Your Weight Training Successes Start in Your Refrigerator

The calendar is just about to roll us over into a new year.  You spent the majority of 2008 telling yourself that a workout program was definitely in your future.  Now unless you can get real active in the next couple of days that is not going to happen.  So unless you want to spend 2009 “getting ready to get into shape” design your program NOW!  And while this may be a bit disappointing your path to physical fitness does not begin at the squat rack in your health club.

Just as you would when launching a business your physical fitness program needs to start with a plan. If you do not lay out your goals you will bounce around like a super ball and be nowhere at the end of next year!  A good place to start is with a nutrition plan.  Remember the common building blocks to proper nutrition are fats, carbohydrates and proteins.  You can spend hours and hours searching for the correct percentage mixture of each of these in your diet so be ready for research pertaining to <i>your</i> needs.

Of utmost importance in weight lifting is to feed the muscles.  You should plan to eat at lease 5-6 meals per day spaced out no more than three or fours hours apart.  And you should remember that you should never exercise on an empty stomach.  This means that you should always have plenty of food (and plenty of the RIGHT food) available at all times.  So the first task in your plan would be to clean out your food supplies.  Empty the refrigerator and the pantry.  If you are going to engage in weight training to find the new you then it should start with your caloric intake. 

Items to get rid of are numerous but we can list a few here and you will get the idea of what to dump:

*High Fat Processed Meat…sausage, pepperoni and bacon are all fantastic foods when they hit the frying pan.  The big however is what they are when they hit your digestive system.  These foods are full of fat and it is not the type we need to build our bodies properly.  Protein is also an ingredient in these processed meats but it comes with a price and that price is SODIUM.  We do not want to have a cardiac arrest or retain every glass of water we drink so get rid of these foods.

*Frozen desserts and ice cream…high fructose corn syrup is a culprit present in many of our purchased food stuffs and mint chocolate chip or rocky road are two of it’s favorite hiding places.  Sugar will be your enemy as a weight lifter and cutting out the ice cream will help you delete it from your menus.

*Packaged foods…now that we have brought high fructose corn syrup into this conversation we can talk about packaged foods.  Probably 75% of the packaged foods you see on supermarket shelves contain corn syrup.  Now corn is a great vegetable when freshly yanked from the stalk, but when processed into corn syrup and shoveled into the majority of our foodstuffs then it loses its respectability.

This small list of foods is just an example of what you need to dump from your food stores before engaging in a weight loss or muscle building regime in the coming year.  A habit you should form when building a nutrition plan for weight training is to read ingredient labels on food packages.  If there are a five or more ingredients in a product that you cannot pronounce then “back slowly away from the package”!  This is not the food that you want to stuff into your new 2009 body.