[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]ou’ve seen it. The overweight bicyclist who pedals 25 miles a day and keeps the spare tire around their midsection.
Or maybe the marathoner who’s skinny but still a little pudgy.
It's not their fault.
They pedal, run, pedal, run to live a healthy life.
I respect them for that. Actually I highly respect them for that. It’s a hell of a lot better than most.
But what’s going on? Where have they gone wrong? Maybe this is you, or maybe it’s someone you know. Whoever it is, they have their nutrition priorities a little wacky.
What I’m going to say next will make every entrepreneur, every business professional, every human extremely happy.
It will answer questions of how much you should workout and why nutrition is important.
The Fitness Hoax
You don’t have to “workout” nearly as much as you think.
It’s not the quantity that matters, it’s the quality. Extreme endurance training is on the downward cliff of diminishing returns.
If you do nothing, it’s bad and if you do too much (although anything is better than nothing) it can negatively affect your goals.
Endurance training sends your body a signal to use fat as fuel. While high intensity training (what you should be doing) uses an adaptive signal by using glucose for fuel, making your muscles big and strong.
With higher amounts of endurance training the more likely you’ll achieve excess fat storage due to your body’s starvation response. This metabolic slowdown happens when you don’t replenish enough calories after a long run, cycle or whatever you’re doing.
For the overweight cyclist mentioned earlier, he probably meets at Einstein Bagels for a high caloric dousing. Your body craves these types of calories after this type of workout.
Bicyclist meet excess calorie intake.
For you, forget what all this mumbo jumbo means if you don't care about technicalities, just remember this:
Overdone endurance training not only stores fat, but it also achieves fat when you over eat to try to replenish what you just lost.
As an entrepreneur, you probably don’t want to spend all your time running around chasing your tail. You want a balanced life so you can enjoy all of it, not just being at work, hitting the pavement, or being at the gym.
So why is nutrition important
Have you ever tried driving a Ferrari, Bentley, or maybe even a multi-million dollar corporate jet without fuel? Even if you haven’t, just imagine.
These well crafted, elite machines are just pieces of junk when not fed the right fuel.
And so is your mind and body.
Without the necessary nutrients, your almighty fitness endeavors become wasted without the fuel to feed the fire [TWEET THIS].
And when you feed the fire too much, hello body fat.
On a macro level, nutrition is what fuels your every move and your every thought. On a micro level, nutrition sparks cell activity within your body’s complex micro-organismic ecosystem.
So, why is nutrition important?
Nutrition is 80% of the battle.
If you feel overwhelmed and don’t know what to do, focus on your nutrition.
Once you get the hang of this, move on to fitness.
By focusing on the fuel you put in your mouth and limiting stressors such as endurance training, your that much closer to becoming a superhuman you.