the popular question: What is more important, nutrition or fitness?? First and foremost, you cannot separate nutrition and training. They are both important and work as a cohesive unit. Regardless of your goals, whether it be gaining muscle, losing fat, athletic conditioning, whatever. You will get less than optimal or even non existent results without paying attention to BOTH. Losing fat or gaining muscle involves three stages. Weight training, cardio training, & nutrition, with each part being similar to the leg of a stool. Pull any of these legs off of the stool & guess what happens? Beginners: nutrition is extremely important for you. If youre a beginner and you dont posses nutritional knowledge, then mastering nutrition is far more important than training and should become your number one priority. I say this because improving a poor diet can create rapid, quantum leaps in fat loss and the muscle building progress. But if you can involve both then even better! For example, if youve been skipping meals and only eating 2 times per day, jumping your meal frequency up to 5 or 6 smaller meals a day will transform your physique very rapidly. If youre still eating lots of processed fats and refined sugars, cutting them out and replacing them with good fats like the omega threes found in fish and unrefined foods like fruits, vegetables and whole grains will make an enormous and noticeable difference in your physique very quickly. But it is also important to know that one of the biggest deficits in diets for people is usually protein. Therefore, eating fruit all day is not a great idea. Remember, sugar still has sugar in it too. If your diet is low in protein, simply adding a complete protein food like chicken breast, fish or egg whites at each meal will muscle you up fast. No matter how hard you train or what type of training routine youre on, its all in vain if you dont provide yourself with the right nutritional support. You can almost always find ways to tweak your nutrition to higher and higher levels, but once youve mastered all the nutritional basics, then further improvements in your diet dont have as great of an impact as those initial important changes. So, to answer the question, while nutrition is ALWAYS critically important, its more important to emphasize for the beginner (or the person whose diet is still a mess). Its not that nutrition ever ceases to be important, the point is, further improvements in nutrition wont have as much impact once you already have all the fundamentals in place. Once youve mastered nutrition, then its all about keeping that nutrition consistent and progressively increasing the efficiency and intensity of your workouts, and mastering the art of planned workout variation, which is also known as periodization. IF YOU REACH THIS STAGE AND YOUR WORKOUTS ARE POOR, THEN IT MATTERS! The bottom line: Theres a saying among strength coaches and personal trainers... You cant out-train a lousy diet!
Posted on: Thu, 24 Apr 2014 17:34:49 +0000