If you consider yourself as an athlete, the most important nutritional tip is that you should eat enough. If you are training five or more times a week and constantly taking fewer calories in than you consume, it will eventually show in your performance and energy levels.

Increasing your muscle mass and strength requires that you eat enough of quality foods. A good principle is to eat more than you consume. If you are eating quality foods and avoiding added sugars, the amount of food you should intake might seem huge in the beginning. Yet, we strongly recommend you to finish your meals because the results will be significant, and your stomach will get used to it. You have to eat quite a lot of chicken and rice to get fat.

After you have adjusted your calorie intake to match your consumption level, you can begin to focus on the details of your diet. Try to eat as clean as possible and avoid everything that is processed. To simplify, what to eat and what not to, let's divide nutrition into three elements - carbs, proteins, and fats.

Carbs

Vegetables are an important part of nutrition. They are light, relatively natural and low processed. They have a lot of necessary nutrients but quite a little energy. It means that you should add good carbohydrate source into your diet to fulfill the energy need. Good and energy-rich sources of carbs are for instance rice, potato, and sweet potato.

Fruits and berries are also good sources of fast carbs and important vitamins. Yes, those consist sugar but fructose is non-processed, and if you eat a fruit before or shortly after a workout, you don’t need to be worried about blood sugar peaks.

Even though you would follow a low carb diet, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t eat those at all. Your body needs carbs for fuel especially if you are training hard. Cutting all the carbs from your diet will only set your body into energy saving mode leading only to a descended performance level.

Proteins

Proteins are a vital cornerstone of any diet. Proteins are organic compounds, which consists of different amino acid chains. There are 20 types of necessary amino acids for human body from which nine it can not create by itself. Therefore those need to be received from nutrition.

If you are willing to build muscle and develop your strength level, you simply have to eat enough of proteins. The importance of proteins only increases the more you train. For an athlete who is working out hard the daily need of protein is approximately 1,5-3 grams per kilogram of non-fat bodyweight. The bigger the muscle mass, the greater the need for protein.

Good sources of protein are for example lean meat and fish. Beef and chicken are good options from meat products. Fish should be eaten at least two or three times a week because it is an indispensable source of important omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin-D.

In addition to meat products, good sources of protein are dairy products, eggs, nuts, seeds, lenses, and whole grain. It is recommendable to add these into your diet to fill some of your daily protein need. These non-meat sources of protein include many other beneficial nutrients that meat products doesn’t. Of course, some of us have allergies and other dietary restrictions. In these situations, ensure that you are eating enough of protein from sources that fit into your diet.

Fats

Last decade an assumption that fat is bad prevailed and people were obsessed to avoid eating fats. We were urged to ban it from our diets whenever possible. Grocery shelves were full of non-fat products, and these products were sold with taglines that underlined the small amount of fat in the product. According to numerous researches, the trend didn’t make us healthier and, luckily, the general approach has since changed, and fats are no more considered as the biggest enemy of human race.

Fats are necessary for several functions of your body. For instance, fats help you to absorb important vitamins and minerals. Fats are also needed in building cell membranes and sheath around as well as in many other body functions.

Obviously, some fats are better than others. For the long-term health, try to favor the healthy, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, which you can get mainly from vegetables, nuts, seeds, and fish. A good rule of a thumb is that the healthy fats stay in liquid form at room temperature.

Then what are the kind of fats you should try to avoid? The worst type of dietary fat is the kind known as trans fat. It is a byproduct of a process that is used to turn healthy oils into solid form and the previously healthy fat into not so healthy trans fat. Eating trans fats increases the level of harmful LDL cholesterol in the bloodstream and causes inflammation, which is linked to several chronic diseases.