Fuel and Material: a Conversation on nutrition

I like to refer to the 3 pillars of success in fitness. The 3 wise men as I like to call them. I feel that the three factors that you must consider if your goal is to get into elite condition are: Resistance training, Cardio training, and Nutrition. 2 out of the three you need to be a rock star at, but you must pay homage to all three.

All three are uniquely connected by their relationship with each other. Resistance training allows you to build the body that you’re trying to reveal with cardio training and the nutrition supplies the materials and the fuel necessary for the construction.

That could be the end of the article, but we’ll go into aspects of the 3 pillars because it’s important to understand them on an individual level to see how synergistically they’re important to each other.

The star of the show in my opinion is Resistance Training. Yes, I’m biased but my argument for that is the fact that Resistance Training or Strength training, as it’s often referred to as, gives you the most control of how you actually look. It’s the actual construction and redesigning of your physique.

This process puts you in the driver’s seat of the project. If all you do is diet down and do cardio, your body will get the idea that you’ve prioritized those programs and to allow you to be better at those the aspect of performing cardio it will begin to jettison muscle.

The body operates under a use it or lose it protocol. Without the stimulus of work, your muscles will cease to function. Programs like hinging, squatting and other lifting task begin to atrophy like the muscles that perform them.

Your base metabolism will drop. It’ll start to become harder to lose weight and to keep it off. Base metabolism is how many calories you burn in the state of rest. Understandably the amount of calories you’re able to burn while active will also drop.

The process of building muscle cost calories. The initial construction in session but out of session as well. Those 2 to sometimes 4 days you carry that residual soreness, you’re burning calories at an accelerated rate while your body reconstitutes itself. The little nano machines that run around restitching you up and making you whole again cost energy. They cost fuel.

Cardio is the great revealer. It gives you the means of excavating all that muscle you’ve been stock piling. There are a lot of different types of cardio but let’s just set the baseline of our understanding around this current conversation.

When we do stuff it cost calories. The muscles store sugar as energy. Fat is also stored energy. When we use our larger muscles for strong or explosive type movements that are shorter in duration, we use the potential energy that’s stored in the muscles. When we do cardio (any activity done rhythmically over a longer duration of time which triggers your body  switch over to the cardiac energy system in which oxygen is used as fuel) fat is used as a catalyst to transform oxygen to energy. Less explosive, less intense, and for longer duration.

Entering the discussion of the third pillar, we understand that in order to craft the body of our dreams we need the building material to do that. Protein and Essential amino acids are the building blocks of that body. I recommend calculating your number by shooting for somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 grams per lb. of your estimated desired body weight. If you don’t pick a target to shoot for, you’ll more than likely miss more often than not.

The entire project is run on fuel. Fuel can be a muscle saver but if over supplied then it’ll be stored. Fuel is our carbs, our sugars and our fats. Your body loves to use carbs in the strength training phase, and it shifts to fat in the steady state cardio phase. The key is to find the right ratio of energy to do the work and still have energy to do all the things required in your life. In my opinion the best way to do that is to change your relationship with food.

Food is neither good nor evil. It’s a valuable tool for that is of the utmost importance for you to achieve the goal of becoming a better version of yourself. It’s the fuel for the project and the material to build it how you envisioned it.

There are all kinds of different nutritional strategies and lifestyles that can add in maintaining the optimal levels of Fuel and Material but I believe that having a clearly defined understanding of what it is can help with that.

When you start to engineer a healthy lifestyle, you’ll need to start to factor in consistent levels of training and figure out how much protein you need. You can then divide that down into your 2-4 meals. Include shakes with that. It’s an easy way to add to your material total without adding too much fuel. For your meals, have a protein heavy plate and divide create a ratio that over the course of the week allows you to be energized but doesn’t allow much surplus.

Think about nutrition as both a daily cycle and a weekly cycle, just like your training and your cardio. After all you’re using the fuel to power (you and) the project, and you’re using the material to change the structure and you’re etching away the excess with your cardio training.

This can and should be the most enjoyable part of the process. Think about it. You have to eat to succeed. I got a saying the better you can cook the better you can look. I just self edited that from the more you cook the better you look. Then all you have to do is find things in the fuel and material category and check those boxes as consistently as you can in the right time frames and the project just keeps humming along in the right direction.