Top Nutrition Tips That Every Bodybuilding Beginner Should Know

Whenever someone talks about a healthy lifestyle, exercise and nutrition are the two important things that they focus on. While proper workout and nutrition are important for everyone, it is the athletes who have to take care of every gram of food that they intake.

Bodybuilders especially have to be mindful of what they eat and how much they must eat because it is much harder to bulk up than losing weight. There are chances that along with the muscles, you may also gain more fat. It is inevitable to gain fat while bulking up but with the right set of exercises you can reduce the amount of fat you gain.

A good gym with a dedicated personal trainer and gym management software will help you manage your bodybuilding workout. However, you still need to think about your diet and nutrition.

Here are the top nutrition tips that every bodybuilding beginner should know:

1. Make protein your best friend
2. Plan you meals
3. Don’t skip your carbs
4. Don’t completely rely on supplements
5. Start Slow

Let’s discuss all these nutrition tips for beginner bodybuilders in detail.

Make protein your best friend

Protein is one of the essential nutrients of the human body. It is also a basic compound of the muscles. This means that it is capable of repairing the wear and tear of muscles occurring due to intense workout sessions.

When you exercise, your muscles experience damage that you need to repair with nutritious food. However, since protein is the building block of muscles, eating healthy food rich in protein will help you repair the muscle damage much faster.

As a beginner who has started training for bodybuilding, you need at least 1.7-2 grams of protein for every kilogram. This helps you to improve your muscle strength and grow your muscle mass.

So, eat foods rich in proteins like eggs, dairy products, and meat. These foods are your base nutrition, you may have to add protein dietary supplements that help you reach the amount of required protein. However, make sure that the protein you eat reaches your muscles to be repaired properly. And that brings us to our next point.

Plan you meals

Planning your meals right is very necessary for your nutrition to show its effects. If you plan your meals correctly, the nutrients that you eat through your food are properly absorbed in your body and in the areas where it is required the most.

Eat small portions of food at an interval of every 2-3 hours during the day instead of eating hefty amounts twice or thrice a day. This will give your food enough time to digest so the nutrients are absorbed fast and help you with maintaining your muscles and energy.

When you eat larger amounts of food only a couple of times a day, it takes much longer to digest that much food. This slows down the nutrient absorption process which can reduce your endurance and make you feel tired during the workout. Whereas, with smaller portions and faster digestion, your food will release more energy thus helping stay focused on your workout.

This also means that energy (calories) giving food must not be skipped either.

Don’t skip your carbs

Carbohydrates and fats are other two essential nutrients for the human body apart from proteins, vitamins, minerals, and water. Carbohydrates and fats provide your body with necessary calories that release energy to keep you going through your vigorous set of exercises every day.

That being said, you need to be aware of what type of carbohydrates and fats you are eating. Mono-unsaturated fatty acids (MUFA) and poly-unsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) rich foods like olive oil or sunflower oil should be used to cook your food. Avoid eating foods with saturated fatty acids (palm oil) or trans fat (fast food).

For your carbohydrate intake, eat foods with complex carbs like whole grains, brown bread, etc. It takes more time to break down the complex carbs as compared to normal carbs. Thus releasing energy more consistently so that it can be utilized in your workouts instead of turning into body fat.

Even so, you must not expect that you will not gain any fat with your current diet. However, with your current workout schedule, you should try to gain as little fat as possible.

Don’t completely rely on supplements

Supplements are just that, a supplement to your food nutrition requirements. Hence, it should not be used as a base supply of nutrition. Relying heavily on nutrition supplements will not help you gain the muscle mass you may expect it to be.

More than anything else, consuming large amounts of supplements may adversely affect your health. So, insist on getting your nutrition from your food, and yet if your nutrition requirement remains unfulfilled, only then you should take the appropriate amount of supplements.

You can use protein shakes and other dietary supplements in addition to your natural diet to fulfill your nutrition requirement, especially that of protein and carbohydrates.

Start slow

Whether you are starting with bodybuilding for the first time or you are getting back to it after a long wait, you will need to start slow instead of jumping right into the advanced level. This means that you need to keep your diet and workout simpler than that of the advanced level bodybuilders.

Your body needs time to fall into the workout schedule and you can do this slowly, giving it enough time to adjust without getting sick or injured. With that said, you will also need a nutrition plan created for your current body to transform for the better.

Do not follow diet plans made for advanced bodybuilders, instead, ask your dietician to create a plan based on your body type. That will help you gain more muscles faster while also avoiding sickness.

If you feel, you can also take a break from your diet and workout every once a fortnight or month. This will allow your muscles time to repair themselves and grow faster. But make sure that you do not do it more often than that.

Conclusion

Proper nutrition and a strict workout schedule are necessary for effective bodybuilding. A beginner bodybuilder’s nutrition is filled with proteins, carbohydrates, and other essential nutrients along with an adequate amount of dietary supplements to help the muscles repair and grow.

In this blog, we discussed top nutrition tips that every bodybuilding beginner should know. As mentioned earlier, a strict and disciplined workout is also necessary for bodybuilding enthusiasts.

This is where top gym management software helps bodybuilders, beginners or advanced, to manage different aspects of their workout schedule. It tracks your attendance streak, conveys you the diet plan created by your instructor or dietician, keeps you updated on your workout schedule, and so much more.

If your gym does not use gym management software or is looking to replace it, then you can try new gym management software for free with the trial demo before buying it to ensure that it suits all your needs.

What other tips would you like to give the bodybuilding beginners? Share with us in the comments below and be sure to share this blog with someone who may get benefitted from it.