One of our favourite questions.
Let us start off by saying something that can save us all a lot of time, unless you are consuming enough calories to be in a caloric surplus, it is going to be quite hard to put on size.
Now that we’ve cleared that, let’s get in to how we can use supplements to help achieve that and more!
1. Mass Gainer
This type of supplement has been around for ages and is a classic staple to anyone who has tried to put on weight and size.
A Mass Gainer is a supplement that contains more calories than your conventional supplement.
They can be broken down into two types.
- A Lean Gainer - which is a mass gainer with 300-500 calories approximately to allow room to manage food and calories to manage putting on fat.
- A Heavy Gainer - which is a dense mass gainer approximately 800-1200 calories for those who require huge calorie increases.
These are great tools to help you bridge any caloric gaps within a diet to fuel muscle growth.
For a Lean Gainer, we love to recommend Max’s Clean Mass and for a Heavy Gainer we recommend Rule1 LBS
2. Whey Protein
Whey protein is a lean protein powder that is rich an amino acid called Leucine which is responsible for muscle protein synthesis and is why Whey is the preferred source of protein within supplements for building muscle.
Should calories be managed through food, whey is a great tool to use for recovery due to its quick absorption and can be used as a food source to hit protein requirements.
Our recommendation of Whey Powder can range from a couple including Optimum Nutrition Gold Standard 100% Whey Protein, Dymatize Elite 100% Whey or Scitec 100% Whey Protein Professional.
3. Creatine
Creatine is by far one of the most studied supplements in the market by far, proving to be the best, safest, most effective and cost efficient supplement that anyone can use.
Creatine has been clinically proven to increase strength, power, performance and recovery.
Benefits like those are a clear reason as to why we would recommend Creatine to any one looking to put on muscle!
When it comes to our Creatine recommendations, we only recommend CreaPure as this the form that 9/10 studies have been done on and is the quality source assuring what you’re getting is safe, tested and efficient.
Brands that contain this are but not limited to Thorne Creatine, ATP Science Creatine Monohydrate and ASN Nano Creatine.
4. Glutamine
Glutamine is an amino acid that has a multitude of uses including gut health, immunity and in this case, muscle retention.
We touch on muscle retention because there’s nothing more frustrating than having all your hard earned muscle be lost or withered away when you’ve paused your training, going through stressful periods or you simply struggle to hold on to muscle due to a fast metabolism and counterproductive genetics for your goa of building muscle.
Queue L-Glutamine, this amino acid can act as a “buffer” when your body seeks to breakdown muscle to use as fuel source.
This is because when muscle is being used as fuel (which is not a preferred energy system and will only do this when calories are adequately insufficient or through stressful periods) our body is seeking stored glutamine within the muscle (which composes approximately 60% of your muscle tissue) to convert to Glucose, usable energy, via a process called Gluconeogenesis.
To prevent this we recommend incorporating L-Glutamine in to your regime.
Brands we can recommend are ATP Science L-Glutamine or International Protein L-Glutamine.
4. ZMA
Lastly, a good ZMA supplement is the cherry on top as they are commonly deficient minerals.
ZMA Is a mix of Zinc, Magnesium and usually Vitamin B6.
These minerals are crucial for a large number of roles within the body and when it comes to building size these roles are, healthy Testosterone levels, better sleep for increased Growth Hormone secretion, good stomach acid production for effectively breaking down the large amount of food you should be eating and processing carbohydrates effectively to name a few.
We like to recommend ATP Science Z-Mag as a suitable option for those looking for a good ZMA supplement.
Other than the basics of eating up and training hard, these are the tools we can recommend to anyone looking to build size to their frame.