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Muscle Building Nutrition 101
Shawn Lebrun asked:
Correct muscle building nutrition and a quality muscle building diet are often the most neglected parts of a weight training program.
Building muscle requires the right nutrition. Make no mistake, it’s an essential part of weight lifting and if you want to build muscle, you have to get it done. Bottom line — if you want to build muscle, you need to consume quality calories.
How many calories?
You need to consume more total calories in your muscle building diet than your body uses each day. It’s important to understand that the human body is constantly working, using and storing energy day and night.
It’s also very important to understand that in order to keep the machine rolling, you need to know what and how much to feed it. This is the single most important element in the muscle building process.
You need to feed your body a correct balance of calories, protein, carbohydrates and fat. Complete muscle building nutrition is the key. If you can find this key, your muscle building efforts will sky rocket.
Complete muscle building nutrition leads to optimal nutrition and optimal results. Over supplementation of certain nutrients will lead to imbalances in overall nutrition and is damaging to your weight lifting diet and health.
It is very important that you understand the importance of nutrition when building muscle. Without good nutrition and diet, your muscle gains will be non-existent and at best, poor.
As a muscle builder, it’s important that you get your muscle building nutrition down to a science. Your success is dependent on a well-balanced and complete diet that includes your optimal nutritional intake.
Poor dietary habits will hinder your progress and may eventually lead to injury to muscles and bones because they are not supplied with the nutrients needed to support the added stress of weight lifting.
What builds muscle?
Protein builds muscle. Without an adequate supply of protein, your body will not support any kind of muscle growth. If you supply your body with the optimum amount of protein, you ensure optimal growth; it’s as simple as that.
After all, you want to build muscle and to do that, you need a steady supply of high quality protein. You must include an optimal amount of protein in your muscle building diet in order to build and sustain muscle growth.
So how much protein should you include in your muscle building nutrition for maximum performance and muscle gain? Each of us has very different body types and the amount of protein will differ from individual to individual.
Protein intake will also depend on the amount of activity involved and how frequently you do it.
Your muscle building diet should be comprised of 30% to 40% protein, or about 1 to 1.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight. You will have to do a bit of experimenting at the beginning to find out your optimal protein intake.
What fuels muscle?
If you want to build muscle, you’re going to have to take in a lot of quality, complex carbohydrates. No question about it. You are going to have to fuel your body to handle heavy weight lifting.
You must include an optimal amount of carbohydrates in your muscle building nutrition program in order to fuel heavy weight lifting sessions.
Carbohydrates are a very important source of fuel for the muscles as well as the leading source of energy for your body. When you have a hard workout, your body draws on carbohydrates, which is stored as glycogen in the muscles.
Glycogen is the product of glucose, which comes from the breakdown of carbohydrates after the digestion of food. Glycogen is stored in the liver and muscle.
During a long intense muscle building session, you can easily deplete your glycogen reserves. When your muscles cannot get enough glycogen, fatigue sets in and your body begins to lose endurance and performance drastically reduces.
However, there is a way to delay the onset of muscle fatigue. By taking enough carbohydrates each day in your muscle building diet, you are ensuring that the amount of glycogen stored in the muscles is being constantly replenished.
Every meal must have sufficient carbohydrates to sustain your hard intense workouts It is suggested that your muscle building diet consist of 40% carbohydrates. If you want to build muscle, you need quality carbs every meal.
If you don’t consume enough quality carbohydrates, your body will resort to other fuel sources such as protein.
Protein is a second rate energy source. Protein’s primary job is to build muscle, not fuel it. Therefore, keep your body filled with grade A fuel to support and maximize your hard, intense muscle building workouts.
If you use the tips written above in making your own personal muscle building nutrition, you’ll be a lot healthier and you’ll succeed in having the rock-hard body you’ve always wanted.
But this can happen only by having good muscle building nutrition.
Muscle Growth
Correct muscle building nutrition and a quality muscle building diet are often the most neglected parts of a weight training program.
Building muscle requires the right nutrition. Make no mistake, it’s an essential part of weight lifting and if you want to build muscle, you have to get it done. Bottom line — if you want to build muscle, you need to consume quality calories.
How many calories?
You need to consume more total calories in your muscle building diet than your body uses each day. It’s important to understand that the human body is constantly working, using and storing energy day and night.
It’s also very important to understand that in order to keep the machine rolling, you need to know what and how much to feed it. This is the single most important element in the muscle building process.
You need to feed your body a correct balance of calories, protein, carbohydrates and fat. Complete muscle building nutrition is the key. If you can find this key, your muscle building efforts will sky rocket.
Complete muscle building nutrition leads to optimal nutrition and optimal results. Over supplementation of certain nutrients will lead to imbalances in overall nutrition and is damaging to your weight lifting diet and health.
It is very important that you understand the importance of nutrition when building muscle. Without good nutrition and diet, your muscle gains will be non-existent and at best, poor.
As a muscle builder, it’s important that you get your muscle building nutrition down to a science. Your success is dependent on a well-balanced and complete diet that includes your optimal nutritional intake.
Poor dietary habits will hinder your progress and may eventually lead to injury to muscles and bones because they are not supplied with the nutrients needed to support the added stress of weight lifting.
What builds muscle?
Protein builds muscle. Without an adequate supply of protein, your body will not support any kind of muscle growth. If you supply your body with the optimum amount of protein, you ensure optimal growth; it’s as simple as that.
After all, you want to build muscle and to do that, you need a steady supply of high quality protein. You must include an optimal amount of protein in your muscle building diet in order to build and sustain muscle growth.
So how much protein should you include in your muscle building nutrition for maximum performance and muscle gain? Each of us has very different body types and the amount of protein will differ from individual to individual.
Protein intake will also depend on the amount of activity involved and how frequently you do it.
Your muscle building diet should be comprised of 30% to 40% protein, or about 1 to 1.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight. You will have to do a bit of experimenting at the beginning to find out your optimal protein intake.
What fuels muscle?
If you want to build muscle, you’re going to have to take in a lot of quality, complex carbohydrates. No question about it. You are going to have to fuel your body to handle heavy weight lifting.
You must include an optimal amount of carbohydrates in your muscle building nutrition program in order to fuel heavy weight lifting sessions.
Carbohydrates are a very important source of fuel for the muscles as well as the leading source of energy for your body. When you have a hard workout, your body draws on carbohydrates, which is stored as glycogen in the muscles.
Glycogen is the product of glucose, which comes from the breakdown of carbohydrates after the digestion of food. Glycogen is stored in the liver and muscle.
During a long intense muscle building session, you can easily deplete your glycogen reserves. When your muscles cannot get enough glycogen, fatigue sets in and your body begins to lose endurance and performance drastically reduces.
However, there is a way to delay the onset of muscle fatigue. By taking enough carbohydrates each day in your muscle building diet, you are ensuring that the amount of glycogen stored in the muscles is being constantly replenished.
Every meal must have sufficient carbohydrates to sustain your hard intense workouts It is suggested that your muscle building diet consist of 40% carbohydrates. If you want to build muscle, you need quality carbs every meal.
If you don’t consume enough quality carbohydrates, your body will resort to other fuel sources such as protein.
Protein is a second rate energy source. Protein’s primary job is to build muscle, not fuel it. Therefore, keep your body filled with grade A fuel to support and maximize your hard, intense muscle building workouts.
If you use the tips written above in making your own personal muscle building nutrition, you’ll be a lot healthier and you’ll succeed in having the rock-hard body you’ve always wanted.
But this can happen only by having good muscle building nutrition.
Muscle Growth
Six Things You Must Have In Any Muscle Building Program
Shawn Lebrun asked:
If you’re looking to pack on solid muscle mass, you’ll definitely want to read this article.
Because there’s a lot of confusion on how to gain muscle mass and what it really takes. I want to give you 6 areas you absolutely, positively must focus on in any muscle building program you decide to use:
1: The proper amount of calories.
Since your diet is one of the most important keys to gaining muscle mass, you really need to know HOW many calories to eat, WHAT types of food to eat, and WHEN you should be eating them!
If you consistently under eat, you will NOT gain muscle mass. However, if you tend to overeat a lot, you will likely gain body fat.
So you have to be pretty accurate with your calorie intake in order to gain muscle mass without a lot of fat.
2: The correct approach to training in the gym.
Any muscle building program should give you MASS building techniques so that you can gain quality muscle weight, not just fat.
You want to make sure you’re not training too many days. That will stop your body from recovering and your muscles from repairing themselves.
You also want to make sure you’re not doing too many exercises, reps, and sets because that too could lead to overtraining.
We’ll touch more on it below, but the best approach for building muscle is to stick with the basic compound exercises (bench, squats, deadlifts, barbell curls) and use lower reps and just a few heavy sets.
3: The best possible supplements to help pack on weight.
Let’s get this straight…you do NOT need supplements to gain muscle. You need calories. And I’ve used just about every supplement on the market and many are a complete waste of money! However, there are a few exceptions and some can help you in the muscle gaining process, if you decide to use them.
The main supplements worth taking to gain quality muscle would have to be protein (whey, milk, or egg), creatine, glutamine, EFA’s, a multivitamin, and meal replacements.
Save your hard-earned money and time by avoiding the useless ones.
4: The proper amount of sets and reps for muscle growth without muscle breakdown.
Like we talked about above, you want to make sure you’re setting up your weight training to be the best use of your time and energy.
Most people train the wrong way for muscle growth. What I mean is, they do way too many reps and sets, thinking more is better.
A lower rep and set range is proven to speed up lean muscle growth while minimizing muscle breakdown.
After all, muscle growth occurs from overload. And it makes sense that one of the quickest ways to increase overload (weight lifted) is to lessen the amount of reps and increase the amount of weight.
5: The right balance of protein, carbs, and fats.
If you don’t get enough protein, you WILL NOT gain muscle. If you consume too many fat calories, you’ll gain mostly fat and not muscle. So it’s important that you get the right breakdown of protein, fats, and carbs for your specific body type.
Most advice shows that 50% of your calories should come from protein, 40% from carbs, 10 % from fats. But this is just a guideline. Find what works best for you and stick with that.
6: The right approach to cardio so that you do not burn off all your hard earned muscle weight.
Depending on your goals, cardio may help or actually hurt your chances of gaining weight. If you’re really looking to gain more weight fast, you may not want to be doing cardio at all.
That way, you don’t risk losing weight and muscle by expending calories that could have been used for muscle building.
If you’re looking to lose body fat while still gaining muscle, 3 to 5 cardio sessions a week is plenty.
For someone wanting to pack on the weight, I’d stick with just a couple sessions, none if you’re really desperately trying to gain weight.
Those are 6 basic areas you want to focus on with any muscle building program you use.
The main points again are:
1. Find out the proper amount of calories you need to gain muscle weight without adding a lot of fat.
2. You want to set up your weight training to be the best use of time and energy in the gym. This includes how often to train, how many muscle groups, and how long to rest, both between sets and between workouts.
3. If you decide to invest in supplements, stick with the proven ones like protein, creatine, and glutamine.
4. Using lower reps and fewer sets means you can use more intensity and overload on the muscles. High reps with low weight does nothing for muscle building.
5. Out of your total daily calorie needs, you want to ensure you’re getting the proper ratio of protein, carbs, and fats. You can start with the 50-40-10 ratio or 40-40-20 and go from there, depending on your results.
6. If you want to gain mass quickly, you may want to consider dropping cardio altogether. Or else, 3 to 5 sessions should be more than enough to continue gaining muscle while shedding fat.
Build Muscle
If you’re looking to pack on solid muscle mass, you’ll definitely want to read this article.
Because there’s a lot of confusion on how to gain muscle mass and what it really takes. I want to give you 6 areas you absolutely, positively must focus on in any muscle building program you decide to use:
1: The proper amount of calories.
Since your diet is one of the most important keys to gaining muscle mass, you really need to know HOW many calories to eat, WHAT types of food to eat, and WHEN you should be eating them!
If you consistently under eat, you will NOT gain muscle mass. However, if you tend to overeat a lot, you will likely gain body fat.
So you have to be pretty accurate with your calorie intake in order to gain muscle mass without a lot of fat.
2: The correct approach to training in the gym.
Any muscle building program should give you MASS building techniques so that you can gain quality muscle weight, not just fat.
You want to make sure you’re not training too many days. That will stop your body from recovering and your muscles from repairing themselves.
You also want to make sure you’re not doing too many exercises, reps, and sets because that too could lead to overtraining.
We’ll touch more on it below, but the best approach for building muscle is to stick with the basic compound exercises (bench, squats, deadlifts, barbell curls) and use lower reps and just a few heavy sets.
3: The best possible supplements to help pack on weight.
Let’s get this straight…you do NOT need supplements to gain muscle. You need calories. And I’ve used just about every supplement on the market and many are a complete waste of money! However, there are a few exceptions and some can help you in the muscle gaining process, if you decide to use them.
The main supplements worth taking to gain quality muscle would have to be protein (whey, milk, or egg), creatine, glutamine, EFA’s, a multivitamin, and meal replacements.
Save your hard-earned money and time by avoiding the useless ones.
4: The proper amount of sets and reps for muscle growth without muscle breakdown.
Like we talked about above, you want to make sure you’re setting up your weight training to be the best use of your time and energy.
Most people train the wrong way for muscle growth. What I mean is, they do way too many reps and sets, thinking more is better.
A lower rep and set range is proven to speed up lean muscle growth while minimizing muscle breakdown.
After all, muscle growth occurs from overload. And it makes sense that one of the quickest ways to increase overload (weight lifted) is to lessen the amount of reps and increase the amount of weight.
5: The right balance of protein, carbs, and fats.
If you don’t get enough protein, you WILL NOT gain muscle. If you consume too many fat calories, you’ll gain mostly fat and not muscle. So it’s important that you get the right breakdown of protein, fats, and carbs for your specific body type.
Most advice shows that 50% of your calories should come from protein, 40% from carbs, 10 % from fats. But this is just a guideline. Find what works best for you and stick with that.
6: The right approach to cardio so that you do not burn off all your hard earned muscle weight.
Depending on your goals, cardio may help or actually hurt your chances of gaining weight. If you’re really looking to gain more weight fast, you may not want to be doing cardio at all.
That way, you don’t risk losing weight and muscle by expending calories that could have been used for muscle building.
If you’re looking to lose body fat while still gaining muscle, 3 to 5 cardio sessions a week is plenty.
For someone wanting to pack on the weight, I’d stick with just a couple sessions, none if you’re really desperately trying to gain weight.
Those are 6 basic areas you want to focus on with any muscle building program you use.
The main points again are:
1. Find out the proper amount of calories you need to gain muscle weight without adding a lot of fat.
2. You want to set up your weight training to be the best use of time and energy in the gym. This includes how often to train, how many muscle groups, and how long to rest, both between sets and between workouts.
3. If you decide to invest in supplements, stick with the proven ones like protein, creatine, and glutamine.
4. Using lower reps and fewer sets means you can use more intensity and overload on the muscles. High reps with low weight does nothing for muscle building.
5. Out of your total daily calorie needs, you want to ensure you’re getting the proper ratio of protein, carbs, and fats. You can start with the 50-40-10 ratio or 40-40-20 and go from there, depending on your results.
6. If you want to gain mass quickly, you may want to consider dropping cardio altogether. Or else, 3 to 5 sessions should be more than enough to continue gaining muscle while shedding fat.
Build Muscle
