Foods for muscle building

If you are well into your muscle building, you will know the importance of protein to help repair and rebuild the muscle fibers that you have broken down. However, many of you won't be including certain foods in your diet that will really help your progress:

Red Meat - Don't skimp on your steaks! Saturated fat in red meat is actually good at boosting testosterone levels, one of the big factors in muscle building. If  you are constantly breaking your body down, you will need the fats in these foods to provide quality calories to help rebuild those muscle fibers. Red meat will provide B12, Creatine and iron and provides more quality calories than white meat for all you muscle builders!

Eat the organs - Another fantastic source of high-quality muscle building calories, are the organs of animals e.g. Kidneys, Liver etc.Think of a tiger in the wild. They will eat these first, the meat second and skin third. This is where you find all the goodness.

Eggs - One of the best and most natural forms of protein. Some bodybuilders eat the whites only. This is usually when they are trying to get lean. If you wan't to put on muscle size, eat the whole egg.

Dried fruit and nut mix - Dried fruit is a great form of condensed calories. Eating 5 dried apricots is easy. Eating 5 whole apricots is more difficult. Pound for pound, raisans are one of the most dense forms of carbohydrate and provide a great amount of anti-oxidants. Anti-oxidants will protect against free-radicals which are a by-product of the stress caused by exercise. Nuts are again filled with protein, good fats and carbs and are a great source of calories.

Whole milk - We give whole milk to babies to build them up. Simple.

Eat carbohydrates - These are massively important to fuel your workouts and to prevent you from breaking down muscle fibers to provide energy. If you don't eat enough of these your body will turn catabolic (break itself down) and you will start loosing muscle. Include sweet potato, white potato, rice, rice pasta, pasta, quinoa, wholewheat, etc!

NOT EATING ENOUGH! - if you aren't gaining weight and you are training hard, then you're probably not eating enough. Start incuding the above foods and the additional calories should get the ball rolling. Make sure you are resting enough between sessions and let the food do the work while you put your feet up!

For more information on eating to gain muscle, email Oli on orm@tonbridge-school.org