Gym, sports and nutrition: myths and realities - healthcapitalconsultants.org

Gym, sports and nutrition: myths and realities

The new course begins and with the arrival of September it is time to join the gym again. Many people set goals: gain weight, lose weight, increase muscle mass, tone, etc. And all of them linked to diet . If you wonder how to eat now that you’ve joined the gym , today’s article interests you. Next I will go on to clarify common statements that I find in the query.

dieta para muscular en el gimnasio

I am an athlete, because I do sports

Well maybe not, if you go to the gym 3 times a week you can’t consider yourself an athlete. We consider an athlete to be that person who does sports every day (or almost every day) for several hours. Your case is that of a non-sedentary person . At the nutritional level this translates as follows:

  • Your energy expenditure goes up slightly but not enough to increase your daily caloric intake in a considerable way. This means that you most likely won’t need to eat more food. If you are one of those who do sports, you should see what to correct in your current diet so that you can stay satisfied with a similar number of calories.
  • You must hydrate properly . Do not buy a soda to do this. Drink water or an isotonic drink during and after sports.

As I go to the gym, I should take products for athletes

You don’t need to take shakes or supplements . Only in specific cases of increased muscle mass will we recommend a shake after doing sports. In any case, it is important to clarify that you can gain muscle mass without taking shakes, making a correct intake of carbohydrates and proteins . Recovery drinks are recommended for after 3 hours or more of aerobic physical exercise.

To gain muscle I need to eat more protein

This is another myth. The certain part is that proteins become a very important nutrient not only in quantity but also in quality. The reality is that we already do an excess in our usual diet, therefore when we do sports we do not have to increase consumption.
Many people believe that they do not get the results they want because of their diet and therefore resort to dieting boring such as rice with chicken or taking synthetic products. Here is a video from our YouTube channel where I comment on these types of cases (I take this opportunity to advise you to subscribe to our channel if you have not done so yet)

If we do not get results doing sports, the first thing we have to evaluate is whether we are doing the correct exercises for us, and not imitating the behavior of the strongest in the room. If you exercise a muscle correctly, it becomes strong, regardless of what you eat (ruling out cases of malnutrition), if you eat very well but do not play sports, the muscle remains soft and small. If you do sports and eat what it touches, the result is optimal.

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Now I can eat whatever I want because I go to the gym and make up for it

It is very typical to give ourselves permission to eat things that we normally decide not to eat in exchange for doing sports. That is, since I have gone to the gym, I will have pizza for dinner or today I buy a croissant but nothing happens because then I make up for it by doing sports. These types of reflections are inadvisable for several reasons:

  • The calories burned in the gym are lower than what one imagines or what the cardio machine calculates through formulas. In addition, the calories that we ingest when we excess are usually much higher than we imagine. I put some examples:
    • Running 30 minutes on the treadmill can correspond to about 500 kcal.
    • Do 45 minutes of weights about 300 Kcal.
    • Meal 1 whole pizza between 1,000-1,500 kcal depending on how the pizza is.

As you can see, it is difficult to compensate for energy expenditure.

On the other hand, the most important thing should always be health. These types of arguments only take into account the weight of the scale but we leave aside that we have to try to eat as healthy as possible and this means natural foods, cooked at home, avoiding precooked and processed foods.

Finally, we must not think or calculate calories when we choose a food. If we choose to eat a pizza we should do it because we want to do it, not because we can or cannot afford it. In this way we avoid falling into unhealthy behaviors.

I go to the gym in the morning on an empty stomach, so I get a tummy

We are faced with another great myth, doing sports without breakfast does not lose weight more than eating breakfast. The only thing we will achieve at this point is to get dizzy, perform less while doing sports and consume muscle protein. If we do fasting workouts, they must be for a specific purpose and always guided by specialists. Here is a video where my partner Natalia Celma explains it to you:

I hope this article has served to clarify some concepts and demystify some of the most common beliefs related to diet and physical exercise. I finish by strongly recommending that you include physical activity in your day, since together with a correct diet, it will be one of the fundamental pillars to take care of your health.

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