Saturday, January 21, 2012

The Effect of Antioxidant Intake When Building Your Body by James Druman

Unless you have been living under a rock your whole life, you've heard about the amazing health benefits of antioxidant rich foods. These free-radical fighting antioxidants help your body to battle cancer, heart disease, and a ton of other degenerative diseases. On top of that, they also help you look and feel more youthful by slowing down your aging process.

Well guess what else? They also help you to recover after your workouts. Let's look a little deeper into this phenomenon.

The function these antioxidants play when helping you recover from exercise is the reticence of free radicals formed during work out. Any time you do cardiovascular exercise, free radicals are made in your body's muscle tissue. If you have an adequate supply of antioxidants around an hour before you workout, your body can greatly reduce the damage caused, and this will in turn improve your muscular recovery.

In addition, your body actually builds muscle when it is resting, and this is another way they come into play. During your workouts you generally tear your muscles strands, and many people think that is when you are building muscle.

But is actually building later when you get your rest. By increasing your antioxidant intake you increase the quality of your rebuilding process, and in the long run build bigger, leaner muscles. That's on top of all the other great effects that antioxidants have for your body.

Generally whole foods are the way to go for antioxidants, but you can always supplement with quality supplements if you are not getting enough of them in your diet. Berries are the most potent sources of antioxidants from whole foods. Some good examples are blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, cranberries, cherries, and acai fruit.

There are also a number of teas that have a ton of antioxidants: green tea, oolong tea, white tea, black tea, and red tea. On top of these you can also get your antioxidant fill from nuts, seeds, red and black beans, purple potatoes, grapes, cinnamon, and dark chocolate.

You are bombed on a daily basis with free radicals, and antioxidants are the piece of the puzzle that will combat them as well as give you a muscular, youthful, and disease-free body.

You see, nutrition is half of the battle in both strength gains and weight loss. Most people focus on the exercise portion of the journey and don't spend the time that they need to on the nutrition aspect. Don't fall for the same mistakes of the masses: eat right and make sure you get your antioxidants.