Protein Plus
We’re always saying there aren’t any tips or tricks to make fitness or nutrition easy. We choose to tell you the truth and not present gimmicks that don’t work. There aren’t any easy buttons, and there aren’t any secrets. It’s just simple things done consistently that get you results.
If I were to pick one thing that would be the most effective way of transforming your body and fitness, it would be consistently combining eating enough protein and regularly performing some resistance training. I know that sounds like two things, and both are good by themselves, but there is a powerful synergy between the two.
The Basics
Resistance training, or strength training, is a style of training that taxes the muscles of your body in such a way that they need to change. They will grow both in size and density. This doesn’t mean getting bulky if you don’t want to but it does mean training hard enough that your body needs to adapt to the difficulty in the training.
To use a construction analogy, resistance training is like a mason building a brick wall. It’s the method through which the wall is built. Protein serves as the bricks for the wall.
If you eat enough protein but don’t do resistance training, it’s like having a pile of bricks sitting around doing nothing. You might use one here or there as a doorstop or to prop up a broken table leg, but you’re not building anything new with it.
If you do resistance training without eating enough protein, it’s like paying a mason to build a wall but not providing him with the bricks. You’re still paying them either way, but they can only build a wall with bricks.
For optimal progress in strength and muscle growth, you need both.
The Bonus
The bonus mostly has to do with how your body looks, but there is some similar relationship to your performance.
Each of our bodies uses calories to live. This happens through the general functions and support of our body’s systems and tissues. Muscle tissue is metabolically active and affects our basal metabolic rate(BMR). This is the rate of calories your body uses before active calories are included.
When we increase the amount of muscle in our bodies, we increase our BMR. By increasing our basal metabolic rate, we burn more calories on a daily basis without increasing our activity level. So, you have a better chance of keeping body fat lower even while you're sleeping.
When slightly larger muscles are combined with potentially less body fat, we start to see changes in our bodies that you may view as positive.
What makes this so cool is that it is a food change that doesn’t reduce the calories you consume. For many of us, it may have us eating more. On the activity side, it’s not asking you to increase the time you work out, but you have to be consistent with the training to continue seeing this change.
It’s also worth noting that the active calories burned during resistance training are significant enough to help create a caloric deficit for fat loss. Your body rebuilding your muscles with the protein provided will also increase your BMR because it increases the amount of behind-the-scenes work your body does daily, which requires calories to complete.
The combination of eating adequate protein and resistance training isn’t an easy button. It isn’t a gimmick but an excellent example of how nutrition and fitness work together to bring about the results that many people want to see. Do these two things consistently, and you’ll see their benefits compound.
