DIETING TO BUILD PURE MUSCLE

Diet is probably the most fundamentalcomponent ofthe bodybuilder’smakeup. The foodyou eat becomes the fuel that allows you to perform heavy sets of muscle-building exercise, as well as becoming the primary fuel of your nervous system and brain. All mental functions, from choosing a biceps exercise to abstract philosophical contemplation, are fueled by what you put into your mouth. Because this aspect of bodybuilding is so fundamental, it can be broken down logically into some basic arithmetic. To start off, let’s conduct an elementary caloric analysis of human tissue. It’s a fact that a pound of human muscle tissue will yield about 600 calories when measured with a device known as a calorimeter, while a pound of fat will yield 3,500 calories. We will return to these numbers in a moment.

As a bodybuilder, you must strive to increase your percentage of organic muscle while simultaneously reducing your stores of bodyfat. The reward for success is a more functional and effi cient (not to mention well-chiseled) physique. Unfortunately, the average bodybuilder fi nds it nearly impossible to gain even ten pounds of solid muscle tissue in a year’s time, due largely to the person’s falling prey to the hype and outright B.S. that is propagated by most bodybuilding publications and that lines the pockets of more than a few gym owners and personal trainers.

Fortunately, to reach a solution to your nutritional problems, you needn’t try to sort through the dubious proclamations of the bodybuilding publishing industry (most representatives of which exist solely to sell you their products, but that’s another story entirely). Instead, you need look no further than the fi eld of nutritional science. You will quickly learn that all that is required in the course of a year to allow for ten pounds of muscle growth would be 600 (the number of calories in a pound of muscle) times 10 (the number of pounds of muscle growth stimulated in a year), or 6,000 extra calories a year over and above your present energy requirements.