Get Off The Supplement Bandwagon - "Don't Follow Every Other Idiot"

By Wesley McDermott

A no-nonsense guide to what supplements you need and those you can do without. This information will help you get the results you want AND save you money at the same time.

So, you’re thinking of using supplements to build your muscle mass and start the fat burning process?  Think again! Even if you’re already on the supplement band wagon – think again! You can think about supplementation later on in the process but, for now, you need to concentrate on what you eat and how you train.

Get the basics right first

So, what’s your diet like?  If you’re like most people who are trying to thin down and firm up, you are very probably malnourished!  Yes, you did read that right – I did say malnourished.  The truth is that, even though your body says you eat too much, you’re not eating enough of the right thing.  So, from here on, your number one priority is to start eating right.  Your body is crying out for nutrients – that is proteins, vitamins, and minerals – which is why you feel the need to eat so often.  Thing is, you’re giving your body the wrong stuff.

Foundations

If you think about this in simple terms, it becomes obvious.  If you want to build muscle, which is protein, you have to put protein into your body.  It’s easy, you can’t build a house without foundations, and you can’t build muscle without protein.  And here’s some more news – in order for your body to use protein to build the muscle, it needs vitamins and minerals!  Let’s put that into a simple formula:

Protein + vitamins + minerals = muscle

Get the above right, and your body will reward you by laying down muscle fibers.  The trick then is to let your body know that you want to build bigger and better muscle fibers, and you do that by working the basic fibers, which you’ve laid down, by eating right.  Work as hard as you want, do as many reps as you want but, without the basic muscle fibers, you are going nowhere!

So, to add to our formula:

Protein + vitamins + minerals + exercise = increased muscle mass

Once you’ve got the foundations in place, you can go on and build that house or, in your case, that well-muscled, slim body.

Building Blocks

Now, we can get to the supplements!  Like I said before, to utilize the protein you need vitamins and minerals.  So the first supplement you take is a multi-vitamin. 

Doesn’t sound very exciting or high-tech, I know, but the truth of the matter is, getting your daily vitamin and mineral requirement is essential to building a fit and healthy body.

At the same time, you need to get a greens supplement inside of you.  Green supplements are also known as ‘superfoods’ and they come as a powder, which you turn into a drink by adding water or juice.  They contain things like barley, beets, wheatgrass, and alfalfa grass in a concentrated form and are very good for you.

Cement

Right, you’ve got good strong foundations and you’ve started building but, hey, wait a minute – the bricks don’t seem to be holding together!  That’s because they need cement to hold together.  Instead of cement, think minerals.  Yeah, okay, you get some in your daily supplement but, to include all the minerals you need, the tablets would need to be huge.  This is where extra mineral supplementation comes in. 

Look at the foundation formula again for a minute, and you’ll see that I haven’t just lumped minerals in with vitamins.  Many folk do lump vitamins and minerals together, probably because your daily supplement lumps them together, but they do very different jobs. 

Just think about your skeleton, which is made of bone, right?  Bone is made of calcium, and calcium is a mineral!  And you need far more calcium to make bones than you get in your daily multivitamin.  In fact, you need 1200 mg of calcium a day, and they can’t fit that amount into a multivitamin tablet.  Of course, there’s more than one mineral and your body relies on them to function.  You also need them to build muscle and lose fat.

So, to your building blocks, you should think about adding the following supplements:

Protection

You’ve built your house on firm foundations and with a solid structure.  Now you’re going to protect it.

There you are, happily lifting weights and building extra muscle mass, but has it occurred to you that the extra workload is putting stress on your joints?  Unless your joints are painful, you probably won’t have given them a second thought – nevertheless you must, otherwise you’ll soon begin to feel the effects of that increased wear and tear. 

So, now you add joint-protecting nutrients to the mix.  There are a number of them, which go under the names of: glucosamine; chondroitin; MSM, collagen, and good old Vitamin C.

Another important protector are the Essential Fatty Acids (EFA’s).  These don’t just protect your joints; they are vital to all-round good health.  They are the basic building blocks of your immune system, which means they protect against ill health, and they are also essential for the production of the hormone that’s needed for muscle building.  You’ll find lots of sources of EFA’s and all of them are good.  You can choose from:

Dosage rates are on the container they come in, but as little as 5g a day will produce positive results in your training.

Research

You don’t need me to tell you that new stuff is being promoted all the time.  Some of that stuff is good stuff – for instance, Creatine and Glutamine have been proved to be effective by good, solid research.  But you need to be selective because there is no research to support other new entrants to the market, like Nitrous Oxide supplementation, for instance.

I guess what I’m saying is that, once you’ve got the basics in place, you can start to look at other supplements.  But you should always take a look at the research before you buy – and don’t be fooled by the glossy ads either!

When you do start adding the exciting stuff to you regime, it’s a good idea to do it slowly, with one new thing at a time.  That way you can see whether it was worth the money or not.  It’s very true that some supplements need others to work to their maximum efficiency, but beware of stacking supplements without understanding how they interact with each other.

Way to go!

Let’s recap then, so that you can plan your way forward: