powerful legal muscle-building supplement.

powerful legal muscle-building supplement. 

Creatine 

Creatine is the most powerful legal muscle-building supplement. Ever. That’s not just our opinion, the International Society of Sports Nutrition agrees.  It’s also 100% safe, with no reported disasters after decades of rigorous testing. The only reported negative side effect is that sometimes some people get stomach discomfort after consuming it, and that’s just due to taking too much of it at once and/or not drinking enough water. (Creatine will pull fluid into your muscles, so drink a little bit of extra water.)

More muscle. Perhaps more interestingly, studies unanimously show that it builds muscle and improves strength. Secretly mixing creatine into a trainee’s coffee in the morning radically improves his muscle gains? Pretty fearsome.

Check out this study showing that following a great training program for 8 weeks with post-workout sugar produced 6 pounds of muscle growth, and 9 pounds of muscle growth with post-workout sugar + creatine. Not bad. That’s a 50% improvement in muscle mass due to creatine. (And the post-workout sugar? That’s up next.)

Less fat. You’ll also gain less fat. This is because creatine is a potent supplement for improving insulin sensitivity in your muscle cells—even in those with decent insulin sensitivity to begin with (like most of us skinny guys.) It does this by pulling glucose into your muscles instead of leaving it hanging around to be stored as fat.

How? Creatine helps your body replenish ATP, which increases anaerobic power—the type of power you need to haul heavy-ass weights. Being able to lift more weight increases the mechanical tension you’re placing on your muscles and on your body, meaning that you’ll have pretty fantastic muscle stimulation and a greater acute hormonal response to your training. The real benefit comes from the increased skeletal muscle synthesis and glycogen storage that comes along with having high concentrations of creatine in your system. This means that not only will you build more muscle via your training, you’ll also get more muscle out of the food that you’re eating.

Some guys joke that creatine supports the entire muscle-building supplement industry, and that isn’t too far from the truth. When you start reading supplement ingredients you’ll be amazed at how many of them have a few grams of creatine tucked away into every serving. How many supplements out there would still produce results if you yanked the creatine out of them? Not many. Not many at all.

Think of most supplements like mix drinks. There are a lot of cool colours, flavours and ingredients, but the whole point of them is the alcohol. Creatine is the alcohol. We aren’t really fans of mix drinks, so we’re recommending that you skip all the fancy proprietary blends and just head straight to the good stuff.

Now, as with virtually everything in the supplement world, there are a lot of extremely expensive and fancy variations out there. You don’t need them. Simple creatine monohydrate is still the king of creatine. You’ll save a ton of money and get all the benefits. You also don’t need to get fancy with how you take it, as you may have heard. Mix it into your tea, coffee, water—whatever.

*Creatine is synthesized in a lab so it’s safe for vegetarians and vegans too.

**If you’re a vegan I would say it’s nearly mandatory, as you’ll be more likely to have a deficiency in creatine, which can cause some longterm health problems and reduce your cognitive function. 

***Beta-alanine is a similar supplement that can be taken in addition to creatine. It’s newer and there’s limited research available, but it’s very promising so far. Not as promising as creatine, but still promising nonetheless

MALTODEXTRIN

Most fancy recovery drinks are packed full of dextrose or maltodextrin and cost an enormously scary amount of money. This particular tub is scary because it’s so cheap. At 24 cents per serving it’s almost too cheap to believe. You’d think you were buying a tub of sugar… and you’d be correct.

Sugar is a little confusing, since there are a few different common types. The carbohydrates that you eat are all converted into glucose, at which point your body can store them for use as a fuel source. If you consume them properly you’ll keep all that fuel stored in your liver and muscles (glycogen), instead of converting them into fatty acids (flabs).

One option is dextrose. This particular type of sugar, glucose derived from corn, is one of the cheapest foods on the planet, digests extremely quickly, and is a dirt cheap source of muscle-building carbs. Taken while working out it’s a pretty effective supplement for us ectomorphs trying to build mass. It’s a valid option, but it’s hard to find and hard to stomach (because it’s so damn sweet).

The supplement that we’re recommending is maltodextrin – a glucose polymer. It’s made up of many glucose units bound together. It’s a starch, so instead of tasting like sugar it tastes more similar to flour. It digests a teensy bit slower (probably a good thing), and we’ve found that our members much prefer the taste. It still has no fibre in it, so it’s easy on the appetite and will clear out of our stomachs relatively quickly, leaving us able to comfortably eat more later. (A big deal for us skinny dudes.)

That study in the creatine section is said to have produced “some of the highest non-steroid increases in lean mass” ever seen—badass. While the study was technically studying creatine, the carbohydrates they were giving them were a huge factor in producing muscle growth, which is why even the group or participants just supplementing with sugar did so well. (The training program itself was also a factor. It was a very well designed muscle-building program, which is surprisingly rare for studies.)

“But Shane, won’t consuming all these refined carbohydrates make me fat?!”

No. Perhaps surprisingly, this is actually a pretty good way tominimize your chances of getting fat. This has to do with the heightened insulin sensitivity in your muscle cells that accompanies weightlifting, the synergistic anabolic effect that the protein creates (whey protein creates a very strong insulin response), the fact that we’re strategically creating a calorie surplus and spiking insulin, and the fact that carbs aren’t very easily converted into fatty acids and thus aren’t very easily stored as fat.

To quote the brilliant nutrition researcher and fat loss expert James Krieger, who has a master’s degree in nutrition and has published of some of the best muscle-building nutrition studies out there—”Post-workout carbohydrates shouldn’t cause you any trouble in the long-run as you are extremely insulin sensitive after training. As long as you maintain a good diet, good activity, keep your body fat low, and your fasting blood sugar remains normal, then you should be fine.”

We picked this brand because it’s so pure and bare bones. It has one and only one ingredient (maltodextrin). It’s also really damn cheap.

WHEY PROTEIN

Whey protein powder is a cheap and convenient way of getting in your daily protein, but there’s really nothing special about it. It’s the quickly digested protein found in dairy products. It’s processed, but unlike junk food, the processing is fairly minimal. Nutritionally you can pretty much consider it a whole food instead of a supplement. It even has some vitamins in it.

Essentially it’s more or less equivalent to a chicken breast. A chicken breast would taste pretty funky blended up into a fruit smoothie though, so whey is sometimes best 

Muscle can only by synthesized out of amino acids (found in protein) so a shortage of those can easily slow down your efforts. Since most of us ectomorphic guys aren’t consuming enough protein to optimally build muscle, adding whey protein into your diet really will most guys build more muscle mass. 

Whey is especially effective when taken surrounding training. It digests quickly and contains a pretty stellar blend of branched chain amino acids (BCAAs). If you really want to kick things up a notch, it works even better at stimulating muscle growth when combined with a carb source like maltodextrin. (study) The whey protein + maltodextrin combo is about as powerful as they come—it’s no secret—and almost every single workout recovery drink and commercial weight gainer will combine these two ingredients.

It’s a classic whey isolate protein powder from a reputable company, and the whey protein itself is very high quality. An interesting (indie) study recently looked into many of the popular brands of whey protein. The study got a lot of attention because of how controversial it was – a lot of popular brands were making false claims. This brand (Optimum Nutrition) wasn’t, and was thus ranked the highest.

*If you want a non-workout protein powder to take along with meals use this casein protein, but keep in mind it presents no advantage over real food. It’s handy and affordable though if you’re not much one for cooking.

**If you don’t handle whey protein well (allergies) or you’re avoiding it for moral reasons (e.g. you’re a vegan) then you can go with rice+pea protein, or another blend of plant-based protein sources. (The amino acid profile in individual plant-based sources isn’t complete, so blends are ideal.) SunWarrior is pretty fantastic both from a quality standpoint and from a taste standpoint. I use it sometimes and I’m not even a vegan.