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Muscle Building Nutrition from Michael Phelps’
August 26, 2008
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Imagine being able to eat 12,000-calories a day and win 8 Olympic Gold medals and still have a six-pack?
I think the media has blown this out of proportion and I don’t believe he consumes 12,000-calories a day - maybe 6,000 to 8,000 max. But for the sake of entertainment and discussion, let’s entertain a typical day…
Breakfast: Three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. Two cups of coffee. One five-egg omelet. One bowl of grits. Three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar. Three chocolate-chip pancakes.
Lunch: One pound of enriched pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayo on white bread. Energy drinks packing 1,000 calories.
Dinner: One pound of pasta. An entire pizza. More energy drinks.
Yes, that’s insane!
I personally assign meal plans from 2,000 to 6,000 calories for my skinny guys and I rarely meet anyone who needs more than 4,000-5,000 calories to get super muscular in conjunction with high intensity weight training.
NFL linemen don’t even consume that many calories yet Phelps’ is able to maintain not a single ounce of fat on him.
Some interesting thoughts…
– Phelp’s plan is the equivalent of eating of 25 Big Mac’s each day, yet he is still able to maintain single digit body fat despite the massive amount of unhealthy fats and lack of veggies and fruits in this diet.
Take home lesson:
Perhaps the saying, ‘Your abs are made in the kitchen,’ is not completely true if you can train 5 hours a day and 6 days a week. Unless you can increase your overall training volume then you’ll have to take your diet much more seriously. I am not saying you need to train 30 hours a week but perhaps you could consider more often for starters?
– Many would argue that Phelps’ diet is full of ‘garbage,’ yet he has proven to be one of the most decorated Olympic athletes of all time.
Take home lesson:
If you’re training up to 5 hours a day then you need a muscle building diet with enough calories or else you’ll ‘hit the wall’ and be completely drained the last 2 hours of your workout. (I just hope that all the saturated fat in Mike’s diet does not result in heart disease in the next ten or twenty years… )
As far as building muscles goes, it’s practically impossible to bulk up by resorting on just veggies and fruits (unless you want to live on the toilet) so be prepared to do more cardio training to counteract the excess calories and remember you can only build 3-4 pounds of dry muscle each month and anything else will be fat, so don’t attempt to ‘force feed’ your muscles into growth.
– Phelps is ULTRA skinny and your classic hard gainer so he has a super charged metabolism which allows him to consume about 6x more (2,000-calories a day) than the average man. So how the heck is he an alien-human-fish instead of a fat whale?
Take home lesson:
It’s all about about energy in versus energy out. If his weight is staying constant, which it is, then he’s obviously burning the same amount that he is taking in.
You’re probably wondering, what’s going to happen now that the Olympics are over… I don’t think he’ll have a problem of maintaining his weight because his metabolism is so high and he still needs to be in the water several hours a day.
Don’t worry, I’m like you and if I tried to follow a muscle building diet like Mike then I would end up in the hospital too. I don’t mean to sound like Dr. Phil but as you can see it all comes down to what comes in and what goes out. If you want to lose fat then you need to move more and eat less.
If you want to gain weight then you need to move less and eat more. It’s that simple.
Check out this link if If you are looking for a more sensible approach to body building nutrition without eating 12,000 calories a day.
Click here to get your own ‘world class Olympic body’br
– a href=”http://www.vincedelmontefitness.com”http://www.VinceDelMonteFitness.com /a
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If you’re looking for a more sensible way of leaning down without training 5 hours a day and six days a week then I get started with my No Nonsense Fat Loss program at a href=”http://www.yoursixpackquest.com”http://www.YourSixPackQuest.com/a
Train hard and train even smarter.
Vince DelMonte
Comments
3 Responses to “Muscle Building Nutrition from Michael Phelps’”
Got something to say?
So about the energy drink bit - it completely surprised me that an Olympic athlete could drink so much of what we think is so bad for our bodies. But then I came across this new product called the ViSalus NEURO which is the first in the billion dollar energy drink business to make a healthy, partly organic beverage! So maybe Mike Phelps is really onto something with all those energy drinks…
I don’t intend to bulk up, but rather tone up my muscles. I am attending Norton pines Athletic club and it has helped me. You see I have Parkinson’s disease and couldn’t walk without a four footed cane, but after several weeks I can walk fairly good without a cane and that makes me very happy.
Brads is my nick name. All of my family refer to me as Brads. My son Jeffrey made that up.