Whether you’re brand new to the concept of working out and you just got your first gym membership, or you’ve been working out regularly for years and even have your own in-home gym, you have most likely heard that the most important thing you can do to see improvement is to eat right.
But is that accurate? Why can’t you just workout longer, faster, and harder in order to get better results? In today’s blog post we will talk about why eating healthy is so important for your results in the gym.
Eating right gives you more endurance in the gym
When it comes to your body and the way your nutrition effects it, think of it the way you would a car. Your car needs to have gas to move. If you run out of gas you can still roll backward or push it forwards, but it won’t operate the way it’s designed to unless there is fuel in the tank. Similarly, our bodies are designed to use food as fuel for our daily activities.
The type of food matters too. If you put diesel fuel in an engine designed for unleaded you will ruin your engine, and while our bodies are able to adapt to what we put in them, eating empty calories like processed sugars or fried foods high in trans-fat or saturated fat will bog down your system and keep you from operating as efficiently as you could be.
If you want to run, lift, or do cross-fit at peak performance, you need to fuel your body with the right types of foods. Make sure you cut out the sugars and bad fats and instead eat plenty of protein, healthy fats, and complex carbs to give you energy for your workouts.
Eating right helps you get to the gym more often
In addition to giving you more energy for your workouts, eating right can also help you work out more often. Proper nutrition is essential to the recovery process of both your body and mind. In order to understand this, we need to look at what actually happens to your body when you work out.
According to insidetracker.com, “When you exercise, the muscle fibers in your body start to break down. Damaged muscle cells release an enzyme called Creatine Kinase (CK) into the blood. The level of CK in your blood shows how much your muscles and skeletal system have been worked during exercise.” Your body makes use of the nutrients from the food you eat in order to repair the broken-down muscle fibers.
If the food that you’re eating has few usable nutrients, your body will struggle to recover, making the process of repairing muscles longer and more painful. Try eating high quality carbs and a good amount of protein immediately after a workout for optimum recovery. Your muscles will recover faster and you’ll be back at it ready to go the next day!
Eating right helps you see your results faster
The concept that eating right will help you see your results faster is closely related to the last point that eating right helps you recover more quickly. When you’re recovering faster and in the gym more often, you will build muscle at a quicker rate than if you were only hitting your workouts once or twice a week.
Another reason you’ll see results faster is that you’re not fighting yourself with your diet. If you work out like a boss every day, but go home and eat an entire pizza with a side of breadsticks, it would be like having two people in a canoe paddling against each other. Even though you’re working as hard as you can, the food that you eat can either assist you or sabotage you in your fitness goals.
As you can see, proper nutrition has a big role in the development of our bodies but nutrition is just one side of the coin. It’s important to also be training physically along with the proper diet. Balance fitness has a wide range of fitness equipment to help you meet your training goals this year. If you’d like to get started with your own equipment or you’re looking to add some new equipment to your established gym, don’t hesitate to give us a call! You can reach our location in San Mateo at (650) 348-1259 or in Santa Clara at (408) 255-3010. You can also contact us online to ask any questions you may have or to set up a consultation!
