Winning the Supplement Game
99% of supplements are bullshit…
When I was in university and money was tight I can remember having a near panic attack that I would have to downsize my supplements, how was I going to keep making gains if I didn’t have my Muscle Juice weight gainer (fast acting and long lasting proteins brah), my ASSAULT pre-workout MATRIX (just sounded cool so I bought it), Xtend (gets you those extra reps every time!), Cellulor C4 (for explosive workouts), hydroxycut hardcore (I need to get ripped and I’m not some pussy, give me the extra strength shit) and NO-xplode (a guy I know’s on it and he’s jackeddd)… and if you laughed at some of those names, I actually just went to bodybuilding.com and listed some of their top ten best sellers!
Anyway, I cut it down to just protein powder. I put it in milk. I kept training hard, and somehow, someway, I still got stronger, stayed lean, and had more money to go out and get drunk with… in University this is a key priority.
I learned a valuable lesson: 99% of supplements are bullshit - EXPENSIVE bullshit, the worst kind. The easiest bullshit-detection method for supplements is to look at the package: if there’s a picture of a bodybuilder on it, don’t buy it… to a lesser extent - if the name contains misspelled words, don’t buy it. This is marketing hype, the kind that they hope causes you to not look at the list of ingredients and compensates for it being so expensive. Plain and simple - that bodybuilder on the cover didn’t get where he was taking this shit, and any time you need to spell something like ‘extends’ as ‘XtendZ’, it tells me you’re marketing to idiots, and as I’m not one, I’m not interested.
Fuckin’ tank, fuckin’ fire, fuckin’ jacked dude, some sciencey talk, the word ‘fact’ before things that are too vague to be facts… awesome!
Supplements are the easiest way to make money in the fitness business, and because it’s unregulated, a company can claim a product does almost anything as long as it doesn’t cure or treat a disease. We’re a quick fix society, and everyone wants a magic bullet, no one wants to work. Furthermore, with most things in life money can buy results - “Why can’t I just BUY a pill or a powder that’ll make me bigger, stronger, faster, leaner, more excited to work out?” Enter supplement companies. A select few are definitely more reputable, but the majority are just after your cash. T-Nation provides some great information on training and nutrition, but their articles are laced with promos for Biotest’s latest and greatest ‘breakthrough’ supplement… remember when ‘Surge’ came out? I just about came my pants when they finally released it because of the hype, now they don’t even mention it in articles! Not to mention that now plain old chocolate milk is shown to be as effective as a post-workout drink: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/muscle-gain/an-objective-comparison-of-chocolate-milk-and-surge-recovery.html
Another reputable source, Charles Poliquin, is a genius… he’s so smart in fact that he has his own supplement line, and watch his recommendations for mid-workout nutrition:
Fuck, taking all those pills would be a workout in itself.
Would this help your performance? Sure. Do I have a million dollars to spend each time I lift a weight? No. Is Charles hoping you think he’s the messiah of strength so you’ll blindly buy all this stuff? I think so.
It’s a much tougher sell to get people to understand that they’re just going to have to bust their ass in the gym and avoid junk food for the rest of their lives to stay in shape… and it won’t cost anything except time and effort.
The truth is that there are supplements that give you energy, improve strength, burn fat, and be healthier overall… just not to the extent most people expect them to. People forget what the name actually means - supplements SUPPLEMENT your diet and training, it’s not a REPLACEMENT. Does your diet suck? Does your training suck? If you answered yes, then all the supplements in the world won’t help. Think of supplements as a 5% bonus on whatever level you’re operating at - if you’re working 75% as hard as you could be on your diet and training then getting on a solid supplement regime can take you to 80%, not 100.
For some people (professional athletes, experienced lifters, etc) an extra 5% is a big difference maker… for your average gym-goer who’s working out 3 days a week, the thing that makes most sense for improvement isn’t supplements, it’s working harder. If you move from lifting 3x per week to 4, that’s a 33% increase in training! Think of this versus the 5% stated above from supplements.
“BUT! When I take Superpump pre-workout I get swole bro! I just feeeel stronger and can see all my veins n’ shit! Something’s happening there, and it’s more than that pussy 5%!” …check out this video on the placebo effect. Understand that your body on it’s own is a fantastic and complex system, and the belief that you’re going to be stronger, faster, able to do more often MAKES this a reality.
I’m not trying to vilify supplements, and I understand that people need to buy things to keep this capitalism thing going… I just want everyone to understand their place in the continuum of things that effect your overall health and performance - LAST - behind training, diet, sleep, and active recovery.
You can’t buy results and there are no short cuts.
In Part 2 I’ll discuss how to not be a sucker in the supplement game, and the 6 items that work best and why.
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