Cortisol: Chemical that your body excretes which eats up all your muscle. The stress hormone.
If you’re serious about building muscle effectively, living a stress free lifestyle is what will get you there. If outside sources, like relationships, work, school or other related issues are affecting your stress levels, cortisol is running a muck inside of your body and is stopping the amount of growth that you can potentially achieve while building muscle.
If you’re working out for more than 1 hour without a 3 day break in between before hitting the same muscle group again, you’re causing physical stress on your body which is doing more harm than good.
The most ideal max time for working out is 45 minutes including the warmup. Keep your workout intense, short and simple.
Do not workout back to back days; have a break day in between where you stretch out your muscles to avoid injury in the future.
Stretching, yoga, and meditation when done correctly in a relaxed fashion, will hinder your cortisol production and increase the likelihood of building muscle. If you have a stressful lifestyle, you are making it hard for yourself to gain anything even though you’re busting your butt at the gym.
Some choose to use Steroids or Pro hormones but most have agreed that the cons out weigh the pro’s when it comes to these performance enhancing drugs. For men, it hinders testosterone production and for women it hinders their estrogen production which can leave men impotent and unable to have an erection or intercourse and leaves women with a deep manly voice and unwanted hair on their body.
A more natural option to reduce your cortisol production is to spike your insulin straight after your workout, by eating fast digesting carbs and proteins which stop your cortisol production.
25 - 30 grams of fast digesting carbs is enough to spike your insulin right after your workout. If you can’t do this and want to keep your blood sugar stable, you will need to consume slow digesting carbs but you have to find out your body type (ectomorph, endomorph etc) and experience what works for you.
When your insulin levels are high, it tells your body to store fat as energy and stop burning everything that it would otherwise be burning.
The number one sign that you should look for to know if you’ve eaten too many carbs in one meal is if you feel sleepy. Sleepiness and drowsiness is a sure sign that you’ve consumed too any carbs in one meal and you’re body wants to stop all other activity to just concentrate on digesting what you’ve just consumed.
An ideal meal to avoid over eating too many carbs, is a steak and a salad. The smaller your portions and the more often you eat, the more energetic you will be. Keep a balanced diet though, keep eating your proteins, carbs, good fats and fibers in healthy portions.
If you’re not cutting, 40 grams of carbs per meal; 5-6 meals a day is a good measurement.
Fast Digesting Carbs:
-White Rice
-Baked Potatoes
-Fries
Slow digesting Carbs:
-Brown Rice