Eating a well-balanced diet is essential if you are looking to boost your training results. Whether you’re aiming to build muscle, improve endurance, or enhance your athletic performance, the foods you consume can significantly impact your progress. In this guide, we have listed the most balanced diets for improving training results.
Mediterranean Diet
Formulated in the early Sixties and inspired by the traditional diet of Crete, southern Italy, and southern Spain, the Mediterranean diet is linked to improvements in physical fitness and athletic performance.
This diet limits processed foods while encouraging you to eat vegetables, fruits, legumes, cereals, and a high intake of fats like nuts and olive oil. The fat content should account for 25-35% of the total calorie intake, while the amount of saturated fat should not exceed 8% of the calorie content.
Not only does fat protect your organs, but it also gives your body energy while training and supports cell growth, including muscle repair and growth.
The Mediterranean diet can also include moderate consumption of the following:
- A low amount of red meat
- Dairy products (mostly yogurt and cheese)
- Fish and other seafood
- Poultry
- Eggs
- Red wine
- Seasoning with herbs and spices
Paleo Diet
The Paleo diet emerged in the Eighties and is based on the eating habits of humans during the Palaeolithic era. It avoids food processing and includes meat, roots, nuts, fruits, and vegetables. The diet also excludes dairy products, coffee, alcohol, salt, processed oils, legumes, and grains.
Because the Paleo diet is rich in proteins, it is a good source of BCAA ( branched-chain amino acids) like isoleucine, leucine, and valine. BCAA are potent stimulants for repairing and building muscle. Because fish and lean meats are the best sources of BCAA, you can easily understand why the Paleo diet encourages muscle development when combined with strength training.
The diet is also a good source of vitamins, fiber, minerals, and other essential nutrients that improve performance and health. The table below shows some variations of the paleo diet that you can follow:
| Paleo Variation | What It Entails |
| 80/20 Paleo | This version is ideal for beginners who find the traditional strict paleo diet hard to follow. It requires you to follow the diet plan 80% of the time and eat your favorite non-paleo foods for the remaining 20%. |
| Primal Paleo | This paleo variant allows organic food, some legumes, and raw dairy products. |
| Ketogenic Paleo | This low-carb, high-fat diet is ideal for aerobic endurance exercise. It gets your body into a state of ketosis, a metabolic state where the body uses fat as the primary fuel instead of glucose. |
Flexitarian Diet
Also known as the semi-vegetarian diet, the flexitarian diet focuses on plant-based foods such as seeds, nuts, legumes, whole grains, vegetables, and fruits. Unlike vegetarian or vegan diets, the flexitarian diet accepts moderate amounts of animal products, including poultry, fish, and meat.
Because it’s less strict than traditional vegetarian diets, the flexitarian diet, when combined with resistance training, simplifies meeting your protein needs to enhance muscle growth. This diet can also help decrease inflammation, enhance blood flow, and improve body composition. Additionally, it can help increase glycogen storage; glycogen is a molecular form of carbohydrate stored in your body and provides energy for training.
Nordic Diet
As the name suggests, the Nordic diet incorporates foods that people in the Nordic countries eat. These include Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland. The diet emphasizes traditional, sustainably sourced foods such as legumes, low-fat dairy, seafood, whole grains, vegetables, and fruits. It also restricts foods that are refined, processed, or high in added sugar.
Since the Nordic diet allows foods rich in carbohydrates, it increases endurance and intermittent high-intensity performance due to glycogen. Foods that are easy to digest and rich in carbohydrates, like yogurt and fruits, help fuel your muscles while training.
In addition to encouraging these foods, the Nordic diet promotes foods high in healthy unsaturated fats and protein to ensure a well-balanced diet that will increase your training results.
Final Thoughts
Solid nutrition is crucial while training since your body operates at a higher level. Eating a range of nutrient-rich foods across various food groups is crucial. The diet plans featured in this article are balanced and provide nutrients that can help boost your training results.