Building Muscle - Taking the Right Supplements

ByAdi Crnalic

When you're trying to gain muscle mass, it's important that you train and eat properly for muscle growth and recovery. After you have a solid training and nutrition regiment in place, you can start adding a few dietary supplements into your daily routine in order to speed up your muscle gains.

The right supplements can help you add more muscle size and strength a little faster than you could without supplements. These days, there are many different supplements available for many different purposes including overall health and wellbeing, energy, metabolism, joint discomfort, pain, and increasing sports performance as well as boosting muscle mass and strength.

It's a well known fact that athletes and bodybuilders have a higher demand for certain nutrients compared to sedentary individuals. Intense training on a daily basis requires a steady supply of essential nutrients for better performance, optimal health and faster training recovery.

Let's start with the basic fundamental supplements that every serious trainee should include in his training regiment.

Multivitamin/Multimineral

Multivitamin supplements are used to ensure that the body has adequate micronutrients to carry out normal bodily functions and maintain optimal health during periods of intense physical exertion such as weight training and cardiovascular training.

A good multivitamin should include all of the B vitamins, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin D as well as minerals such as magnesium, selenium and zinc.

Whey Protein Powder

Once you have a good multivitamin supplement, the next recommended supplement you should consider taking is whey protein powder. During intense training, your muscles get depleted of amino acids and muscle tissue gets broken down rapidly. In order to put on more muscle and recover quickly from training, you'll need to feed your muscles with plenty of amino acids for growth.

The most important amino acids to consume are the Branched Chain Amino acids or BCAA's which your body can not produce on its own, so they must be consumed thorough diet and/or protein supplementation.

A good whey protein powder will include all of the essential branch chained amino acids as well as the non-essential amino acids. Be sure to purchase a whey protein powder that includes a mixture of whey protein concentrates and whey protein isolates as well as hydrolyzed whey protein. Whey protein mixtures have more essential amino acids and usually tend to be lower in fat and carbohyderates compared to only whey protein concentrate powder.

Creatine Monohydrate

Creatine is a very popular sports performance and bodybuilding supplement because it increases your muscles energy stores known as ATP or Adenosine Tri-Phosphate.

When your ATP levels are enhanced, you can lift more weight and get more repetitions, which leads to an increase in muscle mass and performance. Creatine also enhances the volume of muscle cells, which gives the muscles a bigger appearance.

Creatine is also found in red meat. However, you would have to consume an enormous amount of red meat in order to take in enough creatine for performance and muscle building. Red meat is also high in cholesterol and saturated fat, which you obviously don't want to consume too much of for health reasons.

Thus, you should stick with creatine in supplement form for best results. Either a powder or tablet form will do the job.

Fish Oil

Fish oil is not a direct muscle building or performance supplement. However, fish oil contains the essential fatty acids EPA and DHA, which your body can not produce on its own, so they must be consumed through diet.

Fist oil has numerous health benefits such as increasing good cholesterol and decreasing bad cholesterol, healing sore joints and promoting hair, skin and nail growth.

Since fish oil contains fatty acids, it can lead to elevated testosterone levels in the body. Dietary fat has been proven to increase your body's own natural testosterone levels and higher testosterone levels equals more muscle growth.

So there you have it, those are the 4 supplements that should make up your supplement foundation to go along side a properly structured and organized training and nutrition muscle building program.

There are other supplements you can take to increase muscle mass, but they would be considered secondary compared to the effectiveness of the proven supplements that I've outlined above.

Remember, supplements are meant to go along side your training and nutrition program, not to replace it or to make up for a lack of training and proper nutrition

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About The Author

Adi Crnalic Is A Former Skinny Guy Turned Certified Personal Trainer, INBF Natural Bodybuilder and Muscle Building/Fitness Expert.

Article Source:http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Adi_Crnalic

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Health and Fitness: Build-Muscle
Adi Crnalic

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MLA Style Citation:
Crnalic, Adi".".19 Jan. 2012EzineArticles.com.26 Jan. 2012 .APA Style Citation:
Crnalic, A. (2012, January 19). . Retrieved January 26, 2012, from http://ezinearticles.com/?Building-­Muscle-­-­-­Taking-­the-­Right-­Supplements&id=6828540Chicago Style Citation:
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