Esteemed ESBers A little query of mine.. For about 6 months now I have been "semi" regularly going to my local gym, 3-4 times a week. Now my question is - is it fairly normal to be actually gaining weight and not losing any... My workout consists of half an hour high intensity cardio, mixing between treadmill, eliptical trainer and bike followed by quite an intense workout on a particular muscle group that evening.. I take protein powder, and try to make sure I take in approximately 180-220 grams of protein per day, I weigh around 200lbs at the moment... In the last six months I've seen my weight actually increase from around 84kgs to around 93kgs... yet I have been eating a hell of a lot healthier, regulating my calorie intake and gymming it fairly intensly.. Should I be paying more attention to my "measurements" as a sign of progress as I haven't just been doing cardio, I have been taking a lot of protein and working the muscles fairly heavily? Just curious as to why the weight hasn;t gone down or at least stayed the same...?
220 grams of protein? There's your answer. That's almost 1000 calories right there on top of everything else you eat. And that's a lot of protein so your muscles are getting more than enough to build and recover.
To build that muscle you need to consume more calories than you burn, like you're doing if you're gaining weight.
Stop doing cardio before you weight train. When you do cardio your body circulates substances that are counterproductive to muscle growth/repair. If you do have to do both on the same day it is far better to do any weight training first. Your problem is too many calories, 200 grams of protein a day is ludicrous, noone needs that much. The only people who could get away with that much protein are long distance runners. Eat low GI foods, get most of your energy from complex carbs and healthy fats. Don't even worry about your protein intake, it's actually hard to not get your recommended intake for a day. Worry a bit more about your protein intake when you do some proper training, doing some cardio then targeting a muscle group isn't going to up your protein needs. People equate protein with building muscles, technically it's true but there are many more important factors that help protein repair muscles. Eating enough carbs helps more than anything else when it comes to repairing muscles.
Thanks people, so cut down on the protein, increase carbs before workout and I guess, if I'm going to do cardio, dedicate a session to it as opposed to mixing it with weights..?
the minute I saw "reccommended daily intake" I stopped reading. why is everyone calling protein as the culprit? who knows what else the guy is eating? noone needs 200g protein a day? another baseless statement, in the same vein as you can't "absorb more than 25g in a sitting". Pretty much your calories are higher than they should be to lose weight, if that is your goal. Training timetable probably needs a bit of tweaking too but the diet will be the difference between gaining weight, losing weight, gaining muscle, losing fat, etc Have you gotten massively fatter 20lbs later? If not its not all bad really, unless you are sticking to a weight class enjoy those gains, most guys who train with weights consistently can put on 10-20kg in their first year with a solid diet.
