Life Wellness & Health

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First off, you do not need supplements in order to gain muscle. Supplements make a 20% difference in your results. It’s the hard work, eating whole foods and recovery that is the other 80% to you reaching your goals. There are many people that are muscular without taking supplements, but honestly most of us do not have the time and/or the dedication it takes to eat a balanced diet and work out consistently. This is where supplements come in to play. Supplements do not build muscle for us, but it helps our body receive the nutrients we are lacking to build muscle. You still need to eat properly, work hard in the gym and rest in order to build muscle.

The question many people ask is, “there are so many supplements out there, what should I take?” The answer is not very simple because each supplement is designed to do different things. Everybodys body reacts differently to a supplement depending on each person’s needs and bodily chemistry. With that being said, there are 4 supplements that every person needs and you will find them in the cabinet of any bodybuilders home: Multivitamins, Protein Powder, Creatine, and EFA’s

Multi Vitamin

With all the processed foods inundating our supermarkets, it’s almost impossible to get all your nutritional requirements from food alone. Even if you eat nothing but whole foods, you would have to eat a large amount of food to meet all your nutritional requirements due to the inferior soils used today.

Your body is a complex machine that conducts millions of functions simultaneously. Each nutrient contributes to thousands of essential reactions that make these functions possible such as B12 for healthy red blood cell production, Iodine for thyroid regulation, and B6 for protein metabolism. Being deficient in just one nutrient is detrimental to thousands of chemical reactions within your body, which in turn will make it much harder for your body to run at its full potential.

People who put their bodies under physical stress 3-4 days a week have a higher nutritional requirement than people who live a sedentary lifestyle. I’m sure you’ve noticed after a hard workout you’re very hungry. It’s your body telling you it is low on fuel and needs to be replenished.

To make sure my body is not lacking in nutrients, I like to take multivitamins with a higher potency for two reasons:

Some multivitamins use inferior ingredients and not all of that 4000% Daily Value of Riboflavin or whatever it may say will be digested by your body. On the higher potency multi vitamins, I sometimes like to split up the dosage throughout the day as there are some people in the medical field that think there are too many nutrients for your body to digest at one time.
My body’s demands for nutrients on days that I workout are not the same as the days that I rest. I don’t want to be low on any nutrient if my body needs it. I’ve even heard some people on days of extreme stress like to take two doses a day; one in the morning and one after a really hard workout. The good thing about multivitamins are many of the nutrients such as vitamin C and Vitamin B are water soluble and will be excreted out of you, depending on your body’s needs.

A good multivitamin I would suggest is Animal Pak by Universal Nutrition. It is made with ingredients that are easily digestible by the body and they contain a good balance between key nutrients for building muscle, minerals for performance and amino acids for recovery.

Protein powder

We all know in order to build muscle you need to eat plenty of calories and especially protein. The rule of thumb for protein is to consume 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight for muscle building. With any good muscle building plan, you need to spread those calories into 5-7 meals a day to keep your metabolism high and your nutrient intake steady. There are some medical professionals who think the body cannot digest more than 35 grams of protein per sitting and therefore is another good reason to spread out your protein intake. With our busy schedules, it is very hard for any of us to eat that many meals a day and the protein shake is the perfect substitute for 2-3 of those meals.

The three most important times to take a protein shake:

Morning: Drink a shake in the morning as soon as you get up because it is quickly digested. Your body has not had any protein for however long you have been sleeping and if your body goes into a catabolic state it starts to eat away your hard earned muscle. I drink shake as soon as you get up and then 30 minutes later I eat a normal breakfast.

Pre-workout: I prefer to take a protein shake before I workout instead of eating a meal because your body digests whey protein powder within an hour as opposed to chicken or fish which takes your body 2 to 2.5 hours to digest. That way I don’t feel bloated at the gym and I know the protein is going straight to my muscles instead of sitting in my stomach waiting to be digested.

Post workout: This is the absolute most important time to take a protein shake. This is the beginning of the all important “recovery” phase. Your muscles have been broken down from a strenuous workout and you need to get protein to them fast in order to repair and build new muscle.

It is important to take any protein powder, but I think whey protein is the highest quality protein for building muscle and as a bonus it’s also one the cheapest. Whey contains all the essential amino acids for building new muscle and is also high in bioavailability so our body can digest a high amount of it. Whey is also high in BCAA which are the amino acids, leucine, isoleucine, and valine, which help with muscle recovery and muscular breakdown. You can get a 2 lb jug of Optimum Nutrition Gold Standard for under $23 dollars.

Creatine

Has been known to build muscle since the early 1900′s but, creatine was first introduced to professional athletes during the 1992 Olympics. Many English athletes admitted after the Olympics to training with creatine, which angered other athletes as they disputed that “it gave the English an unfair advantage” as they won gold medals in several track and field events as well as rowing. No penalties or disqualifications were passed out by the Olympic committee as they discovered creatine is a naturally occurring nutrient found in every skeletal muscle in the body. They also determined that creatine is abundant in foods such as red meat and fish and it would be impossible to determine if an athlete supplemented or attained it from natural food sources.

Over the last 15 years, creatine has been the most used supplement by athletes and people wanting to gain muscle. The popularity of this supplement is not a surprise as the main function of creatine is to give muscles extra energy to perform strenuous activities. Creatine is essential for short duration, high intensity exercise such as sprints or weight lifting with a max of 8 reps. When muscles are used to lift weights or to perform any kind of work, ATP is broken down to ADP and energy is released. The amount of ATP stored in the muscle will only fuel a maximum effort such as lifting a weight for 10 to 15 seconds. After that, the muscle must rely on creatine to restock its supply of ATP. Creatine promotes intense lifting by replenishing the necessary energy molecule ATP, but there are also other muscle building effects that make this supplement so popular:

Creatine buffers the development of lactic acid so you can train harder and longer.
Creatine increases muscle volumization by increasing the amount of water stored in the cells. Do not confuse this with water retention as this is intracellular water storage and not intercellular water retention. This is important as intracellular water storage boosts hydration, resulting in higher rate of protein synthesis.
Studies have shown that creatine decreases mental fatigue by increasing the amount of oxygenated red blood cells into the brain.
Creatine can increase strength by 5-15% over a short period of time. It’s also not uncommon to gain 5 to 10 lbs in a month.
Creatine increases the amount of growth hormone release during exercise. Your body naturally releases growth hormones as you exercise and creatine allows your body to lift heavier loads more frequently, which naturally causes your body to increase the amount of growth hormone secretion.

Like any other supplement, there is the perfect time and amount to take in order to maximize the effects of creatine. Many say you should “load” creatine, which means, 5-10 grams a day for 5-7 days, but I don’t think you have to do this in order to achieve your desired results. You may achieve your results faster by “loading” your body with creatine, but if you add it to your sports drink before and after your workouts, you will gradually achieve the same results. Absorption time depends on if you take it on an empty stomach and if you take it with a simple sugar like juice or a sports drink.

Creatine only stays in your system for 1 to 1.5 hours and if it is not used it is excreted out of your body. To maximize the short saturation period, you should take 5-10 grams of creatine 45 minutes to an hour before your workouts so your workout coincides with the saturation period. You should also take 5-10 grams post workout as you want to keep your muscles inundated with creatine during the “anabolic window”.