Muscle Building Nutrition…
When it comes to building muscle, what you eat has a HUGE impact on your overall results. In fact some bodybuilding experts even go so far as to say that nutrition is responsible for 80% of your muscle building progress.
Now I certainly agree that nutrition is a very critical component, but I don’t like to give it some random percentage value towards your muscle building gains. Instead I like to zoom out and look at the big picture.
Building muscle comes down to 3 things:
1) Training
2) Nutrition
3) Mindset
You need to have all 3 components in place in order to make progress and achieve your fitness and physique goals.
Training:
Obviously, you need to workout and place demands on the muscles in order to give them a reason to grow bigger and stronger. You can consider weight training as the spark that starts your body’s muscle building engine.
Nutrition:
Once the spark is ignited you need to fuel it in order to get things rolling. Without proper fuel and nourishment that muscle-building spark will quickly burn out, and you’ll be left with nothing to show for your efforts.
Mindset:
Finally you need to have the mental drive, desire, and vision to keep on pushing forward. Your mindset is like the glue that holds the training and nutritional components together over the long term in order to reap the muscle building results you are striving for.
Each of these 3 components is like a leg of a tripod. If one leg is missing the whole thing will just topple over and your progress will come to a screeching halt. Now of all 3 of these equally important elements, the one that people usually have the most trouble with is Proper Nutrition.
When you break down each part and really look into them individually, it’s no wonder that nutrition is the most challenging. You see for most people Weight Training is actually the easy part. After all, you simply have to go to the gym, workout for an hour, and then you are finished. You can forget about it and carry on with the rest of your day.
But Nutrition isn’t like that. You can’t just do it once a day and forget about it. Instead nutrition is an all day event because every few hours you have to plan and eat a meal.
And to make it every more complex our whole social life is based around eating:
–>> Whenever you visit family, it’s usually centered around having a meal together.
–>> Whenever you hangout with your buddies it’s usually over drinks and snacks.
This can make following a proper muscle building nutrition program quite challenging, especially when your family and friends don’t have the same muscle building goals as you do.
Now obviously, no one can eat and train perfectly all the time. There will be times when you skip meals, cheat on your diet, miss workouts, etc. but as long as you focus on the big picture and stick to the plan most of the time, you’ll move yourself in the right direction towards your muscle building goals.
The BIG Take Home Message that I want you understand about Proper Nutrition is that you should
“Strive For Progress, NOT Perfection”.
This is where the whole Mindset component really comes into play.
You see a big mistake a lot of people make is falling into the “All or Nothing” trap. So many people say to themselves;
“If I can’t do it perfectly, then I won’t do it at all.”
They maybe super strict and meticulous about their eating for a few weeks in a row, doing everything spot on and to the letter. But if they fall off the bandwagon and mess up a little bit, they get discouraged, quit, and then go back to their old eating habits.
The key to success with any program is being consistent with it over the long term. You have access to some of the most well planned out training and nutrition programs available right here on this website. But if you are not consistent with following them, you will not get the results you want. Simple as that!
A killer tip that I learned from Dr. John Berardi, and one that I want to share with you is:
perfectly 90% of the time, and following a nutrition program perfectly 100% of the time.”
And if you were so stubborn as to try and stick to a perfect nutrition program 100% of the time, the stress you’d have to undertake and sacrifices you’d have to make in your life would not be worth the messily extra bit of progress you’d make.
Having this 10% of leeway factored into your Nutrition Program makes it possible to be social when needed and still stick to your program over the long term. So when you have that big family BBQ get together, or you are out for a couple beers with your buddies on a Friday night, you can simply count those as part of your 10% meals. And then just pick things back up for your very next meal.
I’ve been bodybuilding for over 20 years and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m NOT perfect…
I’ll sometimes give into my junk food cravings, I’ll miss a meal from time to time, and I’ve been known to indulge in the occasional alcoholic beverage. But because 90% of the time I do stick to a solid nutritional eating plan. I’m still able to move in the right direction towards my muscle building goals.
So my advice to you when it comes to following your nutrition program: “Strive For Progress, NOT Perfection”.
If you fall off the nutrition bandwagon (and most likely you will) just take it in stride, chalk it up as one of your 10% not so perfect meals, and pick things up where you left off for your very next meal.
This takes the stress out of eating, because rather then getting freaked out over every little hiccup in your nutritional program, you can stay focused on the big picture and move closer towards your ultimate muscle building and physique transformation goals.