When I was in a band I saw a lot of pills. Not the kind that is going to make you stronger, but some of the people I encountered were very happy to pop at least a handful of them before lunchtime. I had thought this was the time that I would be most exposed to drugs in my life, but all of that paled in comparison to the rattling sound at the gym as another 18 multi-colored supplements were ingested by the blokes in the changing rooms trying to get jacked. So much promise, so much money, so few results.

The supplement game is big business. If you want to stand head and shoulders above the competition, then your product has to do things that the other supplements can’t. This results in a marketing overdrive of exaggeration, twisted science, and outright lies. The number of supplements claiming to be the one thing you need to get bigger, stronger, and more shredded is mind-boggling, but when you look into the claims made by the companies, and the evidence of the products themselves, you find a few sure bets, a couple of maybes, and a whole lot of absolute negatives.

My aim is to help you navigate the marketing spiel so you only put your hand in your pocket for something that actually has a benefit. This is the only guide you’ll ever need for which supplements to take to get stronger and more jacked.

Creatine Is a Sure Bet

Creatine is probably the most researched supplement in existence, and for good reason; it works. If you’re training to get bigger and stronger and had to pick just one supplement off the shelf to help you get it done, this would be what I’d recommend.

Creatine is a naturally occurring molecule found in your muscles. You can get some in your diet from eating meat or seafood, but unless you’re chowing down on half a cow every day, you’re going to want to supplement.

By the way, don’t believe the supplement marketing hype, there’s no truth that “newer” forms of creatine work better than anything else. Stick to good old-fashioned creatine monohydrate if you actually want results.

Creatine helps you lift more weight and increase muscle mass. As supplements go, it’s ticking the boxes we want to be ticked:

• Creatine increases your maximal strength and the number of total reps you can do.
• Creatine increases the amount of weight you can lift and therefore promotes greater muscle gain.
• People who take creatine experience an 8% greater increase in muscle strength and a 14% increase in weightlifting performance.
• Creatine increases the signals for muscle growth to occur and helps increase satellite muscle cell numbers.
• Creatine promotes quicker recovery from lifting.

The quickest way to saturate your muscles with creatine is to “load” it for five days by taking 20g split into four 5g doses. After this five day period, your muscles will be saturated, allowing for a maintenance dose of 3 to 5g to be taken daily after that.

To get the most out of creatine, taking it in the post-workout period with a meal including carbs and protein is the best bet.

Creatine also has a few more benefits outside of what you might expect. If you struggle to always get a good nights sleep, taking creatine can significantly reduce the normal drop in performance usually caused by not getting nearly enough shut-eye. If you’re not content with only making your muscles bigger, creatine actually promotes brain gains, too. A study found creatine to improve both working memory and intelligence.

Caffeine Is Also a Sure Bet

If you’re anything like me or 85% of the population, you can’t function in the morning without a cup of coffee. However, as well as preventing you from turning up at work looking like an extra from the Walking Dead, caffeine actually has a substantial effect on how much work you can do in the gym.

A quick review of the benefits of caffeine:

• Caffeine makes hard exercise feel easier and helps minimize fatigue so you can lift more and rest less during training.
• Caffeine increases the number of reps to failure you can do in a session.
• Caffeine increases the amount of weight you can lift for one rep.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of when to take caffeine and how much, I want to cover a few gentle words of warning:

• Do not take caffeine too close to bed if you actually want to sleep. Caffeine has a half-life of around 8 hours. That means that if you take 300mg of caffeine before an 8 pm workout, you’ll still have 150mg of caffeine dancing about in your body at midnight. Considering how important sleep is for your training and recovery, staying up all night playing Sporcle on your phone will be detrimental.
• Caffeine is addictive. The more you use it, the better a tolerance you get for it. You may want to take a few days off here and there to re-sensitize yourself to its effects.
• You might be sensitive to caffeine. If you don’t drink coffee or energy drinks, do not go and smash down two scoops of a caffeinated pre-workout supplement before your training session unless hiding under the bench press shaking like a 6-week old puppy for four hours sounds like fun to you.

Several different doses of caffeine can work to your advantage while training, depending on your tolerance and how much of an effect you want to see:

• Doses as low as 3mg per kg of body weight can be effective for increasing performance.
• Only 5mg per kg of body weight is shown to be a dose that works well without too many side effects.
• Keep in mind that 6mg caffeine per kg of body weight is the best dose to improve strength. However, assuming you weigh 85kg, that’s 510 mg of caffeine about equal to 6 cups of coffee or 3.5 large energy drinks, and taking that much in one go could potentially turn you into a gibbering wreck.
• I recommend taking 3mg per kg of body weight of caffeine 60 minutes before a training session in the form of caffeine pills, coffee, or energy drinks as a starting point. Based on your response, you can adjust up or down from there.

If you already love coffee, you probably don’t care about the bonus benefits of caffeine. You already know it’s awesome. Here are a few though benefits about caffeine, just in case you didn’t quite love it enough yet:

• Improves mental choice reaction time, concentration and memory
• Improves focus
• Reduces appetite
• Increases metabolism
• Increases breakdown of fat

Moving on to Maybes

Moving on from the sure bets, we approach the realm of the maybes. With much less research backing or general use, I wouldn’t be too quick to spend my hard earned cash on something that I wasn’t totally sure about, but if you find yourself browsing the supplement aisle, you might at least pause to have a look. If anything, see these as the icing on an already very tasty cake.

Beta-alanine Is a Maybe

Beta-alanine is mostly taken by endurance athletes to increase muscle endurance and improve fatigue. Despite having a lot of evidence for helping people perform exercise lasting at least 60 seconds, beta-alanine may have some benefit for lifters training to get bigger:

Beta-alanine may help performance for very high rep (15-20) strength training. Very recently, a study by José Luis Maté-Muñoz compared two groups of people in a five-week weight training study, where one group were randomly given beta-alanine and the other a sugar pill placebo. The group of people taking beta-alanine improved their one rep max and lifted more kilograms overall compared to the placebo group.

You can take beta-alanine in the following dosages:

• Take a loading dose of 80mg per kg of body weight for the first 4 to 10 weeks.
• Take a maintenance dose of 40mg per kg of body weight after that.

Citrulline Malate Is Also a Maybe

Citrulline is used to reduce fatigue for both cardio and lifting. It should help you reduce fatigue, and therefore perform more reps and sets in a session than you would normally.

A study showed that supplementing with citrulline malate increased the ability to perform higher reps to failure of lower body exercises. In a later study, two groups of people did three sets of chin-ups, pull-ups, and push-ups to failure. One group were randomly given citrulline malate, while the other group of people were given a placebo. A week later, the groups were reversed. The researchers found that the group that supplemented with citrulline malate were able to perform more reps to failure.

If you want to try citrulline malate, take 6 to 8g around an hour before your training sessions.

Supplements to Avoid

In an article recommending supplements, it might seem a little bit strange to have a section containing supplements to avoid. However, there are a bazillion worthless supplements out there and there are two that come up time and time again in conversations in the gym and in chats on the internet. In trying to keep you from falling into the same useless supplement money pit as I did, I’ll address two chronic offenders here.

Avoid BCAAs

Branched-chain amino acids are usually touted as improving muscle building, reducing fatigue, and generally giving you superpowers. The truth is a bit different. Rather than helping you build muscle, BCAAs actually make the process worse.

Studies have shown that they don’t do anything to reduce muscle soreness, and they don’t do anything to reduce fatigue.

Avoid HMB

HMB is used to promote muscle gains while stopping muscle breakdown. Recently, the headlines around this supplement have been extraordinary and people rushed to dose up on the stuff. However, as with a lot of supplements, the claims made were too far-fetched.

In a recent study, HMB was said to have contributed to literally ridiculous gains in muscle mass, more so than that produced by anabolic steroids. Frankly, I would not believe the results of this study, and the rest of the literature on HMB is severely lacking. This is one supplement where you should definitely not believe what you read.

Supplement Bonus Round

We’re not quite done. There exist a couple of bonus supplements. These supplements are beneficial to your health, and despite being a sure bet for health reasons, there is at least some evidence pointing toward them regarding increased muscle building (making them a win-win in my book for muscle building and overall health).

Fish Oil – As well as having a multitude of health benefits making supplementing with fish oil or eating fatty fish a no-brainer, fish oil also has emerging evidence pointing to a potential for helping build muscle.

• Fish oil increases the rate of protein synthesis
• Fish oil enhances the effect of weight training

Vitamin D – Vitamin D is critical for survival and improves bone health, immune health, increases cognition, and reduces the risks of cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and heart disease. If that’s not enough reason to get more of it, recently it has been found that vitamin D improves recovery from training and may enhance muscle growth.

Keep It Simple

Taking supplements for strength and muscle gain doesn’t have to be confusing, time-consuming, or expensive if you know what to take when to take it, and why. Stick with a few sure bets, dabble with a couple of maybes if you like, but keep your money firmly in your wallet when it comes to everything else. Streamline your supplements and then pay more attention to smashing it in the gym and eating right.

The post Supplements to Make You Stronger appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

As time went by, my lifting improved. My muscles grew and so did my knowledge. As I learned more about what makes people jacked, however, the advice I received in the gym remained the same. From “buy a bigger dinner plate” to “drink a gallon of milk with your meals,” it seemed like muscle gain was all about consuming a huge amount calories. While the advice “eat big to get big” is not without merit, it misses the larger picture. Excess calories alone are not the be all and end all for muscle gain.

Muscle Gain Is Not Just About Calories

Let’s try a little thought experiment. Do you know the major difference between carbs, fat, and protein? All three contain oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen, but only protein contains nitrogen. It might have been a while since you sat through a chemistry class, so allow me to make it simple. No nitrogen means no protein, which means no muscle. Have you ever tried getting jacked on a diet of 100% olive oil? It’s not going to work because you’re not growing any muscle no matter how many bottles of the stuff you pour down your throat.

If you don’t get enough protein, you’re not even in line to build muscle, as was shown in a recent study. The study participants were divided into low and high protein groups and it was determined that even when getting 40% less than their maintenance calories, the high protein group still gained an impressive amount of muscle. In contrast, the lower protein group only maintained their prior amount of muscle mass.

Gaining Muscle In a Calorie Deficit Is Not Optimal

While fat loss or weight gain are both energy-dependent processes, muscle gain is the result of the integration of training and nutritional stimuli—namely, lifting weights and consuming protein. To maximize muscle gains a calorie surplus is important, just not for the reasons you might think. What’s referred to as “protein turnover” is happening constantly in your body. To actually end up with a net gain of muscle mass, you need muscle protein synthesis to be greater than muscle protein breakdown. This is what makes a calorie surplus more efficient than a calorie deficit for packing on slabs of muscle.

Your body is pretty busy. It doesn’t just sit around idly looking at Instagram, waiting for something to happen before jumping into action. There are a millions of internal processes going on at any one time, and none more so than right after you’ve eaten. This is the time when food is digested, absorbed, and used. It’s also a time when muscle protein breakdown is minimized. The more food you eat, the less time you spend in a caloric deficit. The less muscle you break down, in theory, the more muscle you build.

It’s Not Just About Eating More

Now, before you decide to construct a diet of a million protein shakes supplemented by unlimited pastries to minimize protein synthesis and put on as much size as possible, consider how quickly you can actually build muscle.

People equate fat loss with muscle gain, but they are not the same. If you are trying to build muscle, you’re going to be playing the long game. Getting as fat as possible isn’t going to help get you bigger muscles, and this is where a lot of people go wrong. In reality, you’re looking at a 0.5% of your body weight to be gained as muscle per month, and much less than that when you’ve been training for a long time. Gaining one or two kilograms of muscle a year is winning when you’re advanced, so it makes sense to not try to gain weight too quickly. If you don’t mind getting fatter at the same time, that’s cool, but there’s also a way to gain muscle without getting chubby.

Aim for a 200 to 300 kcal surplus, to begin with. This often works out to 35 to 40 kcal per kilogram of body weight. This is a great starting point, but you will have to adjust based on real-world results.

Decide On Your Protein Intake

The amount of protein you should eat in a day is usually measured by your day end total. I’m here to tell you there’s a better way. Despite the mantra of “make sure you hit your total protein intake by the end of the day” being extremely common, the number of protein feedings per day for muscle gain is more complex than that. In fact, your total protein intake is less a recommendation, and more a by-product of your protein frequency.

To build muscle, you have to send a signal to your body, and for this to work as well as possible, you need to eat enough protein at every feeding. Eating one huge meal a day will send a signal for sure, but it will only send it once. Eating lots of tiny amounts of protein won’t really send a signal at all.

In a study that specifically looked at rate of protein frequency, the subjects either consumed a whey shake of 25g in one serving or 25g split into 10 servings over three hours containing 2.5g of protein in each serving. Despite the fact that the same amount of protein was taken overall, the 25g of protein taken in one serving spiked amino acids (the building blocks of protein) in the blood more than when the 25g was split. Where muscle growth is concerned, a larger spike of amino acids in the blood is a very good sign that muscle gains are on the way.

Our goal needs to be that we send the right signals to tell the body to build as much muscle as possible and to send that signal as many times as we can. To do this, make sure to eat 0.4g/kg/body weight to 0.5g/kg/body weight of quality protein at each meal—or 0.3g/kg/kg/body weight of protein from whey if you are having a shake. In the evening, to make sure you take advantage of the longer fasting period, a slightly greater pre-bed protein feeding of 0.5g/kg/body weight to 0.6g/kg/body weight is a good idea.

My recommendation is to get somewhere between 4-6 protein feedings of the amounts listed above per day. The number should be based on personal preference, time of training, and how long you’re actually awake for. Based on the evidence, fewer meals than this are not really going to get it done. Simply mainlining protein shakes all day also doesn’t give the best results because protein needs to drop to a certain level in the blood before more protein can have the largest effect on muscle building. Spreading your feedings out is important. If you’ve been at two or three meals per day before this, that’s the first thing I’d look at before changing before adjusting anything else.

Alternatively, if you’ve spent years guzzling down 12 protein shakes a day, dropping back to 4-6 protein meals will give you better results.

With 4-6 protein feedings a day, specific timing of protein intake around your training is of little importance. By eating within two hours before your training session and again within two hours after, you’re covering all your bases.

Set the Rest Of Your Macros

Setting macros can be daunting, but it needn’t be as long as your total fat stays above 20%. While carbohydrates are often thought of as being particularly helpful for muscle building, once a sufficient amount of protein has been ingested, carbs don’t do anything to help muscle protein synthesis. Smashing a load of dextrose after your training session isn’t going to achieve much in terms of muscle growth except leave you feeling a bit hungry while costing you a ton of calories. Calories could be better spent elsewhere—brownie and a cup of tea anyone?

Despite what you might think, there isn’t much solid evidence that carbs before training will do much to help your workout. Anecdotally, and despite the lack of research, I have found that some people simply hate training without eating carbs first. If you go into your session feeling like you’re going to kill it because you’ve had some carbs, then that’s reason enough to keep them in. If you don’t care, don’t feel the need to eat them around your workout because you think it’s the right thing to do.

Keeping overall fat intake too low has been shown to negatively affect testosterone production. Going too low in fat is not going to help with muscle building in the long term.

Where fat and carbohydrates are concerned, I feel that personal preference plays the biggest role. I would not recommend letting fat intake dip below 20% of total calories due to the potential for a less than ideal anabolic hormonal profile, with carbs making up the rest.

In summary, here are my dietary recommendations for muscle gain:

• Consume 4-6 meals containing 0.4 to 0.5g/kg/BW per day or use whey shakes containing 0.3g/kg/BW.
• The last meal of the day should be slightly higher in protein at around 0.5 to 0.6g/kg/BW.
• Consume protein within two hours before training.
• Consume protein within two hours after training.
• Set total energy at 200 to 300 kcal above maintenance, or 35 to 40 kcal/kg/BW.
• Don’t consume less than 20% of total energy intake of fat for a long period of time.
• After protein and fat intakes are set, make up the rest with carbohydrates.
• Base your fat and carb intake on personal preference.

The advice to “just eat more” isn’t enough. To maximize muscle gain, make sure you get the right amount and frequency of protein throughout the day as your number one priority.

You migt also like:

• Top 10 Foods To Gain Muscle Mass
• What To Eat Before Bed To Build Muscle Overnight
• The Modern Myths Of Muscle Building
• A Practical Muscle Growth Plan For The Skinny Guy

The post Eat Big to Get Big? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.