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.