Fitness
The ONE Reason Why You Don’t See Results in the Gym.
How important nutrition is for building new muscles.
You work out 5 times a week and work off your ass n the gym. You spend hours lifting weights. But after months of hard training, you still don’t see any results at all. Does that sound familiar to you, or do you want to make sure that you never get in this situation? Then read on, and I will tell you what I have learned from going through all this by myself.
Disclaimer: This article is meant to show you the importance of nutrition. It is written for beginners. People who don’t have a lot of experience going to the gym yet. I will not only explain to you why nutrition is important but also give you some free tools to start using right away. Nevertheless don’t feel intimidated by all this because the most important thing when working out is to never give up. Always push on!
The importance of nutrition for weight lifters
Did you think going to the gym is guaranteed to get you some sweet gains by itself? No! That’s what they tell beginners so that they don’t get intimidated before even starting to work out. In reality, there are a lot of different things influencing how many gains you make, and lifting weights is just one of them. By far, not the only one. Some of these are for example your genetic tendencies or your nutrition. While you cannot influence nor change your genetics, you can do it with your nutrition. But why isn’t purely lifting weights enough?
Lifting weights by itself is the thing responsible for muscle growth. It causes micro-tears in your muscles, which trigger your body to adapt to the new stimulus. This leads to your muscles becoming stronger and bigger. While this is the basic idea behind muscle growth, that everyone knows, there is far more to it.
As I wrote already, lifting weights is only a stimulus to your body. As a reaction to this stimulus, it wants to make your muscles grow. To make them grow, it needs fuel. That’s where nutrition comes in. Let me explain it with an example.
Let’s say you want a new house. So you plan it with an architect, and then you go to a construction company and give them the plans. You tell them that you are going to pay them and that you want them to build the house. This is the stimulus. Now all the construction workers come to the construction site and want to start building your house. But how are they supposed to do that? They need some materials first. That’s the nutrition. Not only do they need energy for their machines, but they are also going to need things like timber and concrete. Without those, they are never going to be able to build your house. You could promise them to pay each one of the construction workers a bazillion dollars (a very high stimulus), but without materials, they are nevertheless not going to be able to build your house.
Training by itself is not automatically going to make you see progress. You need to fuel your body properly, too.
What good nutrition is
Good nutrition is key to seeing a lot of gains in the gym. However, it is also a very complex topic. You should invest some time into learning more about it and form deep knowledge of what your body needs. To do so, I would recommend you watch videos by YouTubers who base their content on science. Jeff Nippard is one of those guys. Feel free to check out his channel after reading this article.
How to improve your nutrition
For more of a quick-fix solution that is at least going to help you start moving in the right direction, I have two great free tools for you.
The first one is an app called MyFitnessPal. It is free and I love it. I have written multiple articles about it already.
At its core, it is just a calorie tracker. You use the app to track what you eat. But it gives you far more insights than that. You can also easily track your macros with it. By that, I mean that you can easily track how many carbohydrates or protein you have consumed on any given day. Tracking with MyFitnessPal is easy. Just set up the app and start scanning the barcodes of the foods you eat. However, tracking without a goal is useless.
That’s where my second tool for you comes in handy. It’s the free macro calculator from bodybuilding.com. Just open the website and plug in all the required data (age, sex, goal, …), hit “calculate” and the website will show you exactly the macros you will need to consume to reach your goals while training properly.
After calculating your macros, you can plug them into MyFitnessPal and after that, the app will show you exactly how much of each macro you need to consume each day.
That’s it. I hope you found this article helpful.
Please don’t forget that it’s now up to you to implement what you have learned. Just reading about something is a waste of time, you will need to implement it if you want to see results. Go out there, learn about nutrition and adapt yours in a way that helps you build muscle mass.
