Nutrition and Supplementation Notes
As mentioned, I will not go into too much depth but provide enough for you to understand the fundamentals to nutrition and supplementation when building muscle.
That’s a whole other topic on its own.
One thing that you need to understand is that in order to build muscle, you need a good diet. A workout program is only half of the work.
1. Nutrition
I recommend starting off with our calorie calculator which will show you how many calories you need to take in order to build muscle.
There is no need to bulk and eat excessive amounts of calories. Crazy surpluses like 500-1000 calories above your amount to maintain your weight is unnecessary and will do nothing more but make you fat.
Try your best to eat clean food. There’s no need for you to be on a perfect diet, but just make sure that you are not over indulging on junk food.
Make sure that you are eating enough protein. While, there are a lot of reports that claim that it is not necessary to consume exactly 1g of protein per 1lbs of your bodyweight, there are also a lot of reports that claim that this amount promotes anabolism and ensures muscle preservation.
2. Supplementation
You don’t really need supplements to build muscle. That being said, supplements will help you improve muscle gain through their anabolic properties.
Whey protein is a must. Drink whey protein after your workout to ensure that you stop the post-workout catabolic effect and enter an anabolic state. Whey protein shortly after a workout has been shown to create a favourable environment for growth hormone production. Increasing post-workout whey protein to 40g is shown to enhance protein synthesis by up to 20%.
The second one is creatine. I have written an in-depth guide to creatine (there’s an infographic there) where I cover everything from what is creatine to the muscle building properties of creatine. The TLDR of creatine is that it helps with power output during your workout and ensure that you give it your 100% when exercising.
Beta Alanine will also help you increase the intensity of your workouts.
Lastly, omega 3s. They help with muscle inflammation, increase recovery time, and create an anabolic environment for your muscles through mTOR pathways. I have written an in-depth article about how omega 3 fatty acids improve muscle growth.