Supplementation for Natural Bodybuilders

Supplements are present throughout in bodybuilding. For instance, one can find many people that trust in supplements as a magic pill to transform their body from day to day, even when their training and nutrition are not precisely an example to follow. On the other side, one can also find many bodybuilders that adequately use natural supplements as a complement to their nutrition. The industry contributes to this situation by offering a huge amount of supplements, all of them with the most fantastic claims. However, some of these supplements are not natural, or not effective (or at least not for everyone), or even dangerous. This post intends to guide trainees in this crowded space by discussing how supplementation fits in a natural bodybuilding program.

Proper use of supplements requires a clear understanding of what are they intended to, since this a common point of confusion. In this sense, people tend to forget that if training and nutrition are not adequate, supplements are virtually worthless. In fact, it has been established that training hard, eating clean and resting enough determine the 90% of your success. Supplements are a good complement, but they can never fully compensate bad eating habits or inadequate training (although they probably can slightly reduce the negative effect of these bad practices). For this reason, it is important to focus on getting the basics in shape before bothering with the details.

Having said this, what is then the role of supplementation in natural bodybuilding? Well, although supplements are not needed to succeed, they can be a great aid for making this process easier and quicker, acting as a complement for ensuring that you get enough of all needed nutrients, and also for optimizing physiological processes, such as muscle growth, fat loss and recovery. Supplements can be broken down into 3 groups, namely foundation supplements, enhancing supplements, and application specific supplements. I deliberately omit in this list unnatural solutions, such as steroids, that can have catastrophic secondary effects on your health.

Foundation supplements provide substances which are mandatory for proper body functioning such as vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, protein and essential fatty acids (EFAs). In fact, if you could follow a perfect diet, you would obtain the needed amount these substances from food alone. However, in reality this is often difficult to accomplish. Foundation supplements come into play to alleviate this problem, and should always be the basis of your supplementation regime. Use a multivitamin/mineral stack daily (some vitamins are also antioxidants), add some protein supplement to your diet (e.g. protein powders) and consider supplementing EFAs during fat loss periods.

Enhancing supplements contribute to optimize your body functioning and in this way accelerate your gains. Supplements in this category, such as creatine, glutamine, BCAAs, arginine, and HMB, are mainly focused to build muscle. As you gain experience in the gym and muscle gains slow down, you can give a try to this kind of supplements. Finally, application specific supplements are intended for advanced bodybuilders allowing them to increase their control on certain physiological processes such as fat mobilization (e.g. L-carnitine), metabolism acceleration (e.g. ephedrine, caffeine), natural testosterone boost (e.g ZMA), and joint injury prevention/healing (e.g. glucosamine).

Further reading about basic supplementation and its role in natural bodybuilding can be found in the article “Broke Buying Supplements?”, and the article “Food vs. Supplements”, both by Matt Danielsson.

A Fat Loss Program for Muscle Definition

When referring to bodybuilding, most people have in mind muscle development. Of course, gaining muscle is extremely important, but most of the times losing fat is also required to achieve a balanced, muscular and defined body. Losing fat is only possible when combining proper nutrition, cardiovascular exercise and weight training. Find in this post the basic guidelines for developing your fat loss program.

Controlling your nutrition is mandatory for losing fat. You have to adjust your diet in order to consume fewer calories than needed, by creating a small deficit of at most 500 calories per day with respect to your daily maintenance caloric requirements. Don’t go beyond this since diets that severely restricts caloric intake promote loss of lean body weight as opposed to fat. When cutting down on calories, you should keep the protein intake up in order to avoid muscle breakdown (about 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight per day). Control the amount of fat you eat, but don’t eliminate it from your diet. Focus preferably on essential fatty acids and avoid saturated fats and junk food at all. The main reduction on calories should come from carbohydrates. Stick with low GI carbohydrates, especially those rich in fiber, and limit high GI ones (except immediately after training). In addition, drink plenty of water (3 or 4 liters of water per day).

You should eat several small meals throughout the day (every 2.5-3 hours) instead of 3 big meals. This prevents blood sugar level fluctuations, helps control hunger, ensures constant nutrients flow to your muscles, increases metabolism, and avoids excess calories that could be stored as fat. Each meal should include a serving of protein and just enough carbohydrates to replenish glycogen stores in the liver and the muscles. In addition, make the meals smaller as the evening approaches in order to accommodate to the reduction in energy usage that occurs as the day goes on.

In order to increase the amount of fat you burn, you should incorporate to your program some aerobic exercise like cycling, swimming, jogging, rowing, etc. Perform 3-4 cardiovascular sessions per week, lasting 30-40 minutes. Avoid sessions in excess of 1 hour since anything past this promotes muscle breakdown. If you really want to do more cardio, split it up into several shorter sessions. Preferably perform your cardiovascular sessions first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. In this way, you ensure that your insulin level is low. Remember that eating causes an insulin response which inhibits fat burning.

Optimal fat burn is achieved in the 60-70% heart rate zone. Lower intensity (50-60%) burns more percentage of fat calories, but the total amount is not very high. Higher intensity (70-85%) burns more fat calories, but muscle protein wasted is also higher. Thus stay better in the 60-70% zone or use ‘interval training’, which consists of varying the training intensity during the exercise by moving between the different heart rate zones. This has demonstrated to be very effective for losing fat.

Incorporating weight training to a fat loss program is indicated in order to maintain muscle while burning fat. Building muscle is important for giving a muscular and hard look to the body once definition is reached. In addition, muscle is an active tissue that consumes energy. Thus the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn. This does not apply to fat tissue, which does not consume energy at all. You can use your regular workout oriented to muscle growth, but being immersed in a low carbohydrates diet will decrease your performance in the gym. For this reason, probably this is a good chance to train with high reps (12 and above) and stimulate those forgotten slow-twitch muscle fibers, which are more involved in fat burning because they get their energy more from fatty acid oxidization. Training these muscle fibers also leads to development of more mitochondria, providing a greater ability to oxidize fat.

You can find further advice for designing your fat loss program in the article “How to Replace the Love Handles with a Rock-hard Washboard” by Matt Danielsson and in the “Losing Fat” section of Muscle 101.