1.Diet/Nutrition
Your diet is the most important contributing factor to your physique and your health. Since your diet is so important you need to ensure that your diet is sustainable for the long run. The main reason why it is so hard to change to a healthy diet is because of dopamine. To briefly explain simply, dopamine is a hormone that makes you feel good. There are a lot of things that can cause your dopamine levels to rise and fall and one of the things that can cause your dopamine levels to rise is unhealthy food. There are a lot of different ingredients in the food that can cause your dopamine levels to rise. One of them, for example, is sugar. The reason why this can become something bad is because you can become dependent on those kinds of food to keep your dopamine up. The problem actually starts when you go on a healthy diet because your dopamine levels start to drop because you have switched to a healthier diet, however your dopamine levels will return back to normal after a month or two and your body will adjust to this. However, this mostly occurs when you suddenly change your diet to a healthier diet and you can change your diet over a time period step-by-step. If you are going to do it this way you have to set out goals that you want to achieve and the best way to deal with this is actually by working according to a plan.
2.Exercise
The majority of people will tell you to do cardiovascular exercise to lose weight and this works for weight loss but we don’t want to lose weight. We want to actually lose fat since this will actually help you achieve the lean muscular physique that you want. Your workout needs to include resistance training and cardiovascular training. The reason why you want to include resistance training in your workout program is because it actually helps with muscle development and this will actually help increase your resting metabolic rate. This, in turn, will help you to burn more calories. However cardiovascular training helps you to lose mass. Some of which is muscle and the other portion is fat. If you start losing muscle mass this can actually cause your resting metabolic rate to decrease and that is actually the opposite of what we want to achieve. You can use cardiovascular training as a warm-up and also as something that you can cool down after you have completed your workout to counter this effect.
3.Recovery
Recovery is one of the most crucial things that you need to take into consideration. The main reason why you want to make sure that you recover fully is because it helps with muscle development and it can also lower your risk of injury and also said you need to give your muscles 72 hours of rest before you train the same muscle group again. My point is, recovery is just as important as exercise and there are two different ways of recovery: active recovery and passive recovery. The main thing about active recovery is that you do not want to do any exercise that puts a lot of strain on the body. For example, you don’t want to do barbell back squats. But, for example, you can do something like light cardio and battle drugs and with your passive recovery. Then don’t do any exercise on your off-day. Which one is better? Active and passive recovery both work – it just depends on what you prefer.
