Success leaves traces. If you ask any top professional, including bodybuilders, ‘how can I maximize my progress,’ the best answer will not only describe the correct steps but will also indicate those steps that should be avoided.
My goal is to share with you the nutrition-related lessons I have learned by developing nutritional programs for many top bodybuilders, some of whom are now professionals. I hope these tips will enable you to identify and correct the weaknesses in your own nutritional program, thereby maximizing your own progress.
These are the ten biggest mistakes you must avoid to become the best bodybuilder your abilities allow.
1. Impatient Dieting
Many bodybuilders jump from one diet to another without giving the diet a chance to work. It takes at least three weeks for your body to get used to changes in your diet.
If you start with a diet that is high in carbohydrates, moderate in proteins, and low in fat with reduced calories, and your goal is to lose fat, then you might start seeing results after about 21 days. Do not expect to see immediate results.
2. Not Accurately Counting Calories
Make sure you’re not just counting calories, but also keeping track of your carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Because they do not monitor what they eat, many bodybuilders do not lose fat as quickly as they expect, while others do not gain weight. Ensure that you do not make calculation errors when calculating your calorie intake.
Successful bodybuilders meticulously track what they eat; they neither guess nor estimate. Use a nutrition guide or a similar source for nutritional values and invest in a kitchen scale.
3. Irregular Eating
Whether you’re trying to lose fat or gain muscle mass, consistency is key, and eating sporadically hinders your progress. If you’re struggling to gain weight or if you’re having trouble losing weight, the five meals a day plan is best. This approach – a meal every two to three hours – prevents fat storage and increases your lean body mass (your muscles) by improving your body’s nutrient absorption.
4. Relying on Your Scale to Measure Your Progress
Do not solely rely on your scale to refine your diet. When bodybuilders try to get bigger, they often get discouraged if their weight does not increase quickly. Often, they then make the mistake of adding too many calories to their diet to accelerate their progress.
The same happens in the preparation for a competition, where participants try to lose weight too quickly, sometimes removing too many calories at once. While the scale and other tools such as fat meters are good aids, it is better to rely on photos and the unbiased view of someone else to measure your progress.
After all, bodybuilding is a visual sport. If you look leaner and fuller, then your diet is apparently working well to lose your fat, even if the scale and fat meter disagree.
5. Eating Too Much (Especially Carbohydrates)
Athletes trying to gain mass often go too far and consume an excessive amount of calories, which then turn into body fat. Then there are also bodybuilders on a very low-fat diet who still gain too much body fat because they consume an extremely large amount of carbohydrates.
Of course, carbohydrates are needed to train hard, and they help with recovery. However, once the body has absorbed what it needs, the excess is quickly stored as fat.
6. Not Tailoring Your Bodybuilding Diet to Yourself
There is nothing wrong with learning from what professional bodybuilders do. However, Dorian Yates’s diet is very different from that of Nasser El Sonbaty. The only similarity is that they have a personal approach. Dorian’s diet might not work for Nasser and vice versa.
Keeping detailed descriptions of what you eat and how you react to certain types of food can help you create a diet that is ideal for your needs.
Some bodybuilders try to get rid of their fat using carnitine and chromium, but at the same time, they forget to initiate the fat-burning process by reducing their calorie intake.
Others use creatine, glutamine, or BCAAs (branched chain amino acids) to get bigger, but forget to consume enough calories and proteins to stimulate a positive nutrient balance.
Supplements are meant to complement a nutrition program, not to correct poor planning and nutritional errors.
8. Becoming a Slave to Canned Tuna
To be successful, you must always eat the right way. I have known athletes who went crazy with boredom because they only ate plain chicken breast and canned tuna. The cookbook by Laura Creavalle, The Lite Lifestyle (also available on Amazon) contains 150 fat-free and sugar-free recipes, specially developed for bodybuilders in competition preparation. These recipes ensure that you can maintain your nutrition plan, which ultimately yields good results.
9. Eliminating All Fat From Your Diet
Reducing fat in your diet is easy to control your total calorie intake, but removing all fat from your diet and relying only on proteins with little or no fat – such as turkey, fish, and protein powders – can lead to a decrease in your metabolism or slow down growth.
A low-fat diet that includes the essential fats found in meat, chicken, and fish is good for promoting optimal recovery, growth, and fat burning.
10. Making Very Large Changes at Once
When adding or removing calories from your diet, try to do this in very small steps so your body can adjust to these changes. If you drastically reduce the number of calories all at once, your body will hold onto fat; if you significantly increase it, the body will store fat.
