If you go to the bookstore or look online, you’ll quickly notice that there’s no shortage of diet books or websites. It seems that everyone and their brother has a book that guarantees to show you the secret of weight loss. Some of these diet books and websites are actually pretty good. Many of them have good, healthy information about losing weight. A few even have tips for dieting to add muscle too.
Unfortunately, most of the time diet books and the free diet plans you find on a website are geared toward everyday people who want to lose a few pounds of body fat. It can be difficult to find a free diet plan that is focused on bodybuilders. The same eating plan that might help a person who doesn’t work out seriously usually isn’t much help at all to someone who is serious about making gains at the gym. Bodybuilders have more advanced nutritional needs than people who don’t hit the weights hard.
Why Are Bodybuilding Diets Different?
Bodybuilders are concerned, first and foremost, with adding as much muscle mass to their bodies as is possible. As bodybuilders add muscle, they want to minimize any body fat gains and lose existing body fat too. The average person just looking to lose a few pounds before summer vacation, or after the holidays, simply doesn’t have the same nutritional concerns that a bodybuilder has. It’s all well and good for people to lose weight in an effort to get healthy and look better, but the serious bodybuilder needs more than a low carb diet or an eating plan to lose 10 pounds in a month.
Putting on slabs of muscle is serious business. Bodybuilders tax their physiques at the gym in ways that most people don’t understand. When you’re trying to maximize the muscle mass on your body, you have to work out very hard. And when you work out this intensely your body is going to need extra nutrients to recover and build muscle mass.
If you picture the human body as a car, the average person is driving a standard family sedan around the neighborhood, while the bodybuilder is driving a high-performance car at top speed. You wouldn’t throw the same kind of fuel into both of these two cars. You’d want the highest grade fuel for the high performance automobile. In the same manner, bodybuilders have to fuel their bodies with nutrient-dense food that will allow them to recover from workouts and add muscle on a regular basis.
How Are Bodybuilding Diet Plans Different?
Most of the time, if you find a free diet plan in a book or magazine it’s focused on weight loss. There is very little concern in these types of diets about what kind of weight is lost. In fact, a lot of popular eating plans revolve around the concept of calorie reduction. These diets have people eating fewer calories than they burn every day in order to provoke weight loss. But this diet paradigm simply won’t work for a bodybuilder. When bodybuilders cut back too much on calories, muscle mass soon begins to diminish. No diet in the world is worth losing hard-earned muscle mass.
That’s why bodybuilder diets have to be different from mainstream diet plans. Bodybuilding diets are always going to have a heavy focus on protein intake. The building blocks of muscle tissue, amino acids, are plentiful in protein rich foods. If you’re a bodybuilder, you know how important protein intake is to your success, and if you decide to try a free diet plan that doesn’t give you enough protein you are going to sabotage yourself in the gym.
The human body is simply incapable of building new muscle mass without adequate protein intake. There are other differences between a standard bodybuilding diet plan and what you might find in traditional diet book, but protein is the main difference. Bodybuilders thrive on protein, and if a diet plan calls for a reduction in healthy, muscle-building protein it’s not a good diet for a serious bodybuilder.
Bodybuilding Nutrition – Free Diet Plan
Now that you know why bodybuilders eat differently than most people and how their diets differ, it’s time to get into a free diet plan for bodybuilders. This diet plan is very basic and meant to be customized, but it will give you a good framework to base your regular bodybuilding diet around. Depending upon your age, size, individual health level, and fitness goals, you will have to adjust it to make it the best diet plan for you, and be sure to discuss any serious changes to your diet, including starting on this free diet plan, with your doctor before you begin. This free diet plan is for informational and instructional purposes only.
The Muscle-Gaining Free Diet Plan
Breakfast – One cup of water, four cooked egg whites, and two pieces of whole grain toast.
Late Morning Meal – One cup of water, one banana, one pound of lean turkey bacon.
Lunch – One cup of water, large green salad with vinegar dressing, and one boneless, skinless chicken breast.
Mid-Afternoon Meal – One cup of water, one turkey sandwich on whole wheat bread, and a small green salad.
Evening Post-Workout Meal – 20 to 40 grams of whey protein mixed with ice cold water.
Dinner – One cup of water, a large green salad, lean steak or chicken, and a dry baked potato.
Before bed protein meal – 20 to 40 grams of whey protein mixed with skim milk.
This free diet plan for bodybuilders can and should be customized to meet your unique needs. Remember to include a high quality source of protein in your diet from supplements, to get all of the protein you need to keep adding muscle without gaining fat. If you’re hitting the weights hard and being disciplined with your eating plan, the gains should continue to happen.
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