Muscle Building

Muscle growth is your body’s response to stimuli (e.g. running, weight lifting). If you have a bodybuilding nutrition plan that is personalized to your body data, and you push yourself to your limits during training, your body responds by spreading the muscle-building signal through hormones and neurotransmitters. This stimulates muscle breakdown and increases protein synthesis to repair and rebuild the muscle – to be stronger and bigger than before. Remember: Go to your limit – otherwise, strength training is just exercise therapy.

Fast muscle building requires the right diet. If you want to build muscle fast, your diet is, next to your workout plan, one of the most important factors. First and foremost, be sure to get enough protein, as it is the building block of muscle: your body requires protein for muscle protein synthesis. Several studies show that athletes who increase their protein intake make significantly better, faster progress in building muscle mass than athletes who ate less protein. Another benefit of eating more protein: it can help prevent muscle breakdown.

Your body cannot create muscle mass out of nothing, so you have to provide it with building material: a lot of protein for the new cell structures – about 2g per kilogram of body weight per day – and some good fat for the cell membranes. You also need healthy fats to have enough raw material for neurotransmitters – the signal substances in your body that spread the message ” build muscle “. Carbohydrates eaten at the right time – usually, right after training – help to accelerate recovery and increase muscle output. While you should eat complex carbohydrates (which raise your blood sugar levels more slowly) before training and on non-workout days, you can enjoy “fast” carbohydrates after training. Last but not least: If you want to get bigger, you have to eat surplus calories, your normal daily requirement will not provide the raw materials for new muscle mass. A rough set of guidelines: an additional calorie surplus of 20% of your basal metabolic rate.

When it comes to supplements, the name speaks for itself: they serve only as supplements to your daily diet. More specifically, they are intended to supplement missing nutrients and thus close gaps and prevent nutrient deficiencies. However, supplements are not a substitute for a healthy, balanced diet. They can’t replicate all of the benefits of whole foods and should only be used as complementary additions to help achieve your goal. Which supplements are right for you depends on your goal. Different supplements serve different purposes – and not all will help you along the way. Therefore, before you start taking supplements, get clear about what your goal is: do you want to lose weight, build muscle, or just compensate for a nutritional deficiency?

Who would have guessed? The food with the best amino acid profile for us humans is an egg. An egg has a biological value of 100. The biological value of a dietary protein (e.g. an egg) indicates how many grams of body protein you can build up with 100 g of the respective dietary protein. This plays an important role in muscle building recipes: the higher the biological value of a certain food, the less of it you have to eat to meet your protein needs. In addition to eggs, meat, fish and dairy products (such as quark or cheese) provide good sources of protein. But what about muscle building nutrition for vegetarians and vegans? No worries. You can easily cover your daily protein needs even on a purely plant-based diet: nuts, soy, and various other types of legumes provide excellent sources of protein. And grains, potatoes, and rice can also be suitable. Find out more in our article on vegan muscle building.