Guide: What Supplements to Take and to Avoid

It would be cool, but it doesn't happen.

I’ve discussed supplementing briefly before in this post, in which I basically talk about our inherent belief in the magic Hulkout potion that will magically transform us into Mr. Olympia overnight and, more importantly, how it doesn’t actually exist.

I also talked about how I generally prefer you don’t take supplements at all during the first several (eight) weeks of your training, so you use this time to learn how to feed yourself better without relying on any type of supplements (as a lot of times in your bodybuilding life you won’t have supplements to rely on).

That being said, it is important for you to know about supplements because while they won’t turn you into your favorite superhero, they certainly will give you a boost that is quite frankly very important. Following, I’m going to describe the five things I think you should take into consideration when shopping for supplements, and which ones to avoid.

THE IMPORTANT ONES

Whey Protein

Protein is an extremely important element in your nutrition plan. Though the bulk of your intake should be carbs, you’re not going to gain a pound of muscle if you don’t ingest the basic building blocks of muscle. Whey protein is basically the precious nutrient you’d find in fish or beef, but in convenient powder form.

What’s cool about this supplement is that you can very easily measure your intake, you can beef up the number of calories you take when you take it, and you can just drink it down like a milkshake, easily putting in your body the equivalent nutrients of eating a big piece of chicken. It goes down easy, often tastes great (especially if taken with milk which also boosts the caloric content), and you can eat again soon after taking it.

There aren’t many downsides to whey protein. It’s easy to mix, easy to boost, and relatively cheap. The biggest problem here is that the product is so popular that choosing one at the store might be a nightmare. My favorite one is probably Syntha-6 by BSN. Not necessarily the cheapest, but the best mix of flavor, value, and results.

            When to take it: The dose depends on your caloric intake, but the best moments to take it is half an hour before your workout and immediately after your workout. This will ensure your muscles get flooded with protein in the moment they need it the most.

Creatine

Not to be confused with other white powders.

Creatine is an aminoacid that’s naturally produced by your liver and is an essential building block that keeps your muscles from liquefying. As such, a surplus of creatine in your muscles is a must to make them grow. Creatine is pretty awesome because it is by far the most useful and cheapest supplement, and it has pretty much zero side effects.

You can find creatine in powders from pretty much every single supplement manufacturing lab, which also makes picking one kind of hard. I didn’t take creatine before but I started recently, and my creatine of choice is Dymatize’s Creatine Micronized. It’s very cheap, tasteless and very easy to take. You can’t go wrong with it.

When to take it: with creatine, there is a phase-based dosage cycle to make its effects optimal. I recommend checking the label in the bottle to be sure, but the basic gist is you need to ‘cover’ your muscles with the stuff at first, which means you take 25g, divided by 5 servings of 5g a day, for a week. Then, for the length of the cycle, you take 5g a day for about six or seven weeks. Then, you take some time off it, and begin a new cycle.

MultiVitamin

Taking pills is kind of breaking a wall when you’re taking supplements because pills are scarier than powders. The only supplement that comes in pill form that I can 100% guarantee is helpful and will not damage your body in any way is a multivitamin. This is a pill that millions of people, bodybuilders or not, take casually.

Basically this won’t directly affect your muscle growth like protein and creatine would, but it’s really important for general health. Getting the correct amount of vitamins in your body (which you can also find easily in fruit and vegetables) will guarantee faster muscle growth, strength, better sleep, better hair, better nails, better bones, etc. Again, this won’t turn you into Superman, but the feeling of general health is definitely there.

When to take it: Depending the dosage of each pill, you’re good to take one pill before bed every night. With MV it really doesn’t matter so much.

THE UNIMPORTANT ONES

Nitric Oxide

A lot of bodybuilders would give me shit for putting this here. Nitric Oxide is pretty damn awesome, but it has several drawbacks you definitely need to consider.

My first times on Nitric Oxide.

The good thing is that taking Nitric Oxide is the closest thing there is to taking the magic Megahulk Elixir. You know that feeling when you’re working out and your muscles harden? That’s what’s called ‘the pump’, and nitric oxide promotes that. What it does is rush into your blood and engorges your muscles. The effects it gives you are amazing: first, a tingly drunken feeling that just makes you want to go out, climb the Empire State Building and roar, banging your chest; second, once you actually start working out, it really pumps your muscles with blood, making them just grow and harden in front of your eyes, even making your veins pop the hell out. Third, it makes you want to work out harder and for a longer time. This taken in tandem with a pre and post-workout serving of protein, ensures that the protein reaches your muscles during your workout, and during recovery, when they need it the most.

The bad thing is that after you return to being Bruce Banner—and it happens relatively quickly—there aren’t a whole bunch of lasting effects on your body, which means that you’re paying for the feeling of turning into a monster in the gym for a while instead of for an actual lasting effect on your muscles. Considering this isn’t exactly cheap, it’s far from being an imperative part of your diet. What’s worse, is that this one does have some poor side effects. Let’s talk about them.

Most NO2 products will give you the shits, which is an industry term for a terribly upset stomach: diarrhea, cramps, farts like mustard gas, maybe nausea. The worst thing about it is that I can’t recommend a specific product and guarantee it won’t make you want to shit out your amygdalae. I haven’t been able to find a product everyone agrees causes or doesn’t cause an upset stomach. When I first took NO XPlode, it worked for me, but when I took it again, it was the poops. Another shitty side effect is that it might give you the jitters and cause sleeplessness. You need to be careful if you don’t want to spend a long restless night shaking like you got Parkinson’s.

Also, you will develop a tolerance rather quickly, which will mean you’ll have to take more and more. And what’s worse, you might become entirely dependent to it. Not addicted, but if you’ll find yourself less willing to hit the weights without it. These are all things you need to consider. I’ve found two products that have never failed me or given me poor sides: Bullnox Androrush by Betancourt and Jack3d Micro by USP Labs.

Again, if you’re interested in that awesome feeling which I genuinely love, look into reviews of each product, but there will still need to be some experimentation on your part before you find an NO2 product that works for you without turning you into a shaky shitting machine.

Weight Gainers

Pretty much.

I definitely think that weight gainers get a bad rep. Weight gainers are powders like protein, but they come with carbs and fats, as well as a lot more crap to up the calorie count in each scoop. The good thing about it is that it’s extremely easy to put a shitload of calories into your body. The bad thing is that depending on the product, those calories might be mainly coming from sugar and filler instead of protein, carbs or fats.

This is where you need to stick to respectable brands and check out the reviews. Yeah, you’re very skinny and your body will be great at processing the sugar and filler, but you want to get muscular, not fat. I’ve found Monster Mass by CytroSport and Carnivore Mass by MuscleMeds to be pretty good in general. Don’t be too afraid of these, but don’t use them to substitute your meals.

THE ONES TO AVOID

Testosterone Boosters

Though Bullnox claims to have testosterone boosting agents (and if it does I never noticed), this is a supplement you need to avoid. A lot of labs promote test testosterone boosters as a safe alternative to steroids, which really sounds like a great thing if you want the effects of steroids but are too afraid to take them.

See, there are several types of anabolic steroids. When you take them, you’re putting in your body a chemical that imitates the effects of testosterone. In a great world, that means quick and amazing muscle growth and loss of fat, but with some scary side effects that go from acne and hair loss to gynecomastia (man boobs that can only be removed through surgery), liver disease, and shrunken testicles. Yes, a lot of these side effects can be taken away or even entirely avoided if you know what you’re doing, but it’s still a scary road to take. Testosterone boosters claim to have these effects, if on a lesser capacity.

Again, it sounds great, but the truth is that you’re more likely to see the bad effects of steroids than the good ones, and that if the pill works at all. If you’re unfamiliar with the hormonal chemistry of your body, and don’t have a doctor to help you do hormonal supplements/steroids in a safe way, you need to stay the fuck away from this, promising as though it may look. You might fuck up your body for good.

That’s all for now. There are other supplements that might be helpful (like aminoacids), but for now this feels like a good guide for you to get started. You just need to research every thing you decide put in your body. Remember a lot of this stuff isn’t playing around, so be smart and don’t take anything that will cause you short-term or long-term damage.

First Things First: Nutrition Basics.

Last post I talked at length about how to prepare yourself mentally—which is much more important than most bodybuilding programs say—to begin your transformation. Now, moving on, I need to say there really aren’t any secrets to getting big so you won’t find here the recipe to the Magical and Secret Megahulk Elixir ™, mainly because there isn’t one. However, what you will find here is a good outline of the most important thing people take too long to understand, or never do, and give up on bodybuilding blaming their body or some similar bullshit.

I’m talking about nutrition, a word often wrongfully equaled with diet, a word often wrongfully equaled with getting a hot fire poker in the urethra. It’s not that. Nutrition basically just means feeding your muscles so they can grow after being exercised. To understand this better, let me explain the process of hypertrophy (that’s “muscle growth” in Fancy) in the simplest of terms.

Flex your arm. So maybe your arm is small and weak, but right now you need to ask yourself this: why the hell should it not be small and weak? Your arms have never before needed size or strength so why the hell would they grow? It’s not like they’re ever going to need to pick up heavy stuff, right? Your body has absolutely no reason to think it needs strength.

Remember 6^th grade biology when Mrs. Price talked about some dude’s observation of some birds in some island and came up with the theory of evolution? Basically we learned that living organisms adapt to their environment in order to survive. How the hell does the body know how to adapt and to what?

But really, organisms know how to adapt and to what when they find themselves with particular needs. When giraffes needed long necks to reach them tall leaves so they wouldn’t die, they developed longer necks through a painfully slow process. Of course this is an extreme example, but it leads to where I’m going:

You need to trick your body into thinking it needs to adapt, or evolve, by becoming bigger and stronger.

You do this by working out. Your body can’t tell the difference between you lifting a pair of dumbbells for the lulz or you pushing a rock out of your way in order to reach a drink of water. If your body thinks being stronger is necessary for you to not die, and it has the resources to do it, it will become stronger. You need to capitalize on this concept, which is where the concept of “surprising your muscles” comes from. I’ll get to that eventually.

Those resources I’m talking about up there are, basically, the nutrients found in food. You can have the most brutal workout the word has ever known, the kind that would make your body think that you just straight up fought and murdered a wooly mammoth to feed your family, but if you don’t feed your muscles with the nutrients they need, you know what will happen?

Fuck. All.

This is why so many people go to the gym for months, cry, sweat and bleed on the machines, and don’t see any changes in their bodies. Trying to build muscle without eating enough food is like paying fifty dudes to build your house, but not supply them with bricks.

Yes. You need food. More than anything, you need food. Now if you go ask an expert—id est, someone who knows his shit better than I do—what kind of diet you should take on if your goal is bulking—bulking (getting big), as opposed to cutting (getting rid of fat), more on this later—they’ll give you some complicated numbers that will probably make your head spin at first.

Luckily for you, your goal is becoming huge and to become huge, you just need to eat like a monster. Of course, you need to eat the right foods, but don’t bother yourself with the minutiae of nutrition—it’s not important right now. Measuring your food and counting calories is for when you want to cut fat. Right now your body is so desperate to grow it’ll take any decent diet as an excuse to do so.

But let’s not leave it at “decent”. Let’s make a good diet for you in four easy steps.

How To Prepare Your “Phase One” Diet.

Step One. Determine your BMR.

First, you need to figure out your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). This basically determines the rough amount of calories your body burns every day. There is no math involved, here, don’t worry. Just go to this calculator here, fill it up, and write the number it gives you. Pro tip: bookmark this because this is a process you’ll have to do more than once.

Step Two. Determine your daily intake.

You have your BMR now. I’m guessing it’s around 2,000 calories? Anyway, you will plot a diet that will give your body more nutrients than it naturally burns; adding this to a workout plan that kicks your muscles’ ass at the gym will only give your body one choice: use the excess nutrients to grow.

Boom. You just became an X-Man. Choose your mutant name.

"Beast" has been taken twice. Watch it. 

To grow, you need to add ~500 calories to your BMR, so take that number and add 500. If it was 2,000, we now know that you need to eat 2,500 calories every day to grow. Sounds scary? Too much? It’s not, don’t worry.

Step Three. Determine your meal plan.

You’re probably eating three meals a day like a normal human being. Well, you’re not a normal human being anymore, motherfucker, you’re a bodybuilder, and bodybuilders don’t eat three meals a day like puny humans do!

No. You’re going to eat at least five times a day. Don’t freak out quite yet, though. It’s not as scary as it sounds. It’ll actually make your life so much easier (since a lot of your life now is eating). At your current BMR, eating five meals means having to eat around 500 calories each.

So are you still on board? At this point you need to eat 5 meals of 500 calories each to grow. This is very, very manageable. Naturally being more active and heavier will mean having to eat more calories a day, so wait until you’re huge and need to pack in ~4,000 calories to get bigger.

Step Four. Determine your meals.

Pictured: you.

2,500 calories a day? Easy! Just two trips to McDonalds and we’re set! Well no, sorry. Naturally it’s 2,500 calories of the right food. Here’s how you find out the right foods: nutrients are largely divided into three groups: carbohydrates, protein and fats. Only one of those sounds friendly (the almighty protein), but truth is we need all three of them. Oh, and here’s the twist:

Protein isn’t the one you’ll be eating the most. Nope. It’s carbohydrates. That’s right. You’re going to be eating nearly twice as many carbs as you eat proteins. Sounds crazy? It’s not. In fact, this is how you’re going to ratio your food:

50% should be carbs.

30% should be protein.

20% should be fats.

This means that at 2,500 calories, 1,250 should come from carbs; 750 should come from proteins; 500 should come from fats. You do your own math.

Knowing what food belongs to what group is tricky at first, luckily there are a billion resources online, not to mention apps for your phone as reference guides, to help you through. Still, I’ll give you a quick summary to give you a broad idea: carbs are fruit, vegetables, pasta, bread; protein is beef, chicken, fish, dairy; fats are seeds, nuts, olive oil, fish oil, etc.

I recommend for this "Phase One", that you focus at least one protein heavy meal to take it right after your workout. As soon as you can without throwing up.

Another thing that is important is that, although you need to keep a surplus of calories, you need to watch out and don't overindulge in certain foods. You might be aware that muscles grow through protein, but you need to know that a surplus of protein will not result in a surplus of muscle. Sadly:

Your body can only process about 2 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight a day.

If you take more than that it'll just end up packed into a neat brown trunk floating in your toilet.

A word on cheat meals:

You can imagine what "Cheat meals" means. It means a meal in which you cheat on your diet with a sexier diet, one that generally consists of greasy but delicious shit. As a skinny guy, you can get away with shit other people can't, but you shouldn't indulge too much. I recommend having only three or four cheat meals a week.

No wait, I don't recommend. I encourage it. Cheat meals are great mainly because if taken carefully, they don't work against your growth and they work in favor of your determination. Psychologically, it's very important to have the reassurance that, even if you have to eat this dry chicken breast right now, maybe in two days you'll be able to eat a motherfucking Royale with cheese. Until then, hold the desire; it'll make it taste better.

So there you have it. This is all you need to know to begin. Figure out your meal plan, buy the correct foods you’ll need (I’ll make a post about bodybuilding on a budget later), and get ready.

In case you missed the rest of Bodybuilding 101:

IntroductionTo “Wolf In A Gorilla Suit In Gym Clothes”

First Things First: Preparing Yourself Mentally

First Things First: Nutrition Basics

First Things First: Working Out & The Gym

First Things First: Supplementing, Resting, And General Tips.