28.Bodybuilding nutrition basics… A diet plan for the later stages – Bodybuilding

Once you have shifted a significant amount of the fat that you want to get rid of, you are ready to move on to the next stage of your body building diet plan, but before you do, here is something to understand.

In the initial stages, you reduce the amount of energy you are consuming to below the minimum of what you really need as a way of prompting your body to use stored fat to make up the energy deficits.

You have managed to get rid of most of this fat, but you should not try to get rid of all body fat before moving on to the next phase. This is because during this next phase, you are going to reverse the previous eating program by eating more than you need. The primary objective of this is to build additional muscle mass, but it is also an inevitable side effect that you will also generate some additional body fat.

In this next ‘bulking up’ phase, you should aim to consume around 15% to 20% more energy than an average person of your size and weight needs to get through the average day.

You can either guess on this, or you can use a size and weight calculator to get a more accurate picture of what you need to eat every day to satisfy your muscle building requirements.

In terms of the type of foods that you consume, you should certainly up your protein consumption, while you must also remember that every meal should be as well balanced as possible. Nevertheless, protein is the bedrock on which muscle is built, so a significant percentage of the additional calories that you are ingesting should be in the form of proteins.