Curious about bodybuilding?

What Is Bodybuilding, Anyway? 

Bodybuilding is actually a sport. It comes with a particular lifestyle that involves detailed workout training and precise nutrition to strengthen, sculpt, and develop the body's muscles (aka hypertrophy training).

Competitive bodybuilders undergo strict dietary and training practices to achieve an extremely lean, muscular, and symmetrical physique. Along with resistance and aerobic exercise, targeted energy and macronutrient intakes are followed to accumulate muscle mass in the off-season and reduce fat mass in the in-season. However, the specific dietary strategies employed by bodybuilders and their rationale remain poorly understood.

Are you a woman who has a strong will and works hard? Have you thought about getting into female fitness but don't know where to start? For women to start bodybuilding, they need three things: a great workout plan, an equally good diet, and a lot of commitment.

Bodybuilding takes a lot of time and work, but it's definitely something you should look into. Even if you are strong and brave, the path from a complete beginner at weight lifting to an intermediate bodybuilder will be a long and sweaty one. It doesn't mean you can't reach your fitness goal. If you have the right attitude and work hard, you can definitely achieve your goal. 

So you want to be a bodybuilder who competes? 

Bodybuilding is not simply about getting on stage in a sparkly bikini, wearing high heels, and applying false tanning. The most crucial elements of bodybuilding are less glamorous: they include diet, nutrition, tracking macronutrients, exercise, and spending your days working out at 5 AM. Hard work and sacrifice are required to get a six-pack, thick thighs, or a larger butt.

Here are my 7 tips for someone curious about building muscle or going all into a competition:

1. Find a good coach: I can't stress this enough!

Hiring a nutrition coach is the most effective and efficient approach to achieving your goals, regardless of whether the aim is to perform on stage or simply feel secure in your body. Even after charting your macros, eating well, and working out five days a week for months, you may still feel like you are spinning your wheels. Working one-on-one with a nutrition coach will help you avoid time waste and remove the element of guessing from your diet and exercise regimen so you can see the fruits of your labor. Additionally, a coach is a must if you're preparing for a show. 

What are the benefits of hiring a coach? The answer is not hard to figure out. Even the most committed gym-goers will have days when they don't want to go or when a high-calorie food, like a cupcake or pizza, sounds much better than lean meat and veggies. Hiring an experienced coach will help you in many ways, such as making a schedule, customizing diet charts, motivating you, and giving you an extra push to get through your lazy days and challenging workouts. 

2. The proper training: lifting heavy and doing cardio the right way is key. 

A fitness program has two parts: bulking and cutting. The bulking stage of training can go on for as long as it takes to get the desired amount of muscle growth. Athletes mainly focus on getting more calories than they need to build muscle and avoid getting fat. On the other hand, cutting is a slow and steady process of building a calorie deficit and using cardio and high-intensity interval training to reduce body fat while keeping as much muscle mass as possible

Do not hesitate to lift weights. You can only achieve the desired quad and hamstring separation, toned glutes, and six-pack abs by lifting a loaded barbell, heavy dumbbells, and weights that are sufficiently heavy to cause your body to grow and develop muscle mass. 

The days of taking a cardio HIIT class while lifting 2.5 lbs weights are over.

3. Proper Diet: The most difficult part, defying your body during hunger.

Let's start by discussing protein. You can build more muscle and recover more quickly by eating more protein. According to research in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness, those who consumed 25% more protein than those who consumed less protein grew twice as much lean body mass.

Although protein should take precedence, this does not mean that other macronutrients should be neglected. Complex carbs are essential to increase your muscle mass and develop the physique you need to become bigger ands= stronger. Regarding the final macronutrient, fat, it's crucial to maintain a low body fat percentage when gaining muscle. However, maintaining a low body fat level can be harmful and hinder growth.

An essential role for fats in the human body, compared to when you are preparing to cut, your fat consumption will be slightly higher while you are eating for competition or to build muscle. But several important vitamins, including A, D, and K, are fat-soluble, which means they require fat to carry out their biological role and be effective.

Increasing your caloric intake with high-quality foods is the key to this situation.

Finding the right amount of calories and macronutrients for each person can take a lot of trial and error. Most meals have carbs, protein, and fat, but the total number of calories you need depends on what stage of training you are in. Focus on getting good fats, like lean meat, fish, low-fat dairy, eggs, etc. Vegans can choose from seeds, nuts, beans, and plant-based protein powders. If it's hard for you to eat enough of this ingredient, try protein shakes. 

And last, be patient girls! Getting your muscles to grow and strengthen takes time, work, and 100% consistency. Change doesn't happen overnight. Your body will change slowly but steadily, so it's important to test yourself often to make sure you're adjusting the weights, reps, and rest time between workouts correctly. You need to get stronger to increase the intensity of your workouts.

4. Add relevant supplements: There is no point in not using supplementation, it is a key ingredient to the race formula. 

Have you ever had a friend who always ordered chicken and rice wherever you went? Or someone who used the microwave to reheat seafood they brought to work, stinking up the dining area? The bodybuilder's diet is a stricter, more potent version of the typical clean diet that contains high protein to preserve lean body mass and lower body fat, moderate carbs, and low fat, along with additional aerobic exercise. Because of your body's significant vitamin deficiency, supplements are essential to your success.

Let's begin with protein first. You need at least 1 g of protein per lb of body weight for maximum muscle protein synthesis and effective muscle growth. As a result, if you weigh 140 pounds, you must consume 140 grams of protein daily. Have you ever attempted to devour four chicken breasts and a few steaks all at once? It quickly grows stale. Not to mention, eating that much food is difficult, especially after a year of eating only salads and light snacks.

 For your bodybuilding goals, protein supplements like whey protein isolate or plant-based protein powder can help you meet your macronutrient targets, speed up recovery, and increase muscle growth. To increase your muscle mass, consuming a fast-absorbing protein is also a practical approach right before and after your workout. An effective stimulator of muscle protein synthesis is protein consumption. You won't be able to develop the desired thighs without protein. Anybody who engages in recreational strength training or competes in bodybuilding requires protein to nourish their muscles and grow stronger, regardless of skill level.

Creatine is next on the list. You can increase your power, strength, and ability to press greater weight by taking creatine, or buffered forms of creatine that are better for women like Kre-Alkalyn. This will ultimately result in you gaining more muscle growth. With thousands of supporting studies and results backed by data, creatine is one of the most well-known and efficient sports performance supplements.

Powders in green and red, like superfoods, will also be crucial to your achievement. Given that you are denying your body essential micronutrients, greens, multivitamins, and minerals will provide your body with the vitamins and minerals that your chicken and rice do not.

Omega-3, mainly Krill Oil, is the final essential supplement, especially for female bodybuilders. What about fish oil, though? Disregard it. If you follow a low-fat diet, krill oil can help fill in the nutritional gaps and support your body's requirement for healthy essential fatty acids, which are needed for joint and skin health, muscle recovery, and range of motion.

5. Monitor Everything: Everything matters, bodybuilding is a formula. 

People who never track their progress are partially to blame for not seeing the effects of their efforts. To achieve your goals, keeping a food journal is essential; there are many apps for this. Consider the meals you consumed this week. Even better, recall yesterday's meals. You probably don't even remember what you ate, let alone how much. Hopefully, you remembered some; you won't get the outcomes you want if you don't record what you eat. 

Discipline is necessary for bodybuilding, and that involves weighing your food and using meal monitoring software to keep track of everything you consume so you can make sure you're hitting your daily macro targets. Following your training plan is crucial during bodybuilding if you want to achieve your performance and aesthetic objectives. You will need to build a schedule. This is a race.

6. The hardest one: learn when to push or take a step back. 

Your health will be compromised if you don't take care of your body; you are playing with many factors in your habits to change your body composition. This will require you to learn when you need to push yourself or pause. I've seen so many friends about to go on stage but couldn't make it because of different situations involving their health. This sport is demanding on the body, like any other. You are taking your body to an extreme, which is ok if you learn how to manage your emotions and mindset. All races are personal and become a "you against you" battle. What you need to be clear with is your WHY. Why am I doing this? Are you doing it out of love or out of insecurity? You will have to love yourself during off seasons because stage body aesthetics will last about 6 months or so. So don't think you are hopping on stage and keeping that body composition for long without harming your mental and physical health. Even boxers drop weight for a big fight and then return to their natural off-season body. Be realistic, you will not last with a sane mind eating just chicken, rice, and broccoli 24/7 for the rest of your life to stay lean. Your body needs more than that! And if you are even considering keeping that body type, I suggest you don't even try to bodybuild because you will confront yourself with a very rough situation. 

Ask yourself why you are doing what you are doing before you go on stage.

7. Show patience 

Bodybuilding is an art and a science. But you need to have self-control and patience to succeed. The process of increasing endurance takes a few months. Elite bodybuilder-level muscular development, however, might take years. It requires time, effort, and consistency to increase strength, size, and mass. You won't suddenly turn into a bodybuilder. 

Women's Bodybuilding: Takeaways

It is up to you and your level of devotion if you desire results. Your food, nutrition, and training program will be optimized with the support of a coach, who will also provide you the tools you need to succeed. But in the end, you will be the only one who does the work.

Your first step is to adjust to a meal plan; that is why we created Pametarium. So once you’ve mastered level one and wish to upgrade your physique, coaching is available with Pambuddha. 

If you want to dive deeper into the subject, here is a good study on bodybuilding.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5969027/ 

Upgrade your mindset,

Pam