levels of amino acids, the building blocks of
proteins. The sooner you eat protein after you
finish your hard workout, the quicker you will
recover.
The benefits of eating protein soon after
you lift weights do not apply just too elite athletes.
A study from the University of Arkansas shows
that eating meat helps older people grow large
muscles when they also lift weights. Muscles are
made primarily from protein building blocks called
amino acids. Muscles heal from a hard workout
when amino acids and other nutrients travel from
your bloodstream into the muscles. Eating food,
particularly protein, immediately after you finish
your workout helps muscles heal faster.
This study shows that men between the ages of
51 and 69 recover faster and grow larger muscles
when they include meat than when they eat only
dairy, fruits, vegetable, whole grains, beans,
seeds and nuts.Most foods contain protein. Your
stomach acids and enzymes in the stomach and intestines
break down proteins into their building blocks,
amino acids, which pass from the intestine into
the bloodstream.
If your body needs to build protein,
your liver combines amino acids to form body proteins.
Your body has no way to store extra protein. If
you don't need all of the protein you have eaten,
it is broken down into organic acids and ammonia,
which can be used for energy or stored as fat.
|
