Remember why you wanted to work out in the first place? Maybe it was to accomplish a goal!
The process of reaching that goal won't be easy, and training consistently may only lead to a little progress.
Spending a lot of time in the gym every day, only to stagnate.
Have you ever learned about anything other than fitness?
Can strength training suppress your appetite?
It's not just emotional stress that can suppress appetite, physical stress can also make us less hungry, including lifting iron. Some of you think that training to build muscle will enhance your appetite, but this is not always the case. In fact, there are indications that strength training can suppress appetite instead.
A study in the journal physiology and behaviour found that lifting iron caused most pals to consume more calories, but it also caused some to consume fewer. Other studies have found the same results. For some people, lifting iron suppresses appetite.
This explains one of the reasons why most peeps naturally get bigger and stronger as soon as they start lifting iron. When lifting iron, the body automatically adjusts food intake to stimulate muscle growth, again resulting in some people not being able to build muscle.
Generally speaking, the more intense the training, the more likely it is that appetite will be suppressed. Think of a zebra being chased by a lion. If the zebra is under a lot of stress, such as when it is being chased by a lion, it will certainly not be thinking about eating at this time. But if this training is not as intense, then the stress response will be lower and appetite will not be suppressed as much.
The appetite suppressing effect of vigorous exercise lasts for about an hour. Once the stress level drops, the appetite rebounds sharply. This is a good time to eat a meal after training, or even a glass of protein powder before this meal.
When you are just starting to build muscle, it can be difficult to consume enough calories after training. If you eat an extra meal, then train at the gym and go home and cook, time has passed. The appetite will return an hour or two after lifting iron and the calorie intake will have caught up. Add to this the fact that leaner physiques have smaller stomachs and are unable to keep up with their body's demands, and if they are stuffed hard, they will regurgitate and have acid reflux.
Choose some muscle building powder with a good carbohydrate to protein ratio and drink a scoop half an hour before training. This quality nutrition not only improves your performance and allows your muscles to absorb it, but also makes it easier for you to consume enough calories to build muscle. Digestion can be affected during training, so don't consume foods that are difficult to digest an hour before training.
It's not just strength training that can suppress appetite. Doing strenuous cardio can also affect appetite and interfere with digestion. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something to be aware of. We prefer to recommend brisk walking outdoors as the main form of aerobic exercise.
Vigorous exercise suppresses appetite and interferes with digestion. Appetite usually returns after an hour or so, but this may not be enough, so supplementing with muscle building powder half an hour before lifting iron and protein powder after exercise is recommended.
How hard is it to maintain the muscle you have now?
Many guys often worry that even if they build muscle, sometime in the future, if they are sick, stressed or busy, they will drop it. They also worry that once they stop going to the gym and force themselves to eat more, they will lose muscle and go back to being very skinny again. It's true that no skinny physique partner hangs around every day worrying about whether they're eating enough.
According to research, a pound of muscle burns 6 calories a day, so adding 20 pounds of muscle burns an extra 120 calories a day, and the metabolism is only increased by 5%, which a cup of protein powder or a slice of protein pie can make up for.
It makes intuitive sense that building muscle requires a lot of extra calories to be burned, but maintaining muscle does not. Building muscle requires extra ingredients to get the muscle building going. But by not going for muscle gain, we no longer need the excess calories and protein, we just need to maintain the muscle we have already gained, which will be much easier.
For example, when reducing muscle training, it is possible to reduce protein intake by half and not have to think about it. It is also possible to reduce the intake of at least 500 calories from the diet, and usually more.
When we gain muscle, a number of changes occur in the body.
When the weight increases, the appetite becomes bigger and the lean weight pals can eat food happily. The digestive system becomes stronger as you get used to eating more food, allowing the body to adapt to digesting more food or more frequently. When gaining muscle, the extra lean body mass improves insulin sensitivity, making it easier for the body to maintain a low body fat percentage.
Glycogen stored in muscle fluctuates with calorie and carbohydrate intake, leading to muscle contraction and expansion, but the nuclei produced in muscle fibres as a result of muscle gain will remain in the body, even when starving. The point is that after muscle gain, it becomes easier to maintain muscle while naturally becoming stronger and more contoured.
To sum up, leaner physiques often worry about how to maintain their weight after bulking up, but this is not a problem. It doesn't take a surplus of calories to maintain a larger body weight; muscles don't burn many calories and the stomach gets bigger and so does the appetite. Keeping a higher weight is just as easy as keeping a lower weight, only gaining muscle is the hardest part.
For leaner physiques, eating enough food to gain weight is much more difficult than most physiques think. Not only does it become incredibly difficult to eat, but the metabolism of the lean physique partner also adapts more quickly to the high calorie intake.
The stomach of a lean physique partner may be six times smaller than the stomach of a partner with high body fat. Not only does this make it more difficult to consume more calories, it can also lead to problems such as drowsiness and acid reflux if you accidentally force yourself to eat. Even if one manages to consume more calories, the metabolism of a leaner person can burn around 1,300 more calories per day than a normal person, making the hard-earned calories disappear. When feeling stressed, the average person will eat more food and gain weight. However, when lean body pals feel stressed, we tend to lose our appetite and thus become lighter.
It's not simply a matter of eating more. Thinking that 'eating more' is a good strategy for building muscle is like thinking that the secret to losing weight is to 'eat less'. That's not to say that this advice is inaccurate, it's just not very helpful.
Leaner physiques have the genetic advantage of not only being less worried about chronic health problems such as inflammation, obesity and diabetes, but also of being able to build lean body mass more quickly than other body types. It is also easier to maintain low body fat if you succeed in gaining muscle.
In addition to simple exercise or strength training, there is a specially designed way to stimulate muscle growth: Lifting iron.
You can't just eat healthy, but choose to eat in a way that will help you gain weight: A muscle building diet. Improves digestion, builds muscle, avoids fat gain and can also help manage stress and improve sleep.
The way to gain muscle has been unlocked, the next step is to understand yourself and put it into action. The most interesting thing about fitness is finding ways to change yourself and meet a better version of yourself, do you still think you can't progress with muscle gain?