Eating frequently throughout the day plays a major role in maximizing your gains in muscle size and strength and is an incredibly important part of any bodybuilding nutrition program.  If you set up a bodybuilding nutrition program correctly, you can put your body in an anabolic state, increase your fat burning metabolism, improve digestion, and stabilize your energy levels; all due to eating a well balanced muscle building meal every 2 or 3 hours.  Following this bodybuilding nutrition program throughout the  day is a cinch.

But how do you do it when you’re asleep?

Take into account that you probably consume the last meal of your daily bodybuilding nutrition program about an hour before going to bed… then you sleep for a full night… and eat breakfast about half an hour after you get up…. sleep for 8 hours… and then have our breakfast half an hour after awakening…  You’re looking at a whopping 9.5 hours with no muscle building nutrition whatsoever!  The fact is that if a well-balanced bodybuilding nutrition program made up of top quality, growth-supporting nutrition is something you focus on during the day, you can’t just “put it to sleep” at night.

Our growing muscles need a continuous supply of protein, carbohydrates, and fats to recuperate and grow optimally, so doesn’t it make sense to supply your body with these macronutrients when growth and recovery is at its peak?

Allowing your body to endure a starved, catabolic state for such a long time isn’t the best idea, considering that you can still keep up with your bodybuilding nutrition program at night. Not everyone will do this, but if you want to accelerate your bodybuilding progress to top levels, consider eating a muscle building meal at the mid-point during your sleep. Sure, it may seem a little extreme and you might think only obsessive lifters would take the step of incorporating their bodybuilding nutrition program into their sleep, but if you think about how simple it can really be, you might get onboard too and boost your muscle building during the night.

First off, we’re not talking about a typical solid-food meal here. I’m certainly not suggesting that you cook up chicken and potatoes or salmon and rice here. Sitting down to eat solid foods in the middle of the night is actually something that might disrupt your sleep; plus it’s not the most realistic technique to use as a long-term approach to your bodybuilding nutrition program. Stick to a liquid meal that you can drink quickly; that way you can get it down fast and get back to sleep easily.  Add 30-40 grams of protein powder (in the form of whey, egg or casein) to 1-2 cups of skim milk. In this way you can get an easy dose of high quality protein without losing out on a lot of sleep due to chewing times or meal preparations.

Another tip is to add a tablespoon of a healthy unsaturated oil source, like flaxseed oil or extra virgin olive oil. This will slow down the release of the protein shake and give your body essential fatty acids that are very important for muscle recovery and growth.  So, what time should you drink this shake?

In a perfect world, you should drink up about halfway through the night; but any time you wake up naturally is fine too. Alarm clocks are not the best option, since you don’t want to mess with your sleep patterns and feel tired and sleepy for the following days. You might question whether this middle-of-the-night-feeding method works for every bodybuilding nutrition program.

No, but I’d recommend at least giving it a try to see how it works for you. When adding this into my own bodybuilding nutrition program and my clients’ programs, I’ve discovered that most of the time, the effects have been good. Most people wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom anyway, so adding a tiny detour to the kitchen to drink a protein shake isn’t really a big challenge. That one shake alone might be the key to improving your bodybuilding nutrition program. You’d be surprised at the difference a few hundred calories can make between maintaining weight and gaining some.  Want to get the most bang-for-your-buck from your bodybuilding nutrition program? Then give this technique a try.

For more information http://www.getmusclefast.info

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