BASIC NUTRITION
Nutrition is a crucial component of sports training. However, it is often not given much thought. What is important to understand is that all the intelligent, advanced training in the world is completely useless if the body does not respond to it. It is during recovery time that gains are made. The training only provides the stimulus for your body to adapt to the stress placed on it. The food you consume is what your body must use to respond to this stress. So nutrition is extremely vital to the recovery process and thus vital to sports training. Nutrition does not have to be complicated, but many people are uneducated on the subject. This article is meant to cover the basics.

All food is made of some combination of carbohydrates, protein, and fat. These are the three macronutrients. Carbs are the most efficient source of energy. If unused, carbohydrates can be stored as fat. Protein can also be used for energy, but it primarily serves as the material used to build or repair all the structures in the human body. Fat is also used for energy; it actually contains more than twice as many calories as carbs or protein and thus requires more activity to burn. There are other uses for fat as well.

There are some basic guidelines to follow for sports nutrition. First, make sure you get enough carbohydrates to fuel your body through all the activity that you do. Your muscles' preferred fuel is a substance called glycogen, which is formed form carbohydrates. If glycogen stores are depleted, the body will turn to other sources of energy, namely fat and protein. The first problem with this is these energy sources not as efficient. More importantly, the source of the protein that your body will burn is skeletal muscle. That's right, your body will burn muscle fiber for energy when it's short on carbohydrates. This is called a catabolic, or muscle-wasting hormonal state. Many people fail to adequately maintain their glycogen supply; I believe this is one of the leading causes for lack of success in training. The hardest part of becoming an advanced athlete for many people is sustaining strength gains beyond the first few months of lifting. One of the primary reasons is people do not adequately fuel their bodies for all the exercise. You end up with a strong strengthening stimulus from lifting and a hormonal environment in the body that does not allow for a positive response. If you look at powerlifters, the guys who compete in the squat, deadlift, and bench press, most of them are not very lean despite having loads of calorie-burning muscle mass. That's because they eat a ton of food in order to keep their body in an anabolic, or muscle-building hormonal state. The point is YOU GOTTA EAT. Controlling the hormonal environment inside you body is at least equally important in gaining strength as the actual workouts. Consider an adolescent male; his body is just dripping with testosterone. Consequently, just about any workout strategy he employs will result in drastic strength gains. Unfortunately, once you're full grown you don't have that luxury any more. That's when manipulating your body chemistry with nutrition becomes much more important.

My second guideline is make sure you supply your body with enough protein to recover from all the training you do as well as maintain regular body function and repair. This is especially important if you are trying to build muscle. A common rule is for every pound of body weight, 0.8 grams of protein consumed each day is as much as your body could possibly use. So a 200-pound athlete could guarantee he gets enough protein by consuming 160 grams each day.

As far as fat, with the food industry of today, if you are getting enough carbs and protein, the fat will come with it. So don't worry about getting enough fat. However concern yourself with what kind of fat you consume. Natural, unsaturated fat is healthy for your body. Saturated fat is not.

So how much do you need to eat? You could go through all kinds of calorie counting and calculations of your metabolism to try to find the right amount of food to eat, but there is a simpler way. Just eat when your body tells you to eat, include both carbs and protein, and try to get your carbs and protein from the healthiest sources possible. This will keep your body healthy and prevent you from consuming excessive amounts of unhealthy fat that can cause increase in body fat percentage. Fruits, vegetables, eggs, nuts, seeds, beans, and meat are your best options. if you stick to those foods, you can eat as much as you want without any significant increase in body fat. If you're doing that and lifting hard consistently, you should gain a very lean body over time.