I still remember the times when I always had the thought of growing bigger and stronger when I was in high school.
It felt like everyone had that goal.
Some managed to achieve that goal pretty easily while others remained the same, and one of them is me. Throughout my high school and university days, I had tons of training and running when I attended my Volleyball Training and Army Training. Needless to say, there were tons of cardiovascular training that we needed to do.
And if you don’t know anything about cardiovascular training, they help you to burn calories, even though they aren’t the most efficient way of doing so.
So I kept thinking that I couldn’t grow bigger in size because I was doing a ton of cardio.
Fast forward to today, I understand that your training only plays about 30% of the entire process of achieving your goal. If you don’t commit to doing the other 70%, all the time you spend in the gym is practically worthless.
By understanding that, I’ve now figured out a pretty good balance that allows me to improve my cardiovascular fitness, increase the weight of my lifts, and therefore build bigger and stronger muscles.
Here’s how.
The Age Old Idea
Everyone used to think that cardio is the best way to help you burn calories.
It’s probably because most skinny people look like they’ve done a ton of cardiovascular training to stay in their shape. On top of that, fitness influencers and marketing ploys in traditional media definitely don’t help either. It’s only in recent years that people start to debunk this myth that cardiovascular training is the most effective way of burning calories.
Instead, they are very efficient in helping you to improve your heart health and increase your lifespan.
With that out of the way, even though I was doing a ton of cardiovascular training in the past, it probably only meant that I was burning a few hundred more calories compared to if I didn’t do it at all.
The problem wasn’t with my “excessive” cardiovascular training.
The problem was that I simply wasn’t consuming enough food.
Why Is Fuel So Important?
The importance of fuelling your body cannot be underestimated.
This can be understood from a couple of perspectives but given that we want to understand the relationship between fuelling your body to build muscle and strength, we need to look at 2 important things:
Protein and calories.
Protein
By now, everyone probably already knows this.
If you want to build muscle, you need to consume more protein. In fact, the ideal amount of protein that you should be consuming is around 0.7–1g of protein per pound of body weight every single day. If you’re able to do so, you are placed in a very good position to put the efforts that you’ve made in the gym into good use.
Even if you want to lose fat during your cutting phase, consuming a sufficient amount of protein is also recommended because it will help you retain your body’s muscle percentage as you burn fat.
Calories
I believe many people see calories in a bad light because they have fears of growing fat.
But the more I learn about fuelling your body, the more I come to understand how important calories really are. If your goal is to build muscle and improve your strength, being in a caloric surplus of 200 calories above your maintenance calories is recommended.
Some people supplement this with junk calories such as your fast foods but junk calories are still calories and they do help to keep your body in that caloric surplus. It’s not the healthiest but it still works.
In terms of micronutrients, it definitely doesn’t provide the best returns but increasing the calorie number is pretty much all you need.
So even though I was doing my cardiovascular training in the past which resulted in a couple more calories burnt, I could have easily supplemented my body with more calories just by consuming more.
As long as you have both of these things covered, you should start to see some growth in your muscle size and strength.
So What Did I Change?
For the longest time, I thought that my workouts were the most important.
So I kept pushing my body to its limits.
With each session, I tried to apply the art of progressive overload — increasing the weight of my lifts or the number of reps I’m lifting. But my body always felt like it could only improve till a certain limit before I started to injure myself because I wasn’t fuelling my body properly.
If only I understood how to provide the proper fuel that my body needs, I’d then put my body in a small caloric surplus so I don’t gain too much weight too quickly, which could result in an increase in my body’s fat percentage.
Since then, I’ve shifted my training into a more functional hybrid training style each week which comprises of:
- 3–4 functional workouts
- 2 easy/interval runs
This means that my body will definitely require more proper nutritional care as I’m nearing the end of my 20s.
To do that, the 2 most important things I’d focus on is to hit:
- ~160g of protein every day
- 2800 kcal every day
Closing Thoughts
Proper fuelling is the most underrated part of building muscles and strength.
It’s the thing that rarely gets attention when people talk about their goals. The only time when people talk about it is when they are trying to lose weight. But that shouldn’t be the case. Regardless of your fitness goals, you should still be talking about the food you put into your body because it’ll dictate the form that your body will take and how you’re feeling every day.
So a reminder to myself is to constantly prioritise good fuel and results will come naturally.