Why your Nutrition is more important than your Training

  Written by Goji Conway

Everyone should know the importance of setting training goals and determining how you are going to work towards achieving them! However how many people invest the same amount of time and effort to work out exactly what they are eating?
In order to achieve any training goal you should also be concentrating on setting goals for what you need to achieve in terms of your nutrition. It is obviously important to know exactly what you are doing when you get to the gym in order to stimulate your muscles to grow, increase your endurance or speed or lose body fat. However it vital that having done this you know how to give your body what it needs, in terms of Calories, Protein, Carbohydrates and Fats to make all of your efforts worthwhile.
It is a fact that the majority of people who train to improve themselves in sport in anyway, building muscle, losing body fat and everything in between concentrate solely on constructing a training routine. Obviously this is a very important step in achieving your goals, but even if you manage to develop a perfect, ‘bang-on’ routine that will deliver every bit of stimulus your body needs to develop, grow and transform you will still only be 30% of the way there!
Training (including scheduled rest in between) only accounts for 30% of your body transformation, muscle building, endurance gaining, and fat loosing success!
So why do people spend a disproportionate amount of time on routine construction, tweaking this, changing that and getting focused solely on training, training and more training? Even the poorest of training routines will deliver some results, at least in the short term. How else would you account for beginner’s initial metamorphosis? Teenagers that just walk into a gym one day and start lifting weights or decide to go out for a run, without any real thought for it, in just a few weeks have started to notice a difference in their physique or fitness.
Now, I am not suggesting you just ‘wing-it’, as in the example above, however if you are like the majority of trainees (as I once was), you probably need to spend a lot less time and preoccupation with your routine and a lot more on what you are providing your body to repair and grow following it.
It will come as no surprise then that the remaining 70% of your potential success is all wrapped up in your nutrition! The food you provide your body with, measured in calories and proportioned into macro nutrients (Protein, Carbs and fats) are what will make or break your training routine and make or break your goals.

Take for example the never ending search for most trainees – The elusive 6 pack! There are countless thousands of routines and pieces of equipment that train your ‘Abs’ for that all important 6 pack look, however you will never see those abdominal muscles if you have  a layer of body fat covering them! This will be obviously, predominantly down to fat loss as opposed to training and fat loss is predominantly down to what and how much you are eating! As the saying goes…..

Food is of course the only resource the body has to recover and repair its damaged muscles caused by training and to fuel itself with the energy it needs! The only other place it can get this from, if you are not providing enough, is in the form cannibalising its own fat storage and muscle tissue. This is obviously counter productive if you are looking to build muscle, strength, speed and endurance and will only last a very short period before you burn out and no longer have the energy to train effectively.
To build and maintain muscle it is imperative that you eat more calories than you need for basic functions and survival. Muscle tissue (any more than the body needs to work normally) is an extremely expensive investment for the body – basically it doesn’t want it!
We have evolved very little over the thousands of years we have been around and our body’s primary focus has remained the same throughout – that is to survive. The body doesn’t need huge amounts of muscle to do this! Large muscle mass is relatively useless for just surviving, but burns calories even at rest, so almost threatens our own survival when energy (food) is in short supply! Now body fat on the other hand is stored and retained easily, as the body can use this in times of famine and it cost nothing to keep hold of. This is generally why it is easier to put on fat than put on muscle……You need to give your body a ‘reason’ to build and hold onto that muscle. Eating a consistently high calorie, nutrient dense diet will give it that reason, especially after giving its muscles a very hard time fighting against heavy resistance !

Having established that we all need to concrete more on the amount and types of food we are consuming on a daily basis, the next stage is to work out exactly (or there about) how many calories we will need to our specific needs and more specifically where these calories will come from. Basically, what does this look like in practical terms?
To make it as easy as possible I have split the below sections you need into small, manageable step by step guides.
When I first realised that proper nutrition was the key I spent a great deal of time trawling through magazines, which to be honest just provided sample diets really, as opposed to how to determine what I really needed. The internet is also a wash with over complicate and pretty boring ways of working out how, what and why you need to eat. For a pretty straight forward subject it has, as everything in this world, been very overcomplicated. It doesn’t need to be complicated to the max – unless of course you are trying to sell a ‘wonder supplement’ that does it all for you by just drinking 6 shakes a day…..All you need to do is just work through the below stages in order and you will be much better informed, armed with some figures to take with you towards achieving what you want.

1. Determining your ‘Basal Metabolic Rate’ and Calorie starting point.
2. How much PROTEIN do you really need ?
3. Eating for Muscle gain (coming soon)
4. Eating for Fat Loss (coming soon)