Michael Matthews's Blog, page 153

What the Kings of the Multi-Billion Dollar Health and Fitness Industry Don’t Want You to Know

I’m going to tell you something that the kings of the multi-multi-billion dollar health and fitness industry don’t want you to know.

You don’t need any of their crap to get ripped and to look better than you ever have before.

You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars per month on the worthless supplements that steroid freaks shill in advertisements.
You don’t need to constantly change up your exercise routines to “confuse” your muscles. I’m pretty sure that muscles lack cognitive abilities, so this approach is a good way to just confuse you instead.
You don’t need to burn through buckets of protein powder every month, stuffing down enough protein each day to feed a third-world village.
You don’t need to toil away in the gym for a couple of hours per day doing tons of sets, supersets, drop sets, giant sets, etc. (As a matter of fact, this is a great way to stunt gains and get nowhere.)
You don’t need to grind out hours and hours of boring cardio to shed ugly belly fat and love handles and get a shredded six-pack. (How many flabby treadmillers have you come across over the years?)
You don’t need to completely abstain from “cheat” foods while getting down to single-digit body fat percentages. If you plan cheat meals correctly, you can actually speed your metabolism up and accelerate fat loss.

These are just a small sampling of the harmful fallacies commonly believed by many, and they will bury you in a rut of frustration that inevitably leads to you quitting because of little or no real results.

That was actually my motivation for creating Bigger Leaner Stronger: For many years now, I’ve had friends, family, acquaintances, and co-workers approach me for fitness advice, and they were almost always convinced of many strange, unworkable ideas about diet and exercise.

By educating them in the same way as I’m about to educate you, I’ve helped people melt away fat, build lean, attractive muscle, and not only look great but feel great too. And, while helping friends, friends of friends, and family is fulfilling, I want to be able to help thousands (or tens or even hundreds of thousands!). Thus, Bigger Leaner Stronger was born.

Now, where did the many fitness and nutrition myths come from? Well, I don’t want to waste your time with the boring history of the world of weightlifting, supplements, and information resources, but the long story short is simply this:

When people are willing to spend big amounts of money on certain types of products or to solve specific problems, there will never be a scarcity of new, “cutting edge” things for them to empty their wallets on, and there will always be scores of brilliant marketers inventing new schemes to keep people spending.

It’s pretty simple, really. All we have to do is look where most people get their training and nutritional advice from. Almost everyone gets it from one or more of these three sources: magazines, personal trainers, or friends…and you’ll almost never learn anything useful from any of them.

How can I make such bold claims, you wonder? Because I’ve seen it all, tried it all, and while I don’t know it all, I do know what works and what doesn’t.

Every Time You Read a Bodybuilding Magazine, You’re Getting Slapped in the Face

Last time I looked, close to a dozen bodybuilding magazines were waiting on the shelves of Barnes and Noble, all shiny and ready to lure in victims like Venus flytraps. Simply put, every time you buy one of the big bodybuilding magazines, you’re paying to be lied to.

Here’s a fun fact that you probably didn’t know: MuscleMag, IronMan, Flex, Muscular Development, Muscle & Fitness, Muscle Media, and the rest of the mainstream bodybuilding magazines are owned by supplement companies and are used simply as mouthpieces for their products. Yup. MuscleMag is controlled by MuscleTech; IronMan is controlled by MuscleLink; Muscular Development is Twinlab’s shill piece; Muscle & Fitness and Flex are owned by Joe Weider and are thus promotion catalogues for his companies, such as Weider, Metaform, MuscleTribe, and several others; and MuscleMedia is the EAS cheerleader.

The primary goal of these magazines is to sell supplements for the companies controlling them, and they work damn well. The magazines push products in various ways. They have pretty advertisements all over the place, they regularly run “advertorials” (advertisements disguised as informative articles), and they balance the lot of sales pitches with some actual articles that provide workout and nutrition advice (which also, in many cases, end with product recommendations of some kind).

So, this is the first blow that magazines deal to you: They give you a lot of “advice” that is geared first and foremost to selling you products, not helping you achieve your goals.

The supplement companies know that if they can just keep getting these magazines into people’s hands, they will keep selling products. So, how do they ensure that you will keep buying? By coming up with a constant flow of new advice and ideas, of course.

And this is the second, probably more harmful, blow: They inundate you with all kinds of false ideas about what it takes to get into great shape. If they told the simple truth every month, they would have maybe 20 articles or so that they could re-print over and over. Instead, they get quite creative with all kinds of sophisticated (but useless) workout routines, “tricks,” and diets (that include certain supplements to really MAXIMIZE the effectiveness, of course).

The bottom line is that you can’t trust these types of magazines. They are all either owned by or financially dependent upon supplement companies, and what I outlined above is the game they play.

Most Personal Trainers Are Just a Waste of Money…End of Story

Most personal trainers are a waste of time and money.

Every week I see trainers who either have no clue what they’re doing or who just don’t care about their clients. These poor people are paying $50-75 per hour to do silly, ineffective workout routines that usually consist of the wrong exercises done with bad form (and they make little or no gains).

And, let’s not forget that most personal trainers aren’t even in good shape themselves, which always confuses me. How can you honestly sell yourself as a fitness expert when you’re flabby and out of shape? Who could possibly believe you? Well, for some reason, these types of trainers get business all the time, and their clients almost always stay flabby and out of shape themselves.

To compound the disservice, most trainers don’t even bother giving their clients nutritional plans, which really ensures lackluster gains. The fact is that 70-80% of how you look is a reflection of how you eat. Fat, skinny, ripped, whatever—working out is only 20-30% of the equation. Eat wrong, and you will stay fat no matter how much cardio you do; eat wrong, and you will stay skinny and weak no matter how much you struggle with weights. Eat right, however, and you can unlock the maximum potential gains from working out: rapid, long-term fat loss and muscle gains that will turn heads and get your friends and family talking.

You might be wondering why these trainers know so little as certified professionals. Well, I have several good friends who are trainers, and they’ve all told me the same thing, which is that passing the certification test does not make you an expert—it means that you can memorize some basic information about nutrition and exercise…that’s about it.

While some people are happy to pay a trainer just to force themselves to show up every day, trainers are usually in a similar boat as the magazines. They have to constantly justify their existence, and they do it by changing up routines and talking about “sophisticated” workout principles (that they read about in the magazines)…and when it’s all said and done, their clients waste thousands of dollars to make poor gains.

That said, there absolutely are great trainers out there who are in awesome shape themselves, who do know how to quickly and effectively get others into shape, and who do really care. If you’re one of them and you’re reading this book, I applaud you because you’re carrying the weight of the profession on your shoulders.

Bigger Leaner Stronger is Different

I don’t know about you, but I don’t train to have fun or hang out with the boys—I train to look and feel better, and I want to get the most from my efforts. If I can get better results by working out half as long as the other guy, that’s what I want to do. If my options are to pack on ten pounds of lean mass in a month by doing the same exercises every week (done with correct form, intensity, and weight progression) or to squeak out two pounds by doing the latest dynamic inertia muscle confusion routine, I’ll choose the former.

Bigger Leaner Stronger is all about training and getting results. It gives you a precise training and eating regimen that delivers maximum gains in the least amount of time. The exercises are nothing new and sophisticated, but you’ve probably never approached them like how I’m going to teach you. There’s nothing cutting-edge or complicated about how to eat correctly, but most people have it all wrong.

With Bigger Leaner Stronger, you can gain fifteen to twenty pounds of lean mass in your first three months of lifting weights. That’s a pretty drastic change. People are going to start asking you for workout advice. Even if you’re not a beginning lifter, you can gain one pound of lean mass per week, every week, until you’re happy with your size.

If your goal is to simply lose fat, I’m going to show you how to lose one to two pounds of fat per week like clockwork (and how to keep it off, too).

So, are you ready?

Diets that Build Muscle: How to Eat to Grow

What are the types of diets that build muscle?

Some say that nutrition is 70% of the game of getting bigger and leaner, some say 80%, even 90%. Well, I say it’s 100% Yes, 100%. And lifting heavy, overloading your muscles…that’s also 100% of the game. Being properly hydrated is 100%. Having the right attitude is 100% too. (Yeah, we’re at 400% so far…)

My point is this: The building blocks of a great body are more like pillars than puzzle pieces. Weaken one enough and the whole structure collapses when overloaded. That is, you can’t build any appreciable amount of muscle if you don’t train correctly. It’s very hard to build muscle if your diet is wrong. Muscle growth is seriously stunted by dehydration. Your gains will be lackluster if you don’t train with the right attitude.

Let the weak and undisciplined give only 60% in their training, 30% in their dieting, 40% in their attitude. They’re going to make you look like a god.

The nutritional aspect of fitness is incredibly powerful and it can either work for or against you, multiplying or dividing your end results. It is the series of toll booths along the highway of muscle growth, and if you don’t stop and pay each one, you don’t get to go any further. It’s that simple.

Proper diet and nutrition has nothing to do with loading up on the latest, greatest, “advanced muscle building” supplements that clutter the shelves of your local GNC. It is much more than eating a few good meals per day with some snacks here and there so you don’t get hungry.

It IS about following a calculated, regimented eating plan that consistently feeds your muscles the nutrients they need to take advantage of your heavy training and thus get bigger and stronger.

There are four aspects of nutrition that are of primary concern when trying to build muscle and lose fat. They are calories, protein, carbohydrates, fats, and water. Protein, carbohydrates, and fats are known as “macro-nutrients” (macro means “of great size; large”), and how you structure these in your diet is vitally important to your overall results. Of secondary concern success are vitamins and minerals, which are known as “micro-nutrients,” and these are essential for body’s performance of many different physiological processes connected with building muscle and losing fat.

Let’s talk more about each of these four aspects of nutrition.

CALORIES

A calorie is a measurement of potential energy in a food, whether protein, carbohydrate, or fat. Like an engine, your body needs fuel to function, and it gets it from food.

A gram of protein has about 4 calories, as does a gram of carbohydrate (regardless of the source, these numbers holds more or less true). A gram of fat contains about 9 calories.

Your body uses food energy to perform any and all physiological processes you can imagine. Your brain, lungs, heart, liver, and kidneys require energy to do their jobs. Your muscles require energy to contract and extend. Your body requires energy to build muscle and even to lose fat.

Several factors come into play when determining how much energy your body burns every day (and thus how many calories you should be eating, whether to lose weight or gain muscle). Body size, the amount of lean mass, body temperature, the thermic effect of foods, stimulants such as caffeine, and physical activity level all affect how many calories your body burns every day.

Knowing how to determine your body’s caloric needs and then how to translate them into specific amounts of protein, carbs, and fats is crucial to maximizing your muscle growth. As you can imagine, eating 225 grams of protein per day is much better in terms of achieving muscle growth than eating 100 grams of fat, even though they contain about the amount of calories.

PROTEIN

Your body needs protein for virtually every “growth” process it engages in. It uses protein to build and repair cells and to produce hormones and enzymes (which are substances that cause various chemical reactions in the body). Your body needs a healthy amount of protein to keep its immune system functioning optimally.

Weight lifting places considerable protein demands on the body, and as you gain more and more lean muscle, your body needs more and more protein to maintain it. Think of your muscles as protein reservoirs (because that’s how your body views them). What do you think happens if you build some muscle and then don’t provide your body with the protein it needs for its upkeep? That’s right—it eats the muscle away and thus reduces its need for protein.

Therefore, eating enough protein every day is rock-bottom fundamental to building muscle and increasing strength. I can’t overstate the importance of this, really, because many guys just don’t get it. They miss meals and figure it’s no big deal. They don’t ensure their body is never on empty and think it shouldn’t cause too much damage. Well, it does. Regularly not eating enough protein and not eating it frequently enough is the easiest way to ruin your gains, get stuck in a rut, and quit. I’ve seen it happen many times.

Now, as I just said, the daily quantity of protein isn’t the only important aspect—the frequency of eating protein is just as vital. As you know, your body breaks proteins down into amino acids and then your blood transports them around the body for use. In order to achieve optimal muscle growth, you want to have a constant supply of amino acids in your blood stream, ready to be used for repair, growth, and other processes.

If you allow too much to come in between your meals (that should always contain protein), your body will steal protein from its own muscles and you’ll get smaller and weaker. That’s why you can actually eat MORE protein than your body needs each day but plan it incorrectly and you’ll lose gains.

CARBOHYDRATES

The carbohydrate is probably the most misunderstood, maligned, and feared macro-nutrient. Thanks to the scores of bogus diet plans and suggestions out there, many people equate eating carbs with getting fat. While eating TOO MANY carbs can make you fat, carbs are hardly your enemy. They play an essential role in not only muscle growth but in overall body function.

Regardless of what type of carbohydrate you eat—broccoli or apple pie—the body breaks it down into two substances: glucose and glycogen. Glucose is commonly referred to as “blood sugar,” and it’s an energy source used by your cells to do the many things they do. Glycogen is a substance stored in the liver and muscles that can be easily converted to glucose for immediate energy. When you lift weights intensely, your muscles burn up their glycogen stores to cope with the overload.

Now, why is broccoli good for you but apple pie isn’t? Because your body reacts very differently to broccoli than to apple pie. You’ve probably heard the terms “simple” and “complex” carbs before and wondered what was meant. You might have also heard of the glycemic index and wondered what it was all about.

These things are pretty simple, actually. The glycemic index is a numeric system of ranking how quickly carbohydrates are converted into glucose in the body. Carbs are ranked on a scale of 0 to 100 depending how they affect blood sugar levels once eaten, with 55 and under considered “low GI,” and 56 to 69 as medium, and 70 and above as high on the index. A “simple” carb is one that converts very quickly (is high on the glycemic index), such as table sugar, honey, and watermelon, while a “complex” carb is one that converts slowly (is low on the glycemic index), such as broccoli, apple, and sweet potato.

It’s very important to know where the carbs you eat fall on the index, because eating a bunch of simple carbs all day is a surefire way to mess up your metabolism and gain weight (the body doesn’t work well when its energy levels constantly spike and plummet).

The amount of carbohydrates that you should eat every day depends on what you’re trying to accomplish: gain muscle or lose fat. Gaining muscle requires that you eat a lot of carbs, while cutting carbs and upping protein is the best way to lose fat while retaining muscle strength and size.

FATS

Fats are the most dense energy source available to your body. Each gram of fat contains over twice the calories of a gram of carbohydrate or protein. Healthy fats, such as those found in olive oil, avocados, flax seed oil, many nuts, and other foods, are actually an important component to overall health. Fats help your body absorb the other nutrients you give it, they nourish the nervous system, they help maintain cell structures, they regulate hormone levels, and more.

Certain fats are unhealthy though and can lead to disease and other problems. These types of fats are called saturated fats and trans fats.

Saturated fats are a form of fat found mainly in animal products such as meat, dairy, and egg yolks. Some plant foods are also high in saturated fats, such as coconut oil, palm oil, and palm kernel oil. Eating too much saturated fats can negatively affect cholesterol levels and should be eaten in moderation.

Trans fats are scientifically modified saturated fats that have been engineered to give foods longer shelf lives. Many cheap, packaged foods are full of trans fats (such as run-of-the-mill popcorn, yogurt, and peanut butter), as are many frozen foods (such as frozen pizza, pastries, cakes, etc.), and fried foods are often fried in trans fats. These fats are bad news and eating too much of them can lead to all kinds of disease and complications. They have no nutritional value for the body and thus should be avoided altogether.

Most people eat more fat than necessary (adding lots of unnecessary calories to their daily intake). When we work out your diet, it will include a small amount of healthy fats every day.

WATER

The human body is about 60% water in adult males and about 70% in adult females. Muscles are about 70% water. That alone tells you how important water is to maintaining good health and proper body function. Your body’s ability to digest, transport, and absorb nutrients from food is dependent upon proper fluid intake. Water helps prevent injuries in the gym by cushioning joints and other soft-tissue areas. When your body is dehydrated, literally every physiological process is negatively affected.

I really can’t stress enough the importance of drinking clean, pure water. It has zero calories, so it will never cause you to gain weight regardless of how much you drink (although you can actually harm your body by drinking too much water, but this would require that you drink several gallons per day).

I highly recommend that you drink at least one gallon of water per day. And make sure it’s filtered, purified water, not tap water (disgusting, I know, but some people do it). I have a $250 reverse-osmosis filter with a re-mineralization component at home that produces clean, crisp water. I fill a one-gallon jug at the start of my day and simply make sure that I finish it by dinner time. I then drink another half-gallon of water or from the time I arrive home to when I go to bed.

I highly recommend you spend a couple hundred dollars on a good water filtration system. There’s a big difference between drinking clean, alkaline water that your body can fully utilize and polluted, acidic junk from the tap or bottle (which is the case with certain brands such as Dasani and Aquafina). If you’re not currently drinking much water, you’re going to be amazed at how much better your body feels once you get up to 1-2 gallons per day.

VITAMINS AND MINERALS

The importance of vitamins and minerals is unknown to many. Guys will rush to the store to buy the latest super-advanced, muscle-maximizing powder that contains a “proprietary blend” of fancy-sounding snake oil compounds, but few pick up a multi-vitamin.

Well, the fact is your body needs a wide spectrum of vitamins and minerals to carry out the millions of sophisticated functions it performs every day. This is a basic need, like protein, carbohydrates, fats, and water. You want a continual supply of vitamins and minerals running through your body, supporting every growth and repair process that occurs.

Ideally, we’d get all vitamins and minerals we need from the food we eat, but this is nearly impossible with the ever-declining quality of soil and food (even in the world of organic). Thus, we need to supplement our food with vitamin and mineral pills. The easiest way to get all the essential vitamins and minerals is a good multi-vitamin product.

SUMMARY

Building a great body requires great eating habits, and you now know what that means: It means eating enough calories, protein, carbohydrates, and fats and drinking enough water, so that your body has everything it needs to adapt to the intense training you subject it to.

It really is that simple.

How to Build Your Metabolism and Lose Fat Faster

 

Many people want to know how to build their metabolism in order to lose fat faster or be able to eat more without gaining fat.

 

Well, this is actually pretty easy to do, and I’m going to show you how in this article.

First, however, I want to ensure that you understand the word metabolism itself, because most people don’t.

Metabolism refers to the series of processes by which molecules from food are broken down to release energy, which is then used to fuel the cells in the body and to create more complex molecules used for building new cells. Metabolism is necessary for life and is how the body creates and maintains the cells which make it up.

When the body becomes hungry one’s metabolism slows down and less energy is released. The longer one waits between meals, the slower one’s metabolism goes.

This process is simply a product of evolution. Many thousands of years ago, when our ancestors were roaming the wilderness, they sometimes journeyed for days without food and their bodies lived off fat stores. The body learned to burn the fat as slowly as possible because it didn’t know when it would be fed again.

Starving, they would finally kill an animal and feast, and their bodies knew to prepare for the next bout of starvation by storing fat. Having fat was literally a matter of life and death.

This genetic programming is still in us, ready to be used. If you starve your body, it will burn fat to stay alive, but it will also slow down its metabolic rate to conserve energy and it will be fully prepared to store fat once you start feeding it more again.

So, what does this mean for fat loss? Well, it means that you have to show your body that it has no reason to store excess fat and, in a sense, coax it to the level that you desire. And the same goes for building muscle: If you don’t provide your body with the perfect building conditions (proper training, proper nutrition, and proper rest), it will be inclined to simply not grow its muscles.

THE TWO THINGS YOU MUST DO TO BUILD YOUR METABOLISM

So, how do you speed up or “build” your metabolism? There are really only two things you have to do to accomplish this:

Eat Small, Frequent Meals

Most people have heard this advice before, but they don’t understand why.

By putting food in your body every three hours (or so), it is constantly having to work on breaking it down. This not only provides you with a steady stream of energy, but it prevents hunger pangs and actually speeds up your metabolic rate, which, after enough time, can become naturally quite higher than when you started eating this way (allowing you to eat more calories and not gain fat).

Feeding your body every few hours also keeps it from ever going into “starvation mode,” which completely wrecks your long-term fat loss potentials. You want your body to know that it will get food every few hours and thus not have to hold onto unnecessary amounts of fat.

How you plan your meals is important too. You can read more about this in my article on eating plans for building muscle.

Exercise Regularly

This comes as no surprise, of course, but what types of exercise? Weight lifting or cardio? Both. Weight lifting helps build muscle, and every pound of muscle in your body burns calories (studies show that a pound of muscle burns about 6 calories per day). Thus, having more muscle means having a faster metabolism!

Cardio not only accelerates fat loss by burning calories, but it too speeds up your metabolic rate.

Now, what does “regularly” mean? I recommend you exercise 3-5 days per week, every week, to see maximum gains.

SUMMARY

Building your metabolism really only requires those two steps: eat small, frequent meals and exercise regularly. Slowly but surely, your body will naturally burn more and more calories and put on less and less fat.

 

How to Quickly Gain Muscle: The Simple Science of Building Mass Fast

 

So you’re looking to quickly gain muscle?

 

I want to not only tell you how to do it, but I want to save you the frustration of wasting your time and money doing the wrong things.

I’m going to tell you something the kings of the multi-multi-billion dollar health and fitness industry don’t want you to know: You don’t need any of their crap to get ripped fast and look better than you ever have before.

You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars per month on the worthless supplements that steroid freaks shill in advertisements.
You don’t need to constantly change up your exercise routines to “confuse” your muscles. I’m pretty sure muscles lack cognitive abilities, but this approach is a good way to just confuse you instead.
You don’t need to burn through buckets of protein powder every month, stuffing down enough protein each day to feed a third world village.
You don’t need to toil away in the gym for a couple of hours per day, doing tons of sets, supersets, drop sets, giant sets, etc. (As a matter of fact, this is a great way to stunt gains and get nowhere.)

See, gaining muscle quickly is simply a matter of diligently applying the laws of muscle growth, which are as certain, observable, and irrefutable as those of physics.

When you throw a ball in the air, it comes down. When you take the correct actions inside and outside the gym, your muscles grow. It’s really that simple, and these laws apply regardless of how much of a “hard gainer” you think you are.

These principles have been known and followed for decades by people who built some of the greatest physiques we’ve ever seen. Some of these laws will be in direct contradiction of things you’ve read or heard but fortunately, they require no leaps of faith or reflection: they are practical. You follow them and you get immediate results. And once they’ve worked for you, you will know they’re true.

So, let’s look them over.

THE FIRST LAW OF MUSCLE GROWTH:

Muscles Grow Only if They’re Forced to

This law may seem obvious and not worth stating, but trust me, most people just don’t get it. By lifting weights, you are actually causing tiny tears (known as “micro-tears”) in the muscle fibers, which the body then repairs and adapts the muscles to better handle the stimulus that caused the damage. This is the process by which muscles grow (scientifically termed hypertrophy).

If a workout causes too few micro-tears in the fibers, then little muscle growth will occur as a result because the body figures it doesn’t need to grow to deal again with such a minor stimulus. If a workout causes too many micro-tears, then the body will fail to fully repair the muscles, and muscle growth will be stunted. If a workout causes optimal micro-tearing but the body isn’t supplied with sufficient nutrition or rest, muscle growth won’t occur.

For optimal muscle growth, you must lift in such a way that causes optimal micro-tearing and then you must feed your body what it needs to grow and give it the proper amount of rest.

THE SECOND LAW OF MUSCLE GROWTH:

Muscles Grow from Overload, Not Fatigue or “Pump”

While many guys think a burning sensation in their muscles is indicative of an intense, “growth-inducing” workout, it’s actually not an indicator of an optimum workout. The “burn” you feel is simply an infusion of lactic acid in the muscle, which is produced as a muscle burns its energy stores. Lactic acid, it turns out, impairs muscle growth and causes tissues to be broken down instead.

Muscle pump is equally worthless in terms of muscle growth. The pump you feel when training is a result of blood being “trapped” in the muscles, and while it’s a good psychological boost and isn’t a bad thing, it’s just not an indicator of future growth.

High-repetition workouts not only fail to sufficiently stimulate muscles to trigger growth, they flood the muscles with lactic acid, furthering preventing gains.

What triggers muscle growth, then? Overload. Muscles must be given a clear reason to grow, and overload is the best reason. That means heavy weights, short, intense sets of low reps, and no more than nine heavy sets per muscle group. This type of training causes optimal micro-tearing for strength and growth gains.

Trust me on this one. Drop sets, giant sets, supersets, etc., are for the magazine-reading crowd. Such training techniques simply do NOT stimulate growth like simple, heavy sets do. And that’s the only reason we’re in the gym, right?

The same goes for the confused crowd of “muscle confusion” advocates that say you need to change your routine every week or two. This is pure nonsense. As you’ll soon learn, you can make incredible muscle gains by doing the same proven, mass-building exercises every week, steadily increasing weight and reps (overload).

THE THIRD LAW OF MUSCLE GROWTH:

Muscles Grow Outside the Gym

Most training programs have you training way too often. They play into the common misconception that building muscle is simply a matter of lifting excessively. People who have fallen into this bad habit need to realize that if they did less of the right thing, they would get more. Yes, I said that right: do less, get more.

How does that work? Well, muscles grow during the recovery period—the period of time between workouts of the same muscle groups. When you overload your muscles, your body gets to work adapting them to overcome future overloads, and to do the job correctly, it needs sufficient rest and nutrition.

If, every week, you wait too few days before training a muscle group again, you can actually lose strength and muscle size. If you allow your muscles enough recuperation time (and eat correctly), however, you will experience maximum strength and size gains.

THE FOURTH LAW OF MUSCLE GROWTH:

Muscles Grow Only if They’re Properly Fed

How important is nutrition? Answer is one word: everything. Nutrition is everything. Simply put, your diet determines about 70-80% of how you look (muscular or scrawny, ripped or flabby). You could do the perfect workouts and give your muscles the perfect amount of rest time, but if you don’t eat correctly, you won’t grow—period.

Almost everyone gets this wrong. They just don’t give their body what it needs to rapidly build muscle. Sure, we all know to eat protein, but how much? How many times per day? What kinds? What about carbs—what kinds are best? How much? When should they be eaten to maximize gains? And fats…are they important? How much do you need and what are the best ways to get them? And last but not least, how many calories should you be eating every day? How large should your meals be as the day goes on?

SUMMARY

That’s it. Quickly packing on slabs of rock-solid lean mass is, in essence, just a matter of following these four laws religiously: lift hard, lift heavy, get sufficient rest, and feed your body correctly. That’s how you build a strong, health, ripped body. As you see, it’s much simpler than the marketing departments of supplement companies and their magazines want you to think.

If you want to learn exactly how to train, eat, and rest to build muscle or lose fat on command–and I’m talking gaining or losing 1 – 2 pounds per week, every week–then I recommend you check out my book, Bigger Leaner Stronger: The Simple Science of Building the Ultimate Male Body.

 

What is the Best Protein Powder for Building Muscle?

 

With so many options out there, which is the best protein powder for building muscle?

In order to get an answer to that question, let’s first take a look at protein itself.

There are two main sources of protein out there: whole food protein and supplement protein.

Whole food protein is, as you guessed, protein that comes from natural food sources, such as beef, chicken, fish, etc. The best forms of whole food protein are chicken, turkey, lean red meat, fish, eggs, and milk.

Protein supplements are powdered or liquid foods that contain protein from various sources, such as whey (a liquid remaining after milk has been curdled and strained in the process of making cheese), egg, and soy (the three most common sources of supplement protein). You don’t NEED protein supplements to gain muscle, but it’s very impractical to try to get all protein from whole foods considering the fact that you will be eating protein 6-7 times per day.

WHAT MOST PEOPLE DON’T KNOW ABOUT PROTEIN

There are a few things you should know about eating protein. First is that your body can only digest and absorb so much in one sitting. According to various studies, this ranges between 30 and 60 grams depending on your metabolism and digestive tract. To be safe, you can assume 40-50. That means that if you miss a meal in which you were supposed to eat 40 grams of protein, you can’t just “make it up” by eating 80 grams in your next meal. Your body won’t be able to absorb it all.

Another thing to know about protein is that different proteins digest at different speeds and some are better utilized by the body than others. Beef protein, for example, is digested quickly and 70-80% of what’s eaten is utilized by the body (the exact number varies based on what study you read, but they all fall between 70 and 80%). Whey protein is also digested quickly and its “net protein utilization” (NPU) is in the low 90%s, which means that 90-something percent of it can actually be used by your body. Egg protein digests much slower than whey and beef and its NPU also falls in the low 90%s.

NPU and digestion speeds are important to know because you want to rely on high-NPU proteins to meet your daily protein requirement, and you want a quick-digesting protein for your post-workout meal and a slow-digesting protein for your final meal before you go to bed.

I could give you charts and tables of the NPU rates of various proteins, but I’m going to just keep it simple. In order to meet your daily protein requirements, here are your choices:

 

Whole Food Proteins

Lean meats (beef, pork, chicken, and turkey)

Fish

Eggs

Protein Supplements

Egg

Whey

Casein

 

These are all considered “complete proteins,” meaning they contain all of the essential amino acids for cellular repair and growth that your body can’t synthesize itself (it creates some and has to get the rest from food).

Food that’s won’t work for meeting protein requirements are those that aren’t complete proteins, such as beans (all varieties), nuts, bread, rice, and other grains. They don’t contain all the amino acids your body needs from food (which means they need to be combined to make a complete protein, such as beans and rice), and their NPUs are pretty low. So you might think the 190 grams of protein you got from such sources is everything your body needs, but your body may only have 80 grams it can actually use.

SO WHICH PROTEIN POWDERS ARE BEST FOR BUILDING MUSCLE?

So, the best protein powders for building muscle are the three I just listed: egg, whey, and casein. There are a million different brands and some are marketed with so much hype that it’s like the copywriter was hyperventilating as he was writing. I’ve tried many different protein powders, and I recommend Healthy ‘n Fit’s 100% Egg Protein, Optimum Nutrition’s Platinum Hydro Whey, Optimum Nutrition’s 100% Whey Gold Standard, and Optimum Nutrition’s Casein.

And in case you’re wondering why I left soy off the “recommended list,” it’s because it’s just a bad protein source. To start, most soy protein supplements use genetically modified soybeans (which is a very dangerous trend encroaching further and further into the world of agriculture), and too much of it can inhibit your body’s testosterone production (due to a plant estrogen found in soybeans). It generally tastes bad too. Just stay away from it.

Now, regarding when to eat slow- or fast-digesting proteins, I recommend eating a fast-digesting protein like whey after working out to quickly spike amino acid levels in your blood, and then eating a slow-digesting protein like egg or casein 30 minutes before going to bed (your body has to make it through the night with minimal muscle loss and this requires a slow release of amino acids into the blood stream).

For the rest of your supplement meals, you can do whey or egg. I like to do egg because too much whey tends to bloat me.