Supplements
Supplements are an important part of any weight training regimen. Real food gives you the real gains, but supplements do help and have a role in achieving your goals.
First, a good sports multivitamin is very beneficial for growth. This will keep your body healthy and give it all the vitamins it needs. When you’re training hard, you’re getting rid of all these different vitamins and minerals through your sweat. Yet if your body doesn’t have these essential building blocks, it won’t grow.
You also need a good protein powder, preferably a whey isolate or whey isolate concentrate mix. These protein powders should be of high quality and taste good. Protein drinks supply you with the necessary proteins and amino acids you need to grow. I recommend having a protein drink 90 minutes before you train, right after your workout, and one before you go to bed.
Creatine also works well. The creatine monohydrate and an insulin spike will help you achieve some great results and give you some nice strength and size gains. You don’t want to take in creatine on a constant basis because overuse of this supplement is not good for your kidneys. It will give you some good results, just watch your intake and use it in moderation. You can also use Kre- Alkalyn, which doesn’t bloat you as much. I feel this is the superior version of creatine, as long as you use an insulin spike (like a simple sugar) with it. Kre-Alkalyn will give you very good results.
One supplement I’ve been using lately is nitrous oxide, which helps give more blood to your muscles and enhances your pumps. I feel the pumps I’ve gotten from this have helped me achieve some fantastic growth. I would thoroughly recommend using a good nitric oxide as a supplement.
There are so many supplements on the market that you could go broke trying them all. The ones I’ve listed above, as well as glutamine and ZMA, are worth the money. Most of the other supplements you see advertised are rubbish. They don’t work; it’s as simple as that. Eating the proper food and handling simple, basic supplements such as protein powder and whey isolates at the proper times will give you better results than all these other products that promise the world but deliver little.
Plus, you’ll save yourself from wasting a ton of money.
With so many of the supplements these days, you’re just paying for the marketing. You’re paying for the big brands to have a good pro- bodybuilder as their spokesman. There are a lot of products that are just as good, if not better than the ones you see advertised. Those products are often of a better quality, and will give you greater gains, for half the price.
Remember: Eating good, fresh chicken and meat is one of the best ways to grow. I used to rely on a lot of milk and protein drinks, but I found that I got the best results and gains from eating real food. As soon as I switched to eating real food most of the time, my gains became much greater.
In order to make the right decisions when selecting your supplements you need to know the basics of what to really look for in a supplement to know that you are getting the most out of it. To give you an example of this, in my early days I was taking a Protein powder after every time I trained. It wasn’t until after about a year of taking this one protein supplement that I was told it was not being absorbed efficiently as fast as it needed to be after my workout. This meant I was not getting the full use out of this powder. If I had known I needed an Isolate Protein instead of a Concentrate directly after my workout, my results could have been a lot better. I think it’s vital that you understand what you need to know when selecting a supplement otherwise you will just get sold something that may not work from someone with little knowledge about how good it is for building muscle.
In order to build muscle you first of all need to understand the many different types of protein and how they can help you. Next is an article from my good friend Lyle McDonald which will teach you all you need to know about Protein
Protein for Growth by Lyle McDonald
http://www.bodyrecomposition.com
Protein Digestability
Researchers define protein digestibility as the amount of protein absorbed into the body relative to the amount that was consumed. A quick note: researchers are actually measuring nitrogen absorption and excretion, rather than protein or amino acids per se, but I don’t want to get into the technical details of that here.
So, for example, they might feed someone 50 grams of protein and then see how much comes out the other end. Let’s say that 5 grams of protein show up in the poop. That means that 45 grams of the 50 grams ingested were actually absorbed and that protein would have a digestibility of 90% (45 grams absorbed/50 grams ingested = 0.90 *100 = 90%). If 50 grams of protein were fed and 25 grams showed up in the poop, that protein would have a digestibility of only 50% (25 grams absorbed/50 grams ingested = 0.25 * 100 = 25%). Get it? I want to note that a lot of very silly claims are often made about protein digestibility.
Companies selling protein powders argue that the digestibility of their product is impossibly high, vegetarians usually ignore the research on this topic to claim that vegetarian proteins have higher digestibility than animal source proteins, on and on it goes. The research on this is extremely clear and I’ve reproduced the chart from The Protein Book on the digestibility of common foods below.
Food Source………………… Protein Digestibility (%)
Egg................................................................97
Milk and Cheese...........................................97
Mixed US Diet..............................................96
Peanut Butter.................................................95
Meat and Fish................................................94
Whole Wheat.................................................86
Oatmeal..........................................................86
Soybeans........................................................78
Rice................................................................76
Source: National Research Council. Recommended Dietary Allowances, 10th ed. National Academy Press, 1989.
Looking at the chart above, two major things stand out. The first is that, contrary to the occasional vegetarian claim, vegetable source proteins have a significantly lower digestibility than animal source proteins. This actually has relevance for an issue beyond the scope of this article: protein requirements. Because they provide less available protein from consumption, a larger amount of vegetable proteins have to be consumed to meet human (or athletic) requirements.
The second is that commonly available animal-source food source proteins have extremely high digestibilities, 94-97%. This means that for every 100 grams of protein consumed, 94-97 grams are being digested and assimilated by the gut.
What are Amino Acids ?
Amino acids are simply the building blocks of protein. Depending on which reference source you use, there are 18-22 different amino acids that occur in the human food supply.
Whole food proteins are simply long chains of these amino acids bonded together.
Typically whole food proteins are extremely long chains of amino acids, as I discussed in “What are good sources of protein ?”
In regards to digestibility, these long chains are cut into smaller and smaller chunks during digestion until only single amino acids and chains of 2-3 amino acids are actually absorbed.
I’d note that individual amino acids are often sold for either health or sports performance purposes. Readers may be familiar with the amino acid L-tryptophan which is often sold as a sleep aid. L-Tryptophan converts to serotonin in the brain which is involved in sleep. Take L– tryptophan on an empty stomach and you get drowsy because of increased brain serotonin levels.
In the athletic realm, all kinds of products are available. The branched-chain amino acids (BCAA) L-leucine, L- isoleucine and L-valine have been pushed for years to athletes.
Another example is L-carnitine, an amino acid involved in fat metabolism that has been sold as a fat loss aid for years (it doesn’t work by the way). I, myself, have recommended the amino acid L-tyrosine (which converts in the brain to adrenaline and noradrenaline) as part of a stimulant cocktail to improve performance.
You may be wondering what the ‘L-’ means above; it refers to the chemical structure of the amino acid (to be technical, it’s an organic chemistry notation that stands for levorotary). There are also ‘D-’ amino acids (the ‘D’ stands for dextrorotary). The human body only uses the ‘L-’ form of amino acids; the ‘D-’ form can actually be toxic.
Essential vs. Non essential Amino Acids
I should note that the amino acids are usually subdivided into essential amino acids and inessential or non- essential amino acids.
It’s important to note that both are absolutely essential for life, the term inessential/non-essential simply means that those amino acids don’t need to be obtain from the diet; the body can make them. The essential amino acids can only come from the diet; hence they are ‘essential’.
I should also note things aren’t actually quite this simple, some amino acids which are inessential under normal conditions can become essential under others; glutamine is perhaps the most well known example. Under