Confusion
Listen, I understand, nutrition is confusing. There are five hundred types of diets out there, and every single one of them insist that the others are attempting to kill you. Are we supposed to be eating a low fat diet with ample carbs to fuel our training, or trying to become fat adapted and avoid carbs like the plague? Most studies that make a big splash contradict one another and are based off of correlations within epidemiological data, its hard to boil down whats important. It can become so much noise that we tend to blow them all off, and eat whatever is convenient. But for many of us looking to improve our body composition or strength it starts to be pretty important that you are eating in a way that supports your training goals. This will be the first of what I expect to be several posts dealing with nutrition. My goal today isn’t to tell you what the best type of diet is because I don’t believe that one exists. Rather I want to give you three steps you can take to begin making your diet fit into your training goals.
You need to eat
Weightlifting training requires a huge amount of energy. Eating enough food is an essential piece of the pie to continue to gain muscle and strength. Eating at least enough calories to maintain your current weight and recover from training has to be the first goal, before trying to find any particular blend of macronutrients. Even if your goal is to lose weight, we still don’t want to restrict calories to a point that performance tanks, because the goal should be to maintain as much strength as possible while cutting weight. Everybody is different, and that is reflected in the daily caloric needs of people, but there is a ballpark number that should serve as a good place to start. First you’ll want to determine your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), this is how many calories it takes for you to exist laying on a couch all day. There are many online calculators available and I’ll provide a link at the bottom. Once you have your BMR worked out we need to consider your level of activity, for most of us who are doing exercise or sports 3-5 day per week, you would multiply your BMR by 1.55. For instance in my BMR is 2,000 Kcal per day, 2,000×1.55=3,100 Kcal/day. This number should be right around what you need to maintain and recover from training without gaining or losing weight. For many people this looks like a lot of food, and they may feel like they cant eat that much, this is common in chronic under eaters. However in my experience, most people after moving their calories up to a reasonable maintenance level have improved workout performances and generally felt better. If your goal is to move up or down a weight class your should add or subtract 300-500 Kcal from maintenance calories. There are always exceptions and some people may have to troubleshoot more than others, but for most, this is a good place to start.
Protein
We are all strength athletes in one way or another, and as participants in what is essentially a muscle sport, we would hope to be on the same page in that we want those muscles to be bigger and/or stronger. Protein is our cornerstone for ensuring that we have the adequate materials to repair and grow between workouts. Protein, carrying 4Kcal/gram, is composed of Amino Acids, and you guessed it, so are our muscles. Protein ingestion, along with resistance training, can up-regulate the MTOR pathway and leads to the deposition of amino acids into the muscle tissue. This means that just eating protein itself triggers muscle repair, and coupled with resistance training is a powerful growth stimulus. As a strength athlete you should be shooting to eat around 1.8-2.0 grams/kilo of body weight to maximize your recovery and strength gains. For a lot of folks this will be a bit of a challenge at first, protein tends to make you feel full for quite a long time, but if you ensure that you have some kind of protein at every meal and are eating enough food you’ll hit that number fairly easily. Before you go out and spend money on expensive supplements, make sure that you are getting enough protein from real foods in your diet. It will take you further than taking creatine, under eating, and wondering why you aren’t getting the results that you want.
Vegetables
If you are making changes to your diet in pursuit of performance or body composition i have one last task for you to get started. Eat some vegetables at least three times a day. Seriously. It’s not that hard, I know you think they are gross but there are a lot of vitamins and phytochemicals in them that help you recover, and are probably just good for your long term health. If you look at most diet trends, regardless of macronutrient breakdown, almost all of them have one thing in common, eating a lot of multi colored vegetables. You don’t even need to worry about breaking the bank buying every organic thing at the co-op, just make sure you have a couple of salads and some broccoli a few times a day. Serving size should be about a cup or small handful three to five times a day. If you think it’s gross, do it anyway.
In Conclusion
Diets are like training programs, there are beginner, intermediate, and advanced techniques to figuring out what works best for you. Outlined here are first steps you can take to measuring how you can manipulate your eating to support your performance. Once you have a couple of basics down you can try a variety of diet types, its fun, like a science experiment manipulating the organism that is you. You don’t need a fancy or complicated nutrition plan to make gains in the gym, you just need to make the essentials your focus and the other aspects can be layered on as you get more experience.