For hundreds of years, people have been striving to reach athletic perfection and push the limits of the human body. The correlation between lifting heavy weights and gaining muscle mass was discovered a long time ago, but it is only in the last few decades that the art of weightlifting has been refined into a science.
The key to building lean muscle mass is to ensure your diet is up to scratch, and it’s that simple. You need all the building blocks in place to promote swift muscle growth to gain the advantage that your genetics may not provide.
Simply put, muscle growth is caused by the body responding to stress. This stress comes in the form of resistance training, pitting weights against muscle fibers. As the muscles flex to move the weight, microscopic tears occur in the fibers.
Once your workout is complete, these tears are naturally repaired by the body. However, rather than replace like with like, the human body anticipates that these muscle fibers will be used again and understands that they weren’t quite strong enough this time. To make sure the problem doesn’t occur again, the fibers are rebuilt, but slightly stronger, and slightly thicker. Fibers may even be fused together to increase strength.
As you continue to train, the fibers are constantly rebuilt stronger and stronger, leading to your muscles increase in mass and size.
To facilitate these repairs, the body uses protein as a building block to repair and grow muscle fibers. Therefore, a diet high in protein is recommended for building muscle mass – but it can certainly be difficult to eat enough food to meet your protein requirements. It is recommended to eat 0.5 to 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight to build muscle.
This means a 200lb person would need to consume 100g to 160g of protein per day, consistently. A good source of protein is meat, like chicken. 170g of chicken breast meat contains around 50g of protein, but it isn’t always convenient (or possible) to cook and eat chicken breast in that quantity.
An alternative is to use a protein powder such as Whey Protein. This powder is easily mixed into a shake, and one serving will provide 24g of protein.
This is often a better solution than searching out high protein foods as they may be prohibitively expensive or contain carbs or fats that may not fit in well with your chosen diet. If you’re trying to build muscle, give protein shakes a shot – the results are often impressive.
100% Whey Protein Isolate by PNfit is a great choice to increase protein intake and muscle recovery. It has 0gm added sugar and 25gm protein per serving.
