How Important It Is To Understand Nutrition If You Want To Be Fit And Healthy
I remember in my early years in bodybuilding I read what Dorian Yates (six times Mr. Olympia) once said “I can’t tell you in percentages how important nutrition vs. exercise is. Some say nutrition is 70% of the success in bodybuilding. Does that mean that if you perfectly implement nutrition and fitness health diets but don’t exercise at all, you are going to build a physique at 70% of your potential?”
He couldn’t be more on target with his statement. Now, so may years later people still speculate and try to split exercise and nutrition in relation to their importance for building a muscular body, or for losing fat and shaping your physique.
Let’s take each one separately and see what happens if the other one is not there, or it’s there but not the way it should be.
If you eat right you can be sure that you are putting all the necessary ingredients and elements in your body, needed for good health. However, are you going to be healthy? May be, may be not.
See, human bodies are meant to be literally abused in sense of physical work. Today’s levels of physical activity do not even come close to 10% of what we should be doing. This leads to our bodies slowly degrading, aging and dying.
It goes this way: If you don’t utilize certain bodily functions for a long period of time, Mother Nature will take them away. That’s why it is essential that you not only eat properly, but exercise as well.
Exercising may come in many different forms, not only in the gym with weights. Walking, hiking, jogging, yoga, aerobic classes, bicycling. All these can help keep your body healthy and functional.
That was how lack of exercise in the presence of proper nutrition relates to health. How about building more muscular body?
That is virtually impossible. I don’t care how good your nutrition is if you don’t implement resistance exercise in your daily routine you can not build stronger and fitter body.
What if you exercise, but don’t eat right? Are you going to be healthy? Can you build more muscle mass?
No, and no!
If you don’t give your body what it needs to function properly, how do you expect to be healthy? Moreover, if your body doesn’t have what it needs to function properly, how do you expect to recover damaged muscles and build more muscles?
At the end isn’t it this way how you grow – by re-building your damaged muscles and making them stronger and bigger, so that they can take on the same challenge in the future without being damaged?
See the logic? Not enough nutrients means not enough building material.
I hope now you understand how exercise and nutrition relate to each other. In essence, you can NOT build a better, stronger and fitter body if you don’t have the nutrition part right. And you can NOT be healthy in the long term either, regardless of whether you exercise or not.