Is your ultimate goal to gain muscle and become stronger? You’re probably wondering whether your diet or exercise is more important. Both are crucial for your fitness goals, but if there’s one thing we learned, it’s that our results are 80% and 20% exercise. Also, you can’t out-exercise a bad diet!
That said, how will you be able to gain muscle without proper exercise? It just goes to show that a good workout and nutritious diet will work together. Let’s delve deeper into the importance of both diet and exercise and if there if one is more important than the other.
Diet or Exercise: Building Muscle
To build muscle, you must perform resistance training with a progressive overhead while eating enough protein throughout the day. So when you want to build strength and muscle mass, both diet and exercise go hand in hand.
Progressive overload refers to gradually increasing your exercise load and volume. With higher weight, sets, and reps, you get to stress your muscles to build them further. Strength training will break down muscle tissue, and that tissue will rebuild, becoming stronger and bigger, during recovery.
If you don’t challenge the muscles from resistance training, then you can’t build muscles solely from a high protein diet. Moreover, if you engage in strength training without consuming enough protein and nutrients, you’ll find it even more challenging to gain muscle, even if you take muscle-building supplements from Designs for Health in Supplement First!
Remember, your body won’t be able to build new muscle tissue from nothing. Make gains through consuming the proper nutrients in the body. If you don’t eat enough calories, you’ll end up losing fat AND muscle. Plus, not eating properly won’t give you enough energy required to perform workouts that help with muscle gain.
Therefore, diet and exercise are equally crucial to building muscle. But how can you eat right? To gain as much muscle mass and strength as possible, you will need to take in enough calories daily and adequate protein. These work hand in hand because if you eat a ton of protein without the proper amount of calories, you won’t be able to work out. If you eat a lot of calories but not enough protein, even if you take muscle-building supplements like Supplement First, you might end up gaining more fat than muscle.
When Is Diet More Important?
While diet and exercise are essential, there are times when diet plays a more significant role, particularly in weight loss. Both are important to lose weight, but it’s generally easier to manage your caloric intake by changing your diet compared to burning more calories for exercise.
And that’s most likely why the 80/20 rule has become more popular! Many people find it easier to lessen what they eat than trying to burn up to 500 calories a day from exercise, as it’s tiring and time-consuming, requiring a lot of movement.
Wrapping It Up
Keep all this information in mind as you enter your journey to muscle building.