Fitness; The Basics (Incl Diet & Nutrition)

Take photos of yourself
Good to really see results, you may not realise how much weight you have lost/muscle you have put on. It is like seeing a little kid growing up everyday, you don't really notice the change since it is so gradual. It is good to look back at old pics and SEE the change rather than looking at a number on a scale or inch tape. As mentioned muscle weighs more so you may have changed a lot in appearance but not in weight. Also an incentive not to go back to old ways.

When full, stop eating. When pissed, stop drinking!
Avoid chippers after the pub. If you must go home and gorge on healthy food, everything tastes great drunk, how do you think abrakebabra are still in business.

Read and understand nutritional info on packets.
5% fat may sound low until you realise you drink it in 600g portions. "Low fat" muffins can be 90% sugar. "low sugar foods" can be high in fat. Do not believe packet "portion sizes" they are usually far smaller than the average person would eat, misleading you to think there are very few calories. Take into account the water content of foods, is it low calorie because it is watered down?

Info



Nutritional Myths and Truths

Below taken from post by Mivi320 on Bodybuilding.com. Questions are generally taken from a bodybuilding training context, however, many regular and irregular trainers often adopt and read such techniques so here is a take on some myths.

Fruit Avoidance

Questions regarding whether or not fruit is acceptable in a bodybuilding nutrition regimen are the most common here in the nutrition forum. It's just a myth that fruit will make one gain unwanted pounds of fat because of the high amounts of sugar it contains. What makes one gain weight is excess calories, not fruit. Simple. What many people don't know is that all fruits are calorically sparse and rich in nutrients, vitamins, and fiber. Most fruits only contain 4-7g of fructose per serving. The fructose in fruits keeps the liver in a "fed state" which conclusively keeps the individual in an anti-catabolic state. Unlike other food sources, fruits are rich in antioxidants and other phytonutrients that go a long way in aiding in recovery from brutal, grueling, intense workouts. It would take a HUGE QUANTITY of fruit to experience any negatives associated with fructose. Bottom line: eat your fruit!

Carbohydrates At Night

If I had a dollar for everytime a member of the message boards asks "Will eating carbs at night make me fat?", I'd be a rich man. The truth is, eating carbohydrates at night is perfectly fine, but you must analyze a few factors first. Calories are what determines whether one gains or loses weight. If one exceeds their caloric matience level, more than likely, the individual will gain weight. If one creates an energy deficit, preferably through cardiovascular activity/restriction of calories/weight training sessions, the individual will more than likely lose weight. Simple as that! It all depends on one's overall calorie total that determines body composition, not the time carbohydrates were eaten. Carbohydrates have many anti-catabolic properties and should not be eliminated at any time of day. They can be very beneficial at night, bulking or cutting, by pulling out all the theoretical stops related to anticatabolism. In conclusion, carbohydrates should not be restricted at night in attempt of preventing one's body of storing them as adipose tissue because the true factor that determines weight gain is a calorie surplus.

Food Separation Techniques

Ah, the infamous food separation techniques of sticking solely to protein+fat and protein+carbohydrate meals. How foolish is that? Separating out carbs from fat fails to to prevent unwanted fat gain, although it would be pretty swell if it did. If this was true, one could ingest as much fat as one wanted on a ketogenic diet and not add an ounce of adipose tissue. And guess what? That doesn't work either. Conclusively, the potent combo of protein+carbs is much more anabolic than protein+fat alone. Again, it all comes down to calories in vs. calories out that determines whether one gains or loses weight. The optimal choice is to eat balanced meals consisting of protein, carbohydrate, and fat, as food separation methods truly fail in offering prevention of fat storage and are virtually silly to abide by.

Milk Avoidance

Milk and bodybuilding go hand and hand, right? Well there's a ton of myths out there that claim milk makes individuals add and store fat. Before I go into detail, I just want to say that whether or not you consume milk is your own personal preference and you should continue avoiding milk if you're lactose intolerant, bloat due to milk consumption, or have some other milk allergy. But if you're a bodybuilder that has none of these characteristics and you avoid milk due to the myths and speculation, listen up! The truth is, milk is great for bodybuilding purposes. Milk contains cogent anti-catabolic properties, insulinogenic properties that are ideal for the post workout period, a quality amino acid profile, and a wide array of vitamins and minerals. It's also a cheap protein source, and even makes your protein shakes taste 10 times better. Milk is so anti-catabolic/anabolic that it has outperformed whey protein in human research thus far! In conclusion, it all comes down to your personal preferences. If you bloat when drinking milk or have a milk allergy, then by all means, avoid it. But if you're simply avoiding this anti-catabolic substance because of the misinformed media and foolish speculation, then you make want to think twice about milk.

Whole Egg Avoidance

Another myth: refraining from ingesting the yolk portion of the egg. Many bodybuilders opt for the egg white and ditch the egg yolk for whatever reason. The truth is the egg yolks are the most nutrient-dense portion
of the egg. All of the egg's Vitamins A, D and E are in the yolk. Egg yolks happen to be just one of the few foods that naturally contains Vitamin D. The yolk portion also has more manganese, phosphorus, iodine, copper, calcium, zinc, and iron than the egg white itself. Egg yolks should not be avoided because of the high amounts of cholesterol either as high cholesterol levels are correlated with diets high in Trans Fat and Saturated Fat, and genetics play a big role in cholesterol levels. Egg yolks are also anti-catabolic because of the Arachidonic Acid found in them. Overall, there really isn't a reason to avoid whole eggs.

The Glycemic Index

Many bodybuilders follow the gylcemic index (GI) religously, and they shouldn't! Why so? Well, the GI is based on eating carbohydrates on an empty stomach without the addition of protein, lipids, fiber, water, etc. Therefore, it obviously has it's shortcomings and is not the be all end all choice for chosing our carbohydrate sources. Truth is, it's quite irrelevant when it comes to bodybuilding purposes. Let's take white potatoes for example. This food species is often avoided mainly because of it's high GI rank. Foolish. White potatoes are a very nutritious food and should be incorporated in a sound nutrition program. See, we're already spotting shortcomings challenging the elements and principles of the GI. But wait, there's more. The GI of that white potato can be drastically altered by combining it with the addition of protein, lipds, fiber, and other carbohydrates. In conclusion, the GI should not be followed religiously by bodybuilders and nutrient-density should be the main principle in one's nutrition plan, not the GI.

Nutrition Ratios

Many bodybuilders and nutritional fanatics stress over ratios of Protein/carbs/fat. It's not necessary. The fact of the matter is that ratios are completely irrelevant. Lean mass should influence your overall macronutrient reuquirements; note calories. 'Tis true. Ratios are nothing more than an unintentional characteristic of any individual's diet following whatever modifications have been made depending on a multitude of factors such as training, goals, activities, etc. Overall, ratios are actually unplanned and unintentional and should not be practiced.

Some Diet Options and Ideas

1) Tuna Casserole. Boil pasta, add tuna and mayonaise and mic thouroughly. This is really filling but has all the essentials. Feel free to add cold olive oil to it.

2) Chicken Korma- I have taken to buying like 10 packs of chicken fillets when they are on sale. Freeze them and cook one a week. Leave the 10 fillets in your fridge to work from during the week. You can get "Pakatani" (sp) from dunnes for around €2 a jar and it does a few lunches. Basically just boil the pasta and add chicken pieces. Use 3 fillets or so.

This can be changed to suit any pasta / chicken dish, tikka is beautiful with it, all the sauces are dirt cheap and usually one of them is under a buy one get one free offer.

3) Boiled eggs - Just boil them, cool them (under cold tap) and leave them in your fridge to work from as you need them. No matter how full you are there is allways time for an egg.

4) Tuna sambos - I mix up tuna and onion in a lunch box and leave it in the fridge for lunch. In the morning stick some wholegrain bread in the toaster and when popped just take a lump of tuna from the fridge and put it in your sambos. Bring a tomatoe in with you and slice it just before eating the sambo to avoid soggy bread syndrome.

Basics 101;
A kcal is a measure of the energy in food. The food is oxidised (burned) in a closed environment and the total energy given off is recorded. 1 kcal will raise 1 kilogram of water by 1 deg celcius. 'kcal' and 'Cal' can be used interchangeably but are both 1000 times greater than 'cal' with a small 'c', just so you know .

The typical breakdown of macronutrient energy quantities is;
1 gram of protein gives you 4 kcals
1 gram of carbohydrate gives you 4 kcals
1 gram of fat gives you 9 kcals
(& 1 gram of alcahol gives you 7 kcals, but it does worse than that in terms of fat loss & muscle gain - I'm not going to address it again in this post)

These values are pretty good estimates, although there are different types of proteins,carbs and fats which will give slightly different amounts of energy so they may not always be exact.

Designing your Diet;
When making out a diet, start with total calories, then protein, then carbs and fats together. Why? Well, the 40% protein, 40% carbs, 20% fats rule will work well for alot of people, but consider a 220lb male bulking on 7,000kcal/day. Taking 40% of that from protein would mean eating 700g protein a day (or about 3 grams/lb LBM), which is probably excessive. So start with the basic rule of 1g/lb LBM (one gram of protein per pound of lean body mass) and increase as needed. People who just don’t train very hard may need to decrease as needed.

Calories;
Already covered by g’em. My diet is so similar form one week to the next that it’s very easy for me to increase it or decrease it if I feel I need to. Anyway;

Sample person: T-ha, 200lb male, LBM = 180lbs (values rounded off to keep calculations simple )

Maintenance Calories: 3,326kcal (according to g'ems post)

Protein;
When protein enters the body it is denatured in the stomach (peptide bonds are broken) and the aminos enter the bloodstream. They are either used or broken down in the liver. Aminos contain nitrogen, and once broken down they create a positive nitrous balance in the blood which the body can use to manufacture it's own proteins or form ammonia and excrete it in urine. Therefore, assuming you're properly hydrated, your urine can be a good indicator of how much protein you're getting. If it is coloured and smells strongly (think public toilet smell ) then you don't need the amount of protein you're eating and can cut back.

Calculating requirements: multiply my lean body mass by the number of grams of protein I want per pound (1.5g/lb in my case);
LBM (lbs) X 1.5 (g) :
180 X 1.5 = 270g protein/day

This is about 1,080kcal (270g X 4kcal ) of energy from protein, which is 33% of my total daily requirements. This leaves 2,246kcal (67%) to make up with fats and carbs.

The Fat/Carbohydrate Split;
This is where things get hairy, so bear with me. The ideal ratio here, is individual to me and my requirements for that day. It could be due to my ancestry, it could be my old childhood dietary habits, it could be a million things that have affected how I now process food but basically I have to tweak this for myself. I have 2,246kcals to play with. Three ways I could split this, which would represent the extremities of reason, would be;
1] 270g Protein (33%) 430g Carbohydrate (52%) 55g Fat (15%)
2] 270g Protein (33%) 390g Carbohydrate (47%) 74g Fat (20%)
3] 270g Protein (33%) 308g Carbohydrate (37%) 110g Fat (30%)

Well there’s a considerable difference there in those three options, so why would I choose one over the other? One of the main considerations is my insulin sensitivity and glucose tolerance that I covered earlier. I’m basically a meso-endomorph (the fairly heavy, wide guy) and I know from experience that my response to carbohydrates is not great. For example, although it’s not an exact test, if I eat a large bowl of pasta I will fall asleep – that’s not a good sign for handling carbohydrates well. For this reason I will usually go with something between options [2] and [3], i.e. higher in fat and lower in carbs. I know this works for me because I have played with the options before and this combination keeps me the most energetic for longest on the same number of calories . Therefore my calorie expenditure is higher and I can stay leaner on the same food intake.

I highlighted that sentence because it contains the key to body composition management. Find your sweet-point. This is the combination that keeps you the most energetic from day to day. Once you have this, then variations for weight gain/weight loss/weight maintenance/summer diet v’s winter diet/etc. become a doddle, a matter of tweaking. You will often hear veterans of the weightlifting/fitness scene say that they don’t work out any of this diet stuff out and that they just eat. That’s simply not true – they just don’t do it consciously, it’s become ingrained either through working it out initially or through years of tweaking (or both). They just know their own bodies. It’s the same way that Bruce Lee first had to realise that a punch was a lot more than just a punch, and required a lot of skill and practice to do it correctly, before finally realising that a punch was just a punch.

Anyway, enough Brucey waffle. In general, endomorphs do well on higher fat/lower carb diets, ectomorphs will do well on high carb diets, and everyone should steer clear of highly processed carbs and refined sugars.

Sets and Reps (Credit: Michael Cravez)

After reading books on different reps and sets doing high reps with low sets builds muscular endurance but not strength or size. One book i read (cant remember the name but it was endorsed by arnie) showed this table:

1. 80-100% of 1 rm: 1-3 reps X 5 sets = strength gains
2. 50-70% of 1 rm: 4-8 reps X 4 sets = A combination of both strength and size gains
3. 40-60% of 1 rm: 10-15 reps X 3 sets = Size gains
4. 30% of 1 rm: 15 or over reps X 2 sets = Muscular Endurance
5. 30-100% of 1 rm: with any reps or sets with explosive speed = power gains

You should be maxed out on the last rep of the last set you shouldnt even be able to reach 10 reps, or just perform the last set with as many reps as possible till failure.

Recently, we built a mini gym in a new room at the end of our garden, I was down there with my mum helping her do some weights a few weeks ago where she was doing everything with 2.5kg dumbbells. When I asked her why she was sticking with that weight when it was obviously too easy for her, she told me ‘You’ll bulk up if you use anything over 3kg’, apparantly ‘loads of people have said it’ so it must be true. Then I was in the hairdressers last week and was flicking through the glossy magazines when I saw an article on women and weights. Fantastic, I thought, finally, an article that will show women that they’re not going to look in the mirror the day after a heavy training session and see a mass of bulging muscles. Alas, I was to be disappointed. After I saw the line ‘don’t bother lifting anything over 5lbs because it’ll only make you muscley’, I gave up reading it.

I really don’t know where the idea that by lifting weights all women are suddenly going to end up looking like this lady came from because in reality we should be thinking of a woman more along the lines of Jessice Biel.


The main reasons I’ve heard as to why women don’t want to start lifting weights are:

(a) They don’t want to look like a man
(b) They don’t want big muscles
(c) They’re only looking to tone up

There are so many other myths surrounding the idea of women and heavy lifting, those two incidences above really got me thinking about these mis-conceptions and so I decided to write out some reasons why women SHOULD be lifting weights:

Lifting wights will NOT make you look like a man - women were never meant to look like men, the chemistry of each gender's respective bodies is different - women simply don’t have enough of the hormones that allow for increased muscle mass, we actually have ten to thirty times less of those essential hormones than males. This means that it doesn’t matter how much you train or how much you eat, you're not going to even come close to the big, bulky physique of a female bodybuilder. For those women who are looking to gain muscle mass, like the lady in the picture above, they have a pretty tough time accomplishing this goal. It takes serious dedication, a super clean diet, a perfectly designed weight-training program, plenty of dietary supplementation, and for most, steroids.


Lifting weights will actually help you to lose weight – Your diet, will of course be key when it comes to losing weight, however, lifting weights, will, believe it or not also help you a great deal in your quest to shed those unwanted pounds. The beauty of resistance training is that you actually continue to burn calories in the 24-48 hour period AFTER you’ve been in the gym too. This is due to the fact that resistance training elevates EPOC (Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption) which basically means that not only are you going to be burning calories while you’re training but will also burn more calories even when you’re not in the gym. More calories burned means more bodyfat lost which can only be a good thing!!

Lifting heavy is more effective at burning calories then cardio - I know when we think of loosing weight most peoples first thought is of jumping on the nearest treadmill for an hour, now admittedly you’re probably going to burn more calories during that hour but (and its pretty big but), cardio isn’t like resistance training in that it doesn’t raise your EPOC levels all that much which effectively means that when you’ve finished walking/running/rowing you’ve finished burning calories. More muscle also leads to an increased metabolism and a high basal metabolic rate (BMR). The net result of this is that even when you're not exercising your body is consuming calories. Leading to potentially MORE fat loss and generally an easier time of it when it comes to dieting and losing weight.

Heavy weights are what make you toned - Contrary to what many believe, endless repititions with that 2kg dumbbell is not going to make you toned. If you don’t ditch the pink dumbbells and the high rep workouts, chances are when you loose weight you’re going to end up with that ‘skinny-fat’ look, I’m sure you know the kind of look I’m on about – the person looks quite slim but are generally very ‘soft’ looking. In other words, you won’t get that muscle hardness most people associate with being toned. It’s important to note though, that lifting heavy will never completely "tone" up a girl who's carrying a lot of bodyfat, so to that end diet is important too.

It won’t turn fat into muscle - Many people believe that when they start weight training, any fat they already have will turn into muscle and they’ll end up HUGE! This just cannot happen, it is absolutely impossible to turn fat into muscle, or muscle into fat, as each cell is unique from the other. This also disproves the popular myth that once you stop training, all your muscle will turn to fat. IT JUST DOESN"T HAPPEN. What DOES happen is that as your stop training, your muscle atrophy (ie get smaller), your BMR decreases and you need less calories to maintain your weight. Most people miss this point and continue to eat as if they were still training. Of course these excess calories most go somewhere, and they will generally end up on your waist!! It's not muscle turning to fat, it's just plain and simple eating too much food.

Every day tasks become easier - This one’s pretty obvious, the stronger you get, every day tasks such as carrying the shopping in from the car will become easier to do. (Just make sure you don’t go buying extra to compensate )

Muscle is more dense than fat – People often say that muscle is heavier than fat, this is obviously not the case as a kilo of muscles weighs the exact same as a kilo of fat but a kilo of muscle takes up less room in your body than fat does.

Weight training enhances your body type – It can help thin women gain curves while curvier women can lose bodyfat and tone up.

You’ll age better Over time, your body slowly loses muscle at a rate of five to ten pounds a decade. This is the main reason why people tend to gain weight as they age. Less lean muscle means a slower metabolism, so you don’t need as many calories at the age 50 than you did at 40. The only way to reverse this process is to get into the gym and get lifting!

Reduces your risk of osteoporosis – Strength training has been shown to increase bone density thus reducing the risk of osteoporosis.

You will reduce your risk of injury - Strength training not only builds stronger muscles, but also builds stronger connective tissues and increases joint stability. This acts as reinforcement for the joints and helps prevent injury.

Personally I only started lifting about a year ago, but the difference it has made in even that relatively short space of time has been outstanding. Gone are those soft bits on the back of my arms, my stomach is firmer and flatter than ever and I'm in better shape over all over now.

I hope after reading this you'll give serious thought to the positive results that come out of a well constructed weight training program. It's funny, but you never hear girls who have stuck to a good one complaining about getting "too big" or becoming unfeminine. It's usually the complete opposite that happens. So there ya have it. Weights ARE good for women. Give it some thought and if you've any questions start a new thread and post them up. There's many qualified people (but in the "fitness cert/diploma/degree context and "under the bar experience") who would be only too happy to help!!