Believe me when your success as a bodybuilder and your general health is at stake, you can’t even think of telling yourself that rules were meant to be broken. Bones however have been broken in the gym just by breaking a simple rule called safety precautions. There are guidelines that are set not to make your life any harder than it might already be. On the contrary, they are set to ensure that you achieve your goals in the shortest time possible as well as in the safest way possible. Here are some things that you need to embrace as well as others you simply need to kiss goodbye.
1. THOU SHALL EAT A BALANCED DIET
This is as basic as it can get for anyone, bodybuilder or not. For bodybuilders however, eating the right foods is only halfway there. Quantity is very important when it comes to meeting all your dietary needs. While it is important that you should eat your whole foods well, this alone might not meet you body’s high nutritional demands. This is where supplements come into the picture and makes it whole. There are minerals and vitamins that can very easily be left out of your nutrition not necessarily by choice. These are the ones that you need to ensure that are part of your supplement intake. In order to deal with the quantity bit of it, I’d recommend that you should eat a minimum of 5 meals and a max of 8 meals in a day. This ensures that your body gets the right stuff and gives it time to break it down. It also ensures that you don’t end up binging with the excuse that your body has high nutritional expectations. Overeating will just make you fat or even worse, obese!
2. THOU SHALL WORK OUT CONSISTENTLY
There are people who confuse consistency with overtraining. There is a huge difference between the two for example; consistency won’t leave you nursing an injury while overtraining will. If you hit the gym from the beginning of the week to Saturday and only rest on Sunday because you want to practice football with your son in the afternoon, then you are really overtraining. Working out on consecutive days of the week will only make you wish for a massage and a valium after your time at the gym. A minimum of 3 days in the gym is a good start of cause depending on your reasons for hitting the gym. Consistency means that you don’t skip weeks frequently and even more importantly, you don’t deregister yourself just coz you got the six-pack you wanted! Work even harder to maintain what you’ve gotten at the gym.
3. THOU SHALL REST
It is important that you rest after all your workouts and that you take a few minutes breather in between your workouts. This also gives your body time to replenish your energy levels and reduce the accumulation of lactic acid in your muscles. Make sure that you get a good nights rest if you’re hitting the gym the next day.