Growing up, you might have looked up to all those amazing bodybuilders that got on stage and flexed their muscles in front of millions of people. During that time, you might’ve asked yourself, what do these athletes have to do in order to get so big?
Did they sleep more than the average person? Do they have a specific diet that they follow in order to sculpt their bodies into the perfect figure, or do they rely on new advancements in science in order to train more efficiently?
If you’ve gone down the rabbit hole of perfecting your “anabolic” food consumption, then we’re here to help you take a step back and look at the bigger picture. The truth of the matter is, a lot of bodybuilders get frustrated over secondary essentials such as warming up or freezing their whey protein, or whether asparagus versus broccoli is going to help them get leaner.
While they’re all legitimate considerations, they can lead you to get lost in the rabbit hole and forgot the most important thing you should be focusing on: your own training! If you focus on your nutrition, sleep, or diet before you start your training, you’ll be focusing on secondary objectives instead of your main one.
Putting the Cart Before the Horse
Here’s the cold hard truth: if you’re not training to your limits and changing up your training routines and exercises in order to keep giving your body that stimulus it needs to grow, you’re never going to progress, even if you find the right answer to all your secondary questions.
In other words, the number one question you need to answer first is how you should train to maximize growth. If you don’t periodize your training optimally, or correctly put your body under stress to increase your mitochondria and stimulate fat loss, you’re striving in the wrong direction.
Nutrition isn’t going to increase your gains or help you build muscle by itself. If your goal is fat loss, the only way nutrition is going to help you lose fat instead of muscle is if you live a completely sedentary lifestyle.
Even sleeping won’t be that important if you’re not training hard enough, because your body doesn’t really have anything to recover from. You need to sit down and ask yourself how you can constantly provide stimulus to your body. Study different ways to grow your body from a lifting perspective first, and later you can get lost in nutrition and sleep patterns.
We hope this article helped you understand the importance of training and not to underestimate its impact on your growth! We’ll see you next time you need advice on your bodybuilding journey.
