Gaining Strength While Balancing Your Eating Habits on a Paleo Diet
Any kind of strength training or even elevating your efforts to powerlifting from initial routines means having a consistent routine to grow stronger. But how do you do that? Growing stronger means you have to do exercises that are designed to improve your overall strength, muscle mass, and endurance of your body.In this article, we’re hoping to start you on your strength journey by highlighting the benefits of using a Paleo Diet alongside your strength training to give you an overarching strategy to improve your health, strength, and overall well-being.
Why Do You Need Strength?
Physical strength is regarded as one of the most vital things in life. This is true whether we want it to be or not. Injuries and debilitating conditions as well as progressing through age require an increased focus on strength to at least meet your limitations and strengthen your body to compensate.
Increasing your focus on better eating, living, and taking control over what you do every day will not only help you feel better mentally but physically too.
Strength training is as old as civilization itself.
In the Greek tale of Milo, Milo is said to have lifted a calf over his shoulder every day, and he grew stronger as the calf grew larger.
Evidence of gym equipment like barbells found in the ruins of Rome, Greece, and India. Weight lifting is derived from stone lifting which is a popular sport in almost all parts of the world.
Exercise has always been crucial since ancient times when even Pharaohs needed fitness and strength to lead armies into battle.
To put it simply, strength training, also known as resistance training, is the process of increasing muscle mass by asking the body to do more work than it is used to doing. Makes so much sense right?
As humanity has developed throughout history, physical strength has become less critical to our daily existence, but no less important to our body.
Our strength more than anything determines the quality and quantity of our time here in these bodies.
Previously, our strength was determined by how much food we ate but now, it's determined by how well we function in our surroundings. A weak person is not as happy as that same person when they were strong.
Using a Paleo Diet Alongside Your Strength Training
A weak person won't be as happy as that same person when they were strong and felt good.
Even if you have physical, age, or other limitations, taking control of the food you eat, what you do in your downtime, and strengthening yourself from the ground up is the Root of a Paleo Diet.
Paying Attention to What You Eat on a Paleo Diet
Your diet and strength play a crucial part in YOU staying alive.
As the nature of our lifestyle has changed, our relationship with physical activity has changed alongside the increased use of artificial ingredients, preservatives, and harmful food preparation processes.
Previously, our ancestors were stronger because they were active constantly, searching for food, and materials, trying to not become a meal for something, or someone else.
Going From Sedentary to Strong
Now, we lead a more sedentary lifestyle with distractions like our phones, and TVs, which have programmed people to eat processed, unnatural foods that have led to numerous chronic conditions.
While many young people are looking to strengthen themselves with Paleo when they're young, everybody has the potential to benefit from a Paleo Diet.
Whether you're those who have already spent many years eating a poor diet, developing chronic conditions alongside a lack of activity has made many people much weaker and susceptible to even worse illnesses.
A Paleo Diet combined with even beginning-level strength-building activities and a sustained training regimen allows you to positively impact your physical and mental well-being at any age.
Utilizing a Paleo Diet to Complement Your Strength Training
Paleo Diets are growing in popularity among athletes and people of all ages because of their potential to help counter the effects of years of poor nutritional habits that include processed food intake, and poor food choices that have caused digestive disorders and other acute and long-term conditions.
Paleo Diets can provide increased control of dietary blood sugar levels, Diabetes, PCOS & Hypoglycemia; while helping to regulate your hormone levels and overall health.
Many who have started a Paleo Diet have experienced improvements in their Cardiovascular health including lowered Cholesterol and Blood Pressure levels while benefitting from weight & fat loss while never feeling like they’re starving.
Paleo Diets have the potential to alleviate & mitigate symptoms along with better regulating the conditions associated with autoimmune and inflammatory conditions.
What Can You Eat on a Paleo Diet?
Why people avoid a Paleo Diet is the same reason why others love them. Paleo Diets consist of eating simpler food choices based on the type of diet that cavemen and cavewomen would have eaten during the Paleolithic Era and only the same types of food that could be eaten or foraged during this time.
Strict Paleo Diets eliminate most dairy, milk chocolate, and most nuts, and legumes, and likely, many of your favorite and comfort foods.
On a Paleo Diet, there's always a better-tasting alternative that gives you the flavor satisfaction you need. Saving recipes, finding the right Paleo Snacks, and learning to make your own Paleo-friendly food at home lets you take complete control of what you put into your body.
Steroid-Free & Hormone-Free eggs and grass-fed meat with lean proteins are a staple of Paleo Diets and with a consistent, progressive strength routine, you need to eat enough of the right foods to sustain your efforts.
What Foods Do You Avoid on a Paleo Diet?
Frozen dinners and snacks, candy, canned items, pasta, and bread, unless you're eating raw vegetables, fruits, meats, and foods that are prepared and consumed without preservatives, processing, or additives, your food is known as processed food.
These foods can directly compromise your health because the long-term effects of artificial ingredients, GMOs, and other additives haven't been directly studied.
Eating a poor diet that includes the above can be directly linked to gastrointestinal problems from IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), fructose malabsorption, SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth), celiac disease, and food intolerances.
Why Should You Be Doing Strength Training?
Whether you're young and looking to compete in sports or are reaching an advanced age where many of your daily tasks have become much harder due to ailments, or lack of activity, the best way to protect yourself from common injuries that can derail your health.
With a sedentary lifestyle in combination with poor eating habits, your body will struggle to heal itself which can leave you vulnerable to acute and chronic internal problems that affect digestion, your heart, and your mental well-being.
Here are some benefits of strength training for men and women of all ages.
Progressive Strength Training to Feel & Be Better
But most importantly, it can lead to a more positive mental attitude while allowing you to do more with less effort.
Climbing higher, lifting more, and being the better you should be your main motivation for your strength training.
Building a strength routine that incorporates a Paleo Diet gives your body the ultimate food regime to support your strength training.
Building Strength for Your Muscles, Bones & Joints
Strength training provides amazing benefits for these.
Strength training removes excess fat from our body and helps us bind our muscles more strongly with our bones.
This retained muscle mass delays aging and while it can't reverse the effects of aging, it better prepares our bodies to feel better, younger, and better prepared to counter the hardships of aging.
When our body is exposed to strength training, additional pressure on our body increases bone density.
This results in bigger and stronger bones. Our joints become more mobile and less prone to injury if we incorporate strength training in our workouts.
Fighting Disease & Long-Term Health Conditions
Strength training increases muscle size which burns more calories at rest.
Also, muscle resistance training is proven to eliminate chronic disease-causing visceral fat in the abdomen.
Strength training boosts testosterone which is the primary sex and secondary growth hormone in men.
Preventing & Recovering From Injuries
A sedentary lifestyle and a poor diet lead to a body that's more prone to internal and external injuries.
This is especially true for beginners to strength training, leading many to overdo their workouts.
Beginners often don't realize they've hit their body's limit until the next day when every muscle in their body aches or worse, they've overdone their workout.
They discover muscle tears, stress fractures, or more damaging injuries due to inattention to their routine combined with their inexperience.
Building your strength has limits and recognizing the signs will help you build a smarter and healthier strength routine.
The Best Ways to Start Strength Training
Fortunes have been made selling new ways of training core muscles but generally, very few people know about strength training.
Below are a few tips for starting strength training for maximum performance.
Building Strength around your limitations
While physical disabilities can limit what types of strength training you can do on certain areas of your body.
Learning how to build strength around your limitations can help your body compensate for strength around your disability.
Beginners should learn the basics before they advance to more strenuous and complex exercises.
Working with a fitness trainer, you can share your strength goals and learn how to work out without damaging your body while building momentum with a long-term strength routine.
Since lifting movements have a very strict form, more beginners often hurt their back and discs when they begin using weights, especially when they do it alone.
Read more about basic power moves and remember to train with professional and dedicated people only.
Keeping a Consistent Workout Routine
A major advantage of strength training is that you can start your regimen with exercises that use your body weight to your advantage to build strength.
By doing some variations of squats, push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and lunges, these exercises provide a significant amount of resistance against gravity which is a natural start to any strength training routine.
These movements provide endurance, explosiveness, coordination, flexibility, and balance along with power while building core strength.
While Bodyweight exercises are not recommended for significant muscle growth they give you a natural way to progress into more muscle-intensive workouts
Often athletes find that once they've developed a consistent rhythm, the shift to strength training is a natural progression to continue their strength progression.
Developing a Whole Health & Body Strategy
While there may be no need to put any additional stress on our bodies during the learning phase, using other exercising techniques can help build an all-around body.
Combining strength training with walking, light running, or swimming regime can help you develop all areas of your body, give your lungs and blood flow a workout while developing your endurance.
However, it's extremely important not to overdo it. Getting enough sleep at night and enough to eat to compensate your body with the extra fuel it needs is crucial to building a better you.
When you're on a strength routine, you're body needs fuel to keep building on your efforts.
Lean proteins, a mid to high fat intake alongside the right fruits and vegetables help you retain your gains to build a healthier you.
Building Strength vs. Building
Mass
However, the amount of testosterone produced in women is very low compared to men.
Also, it takes a lot of eating to grow big.
Bulk muscle growth results from extremely heavy lifts done with intentional cheating with supplements, powders, and hormones that can have a potentially damaging effect on your body.
A standard starting deadlift weight is 135 pounds for men and 85 pounds for their female counterparts.
However, while this may be standard for some, a man who weighs 150 pounds, a woman who weighs 110 pounds, or someone recovering from injuries will naturally struggle to lift these types of weights.
Instead of having an initial goal of bulking up, you will find a more proportionate, lean, and attractive body by slowly but steadily developing a routine built around you, your body, and your limitations.
Nutritional Intake For Those Who Undertake Strength Training
While many use a Paleo Diet to help with weight loss goals, the combination of clean, unprocessed food along with a consistent strength and fitness routine means that you're giving your body the best fuel to sustain your higher activity levels.
When you cut out processed foods, and their accompanying empty calories and replace the with proper protein, healthy fats, and carbs, you help your body sustain the efforts that you put into your overall fitness program.
Sustaining your body through increased levels of activity and strength training requires the right fuel to power you through your training program.
Lowering the Risk of Injury During Strength Training
Strength training is a significant part of your overall fitness program. Not having enough to eat or enough rest leads to poor performance and worse, injuries that can cause setbacks that can destroy your motivation.
This opens the door to a vicious cycle that self-feeds itself to cause you long-term harm with injuries, laziness, and confidence.
A Paleo Diet with all-natural foods, no preservatives, artificial ingredients, or harsh preparation processes that destroy your foods' natural benefits combined with a consistent strength training routine keeps your body at its best while giving you the ability to recover from injuries and illnesses faster.
Strength training is a significant part of your overall fitness program, check out our article on more strength training activities you can do to build overall strength to live better.
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The rise of the use of additives, GMOs, complex ingredients, and processed foods consumed has coincided with the rise of numerous short-term & chronic illnesses, eating simple, unprocessed foods gives you everything that your body needs without harmful additives, ingredients, and potential long-term effects.
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