When it comes to talking about food and dieting in the fitness industry, one term you hear over and over is macronutrients. It’s lesser discussed counterpart – micronutrients – are the topic for today’s piece.

While often disregarded in the fitness industry, micronutrients are essential for optimal body function and reaching your fitness goals. Namely, the goal of body recomposition.

So if you’re looking to step your game up, expand your knowledge and improve your health, micronutrients are where we need to start. Let’s get into it.

What Are Micronutrients?

Starting with the basics, the difference between macro and micro nutrients is in the name – large and small nutrients. This doesn’t refer to their physical size, but rather the quantity required in a healthy diet to consume body functions. Macronutrients include the three staples: protein, carbohydrates and fat, which make up the bulk of your calories.

Within the three macronutrients, you have micronutrients. Micronutrients refer to vitamins and minerals that are consumed in smaller amounts, and most are found within the larger macronutrient group.

For example, avocados contain micronutrients – 20 vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients – and is also a fat, within the macronutrient grouping.

However some micronutrients aren’t found in macronutrients, for example vitamin D is created directly from sun exposure, when the UVB rays hit the cholesterol in the skin cells, vitamin D synthesis occurs. But as a sweeping statement – micronutrients are predominantly found in food, within the three main macronutrients.

Daily body functions require an array of different vitamins and each has a unique role and function.

There are 13 essential vitamins, meaning that they are essential for your body to work optimally, and without them you may experience negative side effects ranging from dry hair, acne, increased fat storage and more unfavorable side effects.

Vitamins can be grouped into two main categories: fat soluble or water soluble. There are four fat soluble vitamins: A, D, E and K that are absorbed readily when consumed with fat, because they are stored in adipose tissue.

Water soluble vitamins – the remaining nine – are not stored in the body, highlighting the need to maintain a healthy, vitamin rich diet for optimal functioning and performance

Some of the functions of vitamins include:

• Immune health
• Healthy and hydrated skin and hair
• Strong bones and nails
• Metabolic health and nutrient absorption
• Heart health
• Brain health
• Nervous system regulation
• Hormonal balance and homeostasis
• Fighting free radicals and repairing DNA damage

Minerals also help your body to function, some examples of minerals include calcium, magnesium and potassium. Minerals play an essential role in bone health, growth, regulating fluids in the body, heart health, transmitting nerve impulses and are precursors to many hormones.

For example, as shown in a 2014 study, the mineral iodine is found in the thyroid hormone, which plays a role in the metabolism, amongst others.

Where Are Micronutrients Found?

As briefly touched on, micronutrients are predominantly found within carbohydrates, fats and proteins.

Each whole food – i.e. food that hasn’t been processed – is likely to contain a number of different vitamins and minerals. Often, these micronutrients cause the food to have a certain color, known as phytonutrients.

Phytonutrients are found in plant foods and are correlated with certain vitamins and minerals, which is why you’re often told to ‘eat the rainbow’, with each color providing a unique vitamin and mineral density.

Here are some example sources of micronutrients:

• Calcium – milk, yogurt, spinach, kale, sardines
• Vitamin B12 – beef, chicken, fish, cheese, egg
• Potassium – bananas, spinach, potatoes
• Vitamin C – oranges, lemons, strawberries, broccoli
• Vitamin E – vegetable oils like sunflower oil, nuts and seeds, spinach, broccoli
• Vitamin K – kale, spinach, brussels sprouts, broccoli, fish, beef

As you can see – whole foods and plant foods are rich in micronutrients. If you’re wondering whether you’re lacking any micronutrients, the best advice is to adopt a plant based, whole food diet that includes foods with an array of different colors, that have been the least processed as possible.

This is of utmost importance if your goal is body recomposition, let’s get into the reasons why.

Micronutrients and Body Recomposition

Body recomposition is a term used in the fitness industry to describe the process of losing body fat and gaining muscle mass, you can read more about it here.

The way you do this is by increasing your energy expenditure, hitting effective and efficient workouts and implementing progressive overload to strategically increase your strength, build muscle and ultimately boost your metabolic rate. Simultaneously, calories will need to be closely monitored – most recommend eating around maintenance – to lose excess body fat.

So how does this link to micronutrients? It comes down to the magic word: optimization.

Optimizing Body Recomposition

If you want your body to work as efficiently as possible, you need to be providing it with the tools to do so. As much as trainers would like to believe it’s as simple as ‘calories in vs. calories out’, there is so much more to it than that.

For example, 100 calories of ice cream is not the same as 100 calories of kale. You can read more about that in this article I wrote.

Within a calorie, you have different macro and micronutrient offerings. If you are deficient in any vitamins, you’re not going to be optimizing your fat loss or muscle gain efforts. In fact, you could be preventing yourself from achieving any progress.

For example, vitamin D deficiency is associated with fat storage – a study that examined low vitamin D levels in a group of women found that those with the lowest gained more weight over the course of the study, despite not changing their diets at all.

Another example of this is B vitamins. B vitamins are essential for metabolic function. If you’re deficient or insufficient in any of the B vitamins, your body is going to be in fat storage mode.

This is because the main function of B vitamins is to metabolize macronutrients, and so if you don’t have enough circulating, you’re going to be storing way more calories than you could have otherwise been burning.

A study found that vitamin B supplementation was able to reduce body weight by increasing the metabolism.

When it comes to building muscle, if you’re deficient in any nutrients you’re also going to face similar problems. Vitamin E is an antioxidant that fights free radical damage and helps to flush out metabolic waste.

During exercise, you create oxidative stress, if you don’t have enough circulating vitamin E, you’re going to experience intensified delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), poor recovery and stunted muscle protein synthesis.

Not ideal. A study published in the International Journal of Preventive Medicine found that vitamin E supplementation improved recovery by reducing muscle damage markers.

To conclude, if you’re busy counting your macros without much thought for your micros – you need to repriotizie. Micronutrients help your body to work optimally, and without them, you’re going to experience negative side effects and your fitness goals will move further out of reach.

As mentioned, adopting a diet rich in whole plant foods with an array of colors will provide you with the majority of your micronutrient needs.

The post The Forgotten Role of Micronutrients in Body Recomposition appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

With gyms closed globally, the question fitness fanatics keep asking is, “Can you still get results from doing home workouts?”

It’s more important than ever to understand how to adapt your training to keep getting results.

With gyms closed globally, the question fitness fanatics keep asking is, “Can you still get results from doing home workouts?”

The answer is- Yes. Can you continue getting consistent results? Yes, assuming you understand some key intensity strategies to implement progressive overload effectively. In this post, we’ll be giving you the six key ways to keep getting results from the comfort of your home using simple intensity adjustments.

First of all, it’s essential to understand that you can make serious gains just using your bodyweight.

While it’s contrary to a lot of popular fitness culture, the gym isn’t the only place where you can lose weight, build muscle, and improve your performance. Here’s a quick run-through of how you can use bodyweight training as a critical component of your fitness goal.

Is Your Goal Weight Loss?

If your chief fitness goal is to lose weight, your primary focus should be on creating an energy deficit – meaning that you are expending more energy than you are intaking. Creating an energy deficit is typically done through caloric restriction and increased physical activity.

Whether you’re increasing your physical activity during gym sessions or home workouts, what matters is that you’re moving and pushing yourself regularly.

Bodyweight workouts can burn a lot of calories, mainly if you are performing high rep, with limited rest time and doing high-intensity exercises.

Is Your Goal to Build Muscle?

To build muscle, you need to stimulate muscle hypertrophy. Without getting too much into the exercise science, here’s what you need to know: muscle hypertrophy requires three mechanisms:

1. Muscle damage can occur if you do a workout of sufficient length with enough sets per body part.
2. Mechanical tension can arise if you perform each exercise slowly, alternating concentric and eccentric tempos.
3. Metabolic stress can occur if you perform an exercise for a high amount of reps.

Optimally, you would be using heavy weights with progressive overload, with a different rep and a set range to build muscle. However, it’s possible to build muscle doing bodyweight exercises if you follow a specially curated workout that promotes each key mechanism for hypertrophy.

Is Your Goal to Build Strength?

Bodyweight workouts are for you. Using your body’s weight as resistance is one of the most effective ways to build strength.

Doing functional movements focuses on strengthening key movement patterns that transfer into your daily life and increase your body strength.

Compared to using weights, bodyweight workouts are not necessarily superior, but they are equally as beneficial and arguably more practical, particularly in the current climate.

Strength is built by increasing power and endurance, and bodyweight training is ideal for both of these goals. Plyometric exercises help to develop power, and performing bodyweight exercises with a high rep is a great way to build endurance.

What determines your results in bodyweight home workouts is your ability to implement progressive overload. In the gym, this is easy. But at home, it can get a bit more complicated. If you’re new to the concept of progressive overload, here’s a quick run-through of what you need to know.

What Is Progressive Overload?

The principle of progressive overload states that for muscles to grow, performance or strength to increase, or for any similar improvement to occur, the human body must be forced to adapt to a tension that is above and beyond what it’s previously experienced.

Ignore every person who has ever told you that you need to switch up your workout routine every few days to shock your muscles. There is zero scientific evidence to show this; your muscles are muscles, not people. They don’t know what you’re doing, only that they’re working under tension.

Research shows that the most effective way to build muscle is to repeatedly do the same movements and exercises, increasing the intensity of the workouts, to keep forcing your muscles to work and adapt.

This increase in intensity is the concept of progressive overload. Progressive overload forces your muscles to work harder each time, so they continue to tear, repair, and grow.

If you want to learn more about this, check out this article. So: keep the exercises the same, but increase the intensity.

Logically, the best way to do this is by increasing the weight you’re using. But if you’re stuck doing home workouts, does that mean you need to keep buying heavier dumbbells? That would make your fitness journey way more complicated than it needs to be. So here’s what you need to do.

Implement Progressive Overload

• Increase the weight – this is the most typical way of implementing progressive overload. Even just increasing the weight by five pounds will force your muscles to work harder and adapt quicker. Make a note of the weight you’re using each workout, so you don’t forget.
• Increase the volume of sets/reps – increasing the sets or reps forces your body to adapt to a higher intensity. It also builds metabolic stress, which makes your muscles look pumped. However, it also causes high amounts of muscle damage and glycogen depletion, which requires extended recovery periods. Plus, you can’t keep increasing your sets and reps forever, it isn’t practical. Nonetheless, this can be an effective intensity strategy for bodyweight or low load isolation exercises – avoid doing this method for compound exercises like squats and deadlifts.
• Decrease the rest time between sets – this causes you to work harder and keep your heart rate up. This method is better for endurance based exercise rather than hypertrophy (muscle building). So feel free to implement this on the upper body or lower body/HIIT superset day, but not for heavy lower body days when the rest time is important.

So now we’ve covered the bases, what are the more advanced methods for intensifying your bodyweight home workouts?

1. Alter the Tempo

As mentioned, this is an effective way to stimulate mechanical tension, one of the fundamental mechanisms for muscle building.

Mechanical tension involves increasing the time under strain, i.e., the amount of time your muscles contract, and the force they generate to complete the movement.

Remember, your muscles do not know the size of the weights you use; they only know the amount of tension.

The tempo of an exercise is the timing in which it’s performed, so if you wanted to increase the tempo of a squat, you’d count in your head ‘down 2, 3 4’ ‘pause, 2 3’ and accelerate up in ‘one.’

This is an example of a slow eccentric (lowering) phase, a pause at the bottom of the squat, and an accelerated concentric phase that brings you back to standing.

Performing an exercise slowly, alternating between a slower concentric and fast eccentric, or vice versa, increases time under tension and forces your muscles to adapt.

2. Play Around With Set Intensities

There are not just sets and reps. There are a wide variety of set and rep styles:

• Drop sets
• Supersets
• Giant sets
• As Many Reps As Possible (AMRAP)
• Working to failure

For intensity, you can perform a superset (performing each exercise immediately after the other).

There are various types of supersets:

• Pre-exhaustion
• Post-exhaustion
• Compound
• Isolation
• Staggered

Read more about different supersets.

3. Manipulate Range of Motions

When you perform an exercise with weights, you are causing axial loading, which may prevent a full range of motion.

For example, when doing a squat with a barbell on your back, your spine is in a manipulated position, so the full range of motion may be less.

Without any external weight, your range of motion is likely to increase. So play around with the depth and breadth of movement planes.

4. Manipulate Your Stance

Similarly to the above, you can alter your form to activate different muscles. Following the example of a squat, narrow squats target your quads while wide squats target your glutes.

With just slight alterations in your stance or position, all exercises can feel different.

5. Change the Position of Your Torso

While this doesn’t work for all exercises, some bodyweight exercises can be made more intense by changing the position of your torso.

For example, next time you do a pushup, try to put one hand behind your back and shift your weight onto the grounded side. This slight torso shift changes the plane of motion and rotation of your shoulder joint to hit differently.

6. Use Partials and Constant Tension

When you’re doing an exercise, play around with partial reps and constant tension.

For example, when performing a squat, you can try doing constant tension pulses while coming a quarter of the way up of a regular squat and pulse there for reps.

So, now, you have gotten six tips, let’s put them into practice to get the most out of your bodyweight training; whatever your goal.

Example Workout:

The post How to Intensify Your At-Home Bodyweight Workout appeared first on Breaking Muscle.