It’s important to improve your body’s strength and resilience as well as trim unnecessary flab and tone muscles. One of the best ways to use your training program to its fullest extent is to increase your body’s metabolic rate. This improves your body’s absorption and use of key nutrients that assist it to build lean muscle and recover from stresses placed on it in training.
If your body can react faster and more efficiently to training, then you’ll recover more quickly from each session and gain the maximum benefit in calories burnt and lean muscle built.
What to Eat and When
There are two keys to increasing your body’s metabolic rate:
- Physical training gets your body working to metabolise nutrients as quickly as possible.
- Eating the right things at the right time gives your body the nutrients that it needs, when it needs them.
While training, or immediately afterwards
This is when you should be making use of your protein shakes. These provide your body with a quick hit of protein right when it’s needed. Your body uses protein to repair and build muscle cells. While it might sound bad that your training can cause minor damage to muscle tissue, this is actually how your body knows to build better, stronger muscles in the affected locations.
35-45 minutes after training
A large, nutrient-dense meal with lean protein and vegetables – raw or lightly-cooked, as unprocessed as possible. This provides your body with plenty of good carbohydrates and proteins, and sparks the production of growth hormones that encourage the body to repair muscle tissue.
Rest of the day
Lots of fibre is key for the remainder of the day. This improves the speed of digestion and, indirectly, metabolism. Eat fruit and vegetables in an array of colours. Remember that the colour of the flesh of vegetables and fruit is a key indicator of the nutrient group it belongs to. If you eat a wide variety of colours of vegetables and some fruits, you’ll ensure good nutrient intake. Don’t forget the dark reds and leafy greens. These are loaded with antioxidants and alkalising benefits!
Eat regularly: every 3-4 hours tends to be the ideal time so keep an eye on the clock as undereating and missing out on delicious nutrient dense foods will slow down your progress so fuel up on goodness Shakers!
More Information
Check out Metabolic Precision website and read this great article on Fats