What Supplements Should You Take to Help You Achieve Your Health & Fitness Goals?

Here’s the second part of this month’s UNCENSORED Podcasts Season 2.

The topic?

Supplements.

Here’s what you discovered in the first part (link to the 1st part here):

  • What a supplement is, how the industry got started, and what it has evolved into
  • What is the definition of supplements in various countries and why it matters
  • How important supplements are
  • What’s the lifecycle of a supplement product
  • How the process of putting new supplements on the market works
  • How come government regulators have no control of what’s on the market
  • What ingredients are added into supplements are useless and serve just as marketing

“Will These Supplements Help Me?”

Often times guys on the Internet and in our community ask us “What supplements should I take?” or “Will this supplement help me?”.

Should you take those? Are they worth the money? How will you track the results? Or will you just go by the “feeling”?

The issue is that it’s impossible to answer those type of questions.

If you want an accurate answer that can actually help you (not the generic crap found on the web) with your fitness goals, you need to get clear on what is it you really want and what do you expect out of the supplements.

Another thing that will determine what supplements to use and how much of it we will recommend you taking is your budget, how much money can you spend on supplements? 50 bucks? Or 1000 bucks? That’s a pretty big difference. Somebody who is a sponsored athlete or works in a supplement lab will have different options than a college student.

For example a question “Will this product give me the body I want?”or “Can this product do what I want it to do?” is way better and gets to the point of what you really expect from it.

But even those two questions aren’t perfect, when you start thinking about it, you’ll soon find out that it’s not that easy to figure out the right question (after you listen to the podcast, try to come up with a good one and share it in the community so others can comment on it).

This is just one way of looking at it, another way would be to take a different approach and actually set your goals first and then try to match the right product to that desired outcome.

However, in this case you will find a pretty nasty barrier.

And that’s the fact that supplements contain a lot of ingredient that will have absolutely zero effect on your body.

When you look into each product you will see a bunch of stuff you have never heard about, but almost always there will be one big ingredient that’s usually responsible for all the results. In many cases it will be creatine, or caffeine, depends on the supplement.

Why is that?

Well, the top selling supplements are exactly the same as ten years ago and they will most likely be same as the best selling supplements ten years from now.

There is just a couple of items that are packaged in a thousand different ways.

The product isn’t what’s different, they are roughly the same, it’s the marketing around it that makes all the difference.

Supplement companies fight a difficult challenge and that’s pointing out the ingredient.

Nobody gets excited about plain Creatine monohydrate anymore, simply because it’s been around a while. So, they have to sell some “enhanced version” of creatine to pump up the sales.

It has nothing to do with finding some new amazing and proven ingredient that nobody has ever heard about and adding it to the current product, it’s just a simple desire to sell more products.

Today John Barban and Brad Pilon will reveal more information about the supplement industry and also coach you on how to ask the right question and how to find supplements that will help you with:

a) Building Muscle

b) Losing Fat

c) Improving Health

d) Boosting Energy

In today’s UNCENSORED training, you will also discover:
  • How to approach weight loss supplements and what do they really help with (hint: they are not burning your belly fat)
  • What are the realistic expectations for using the supplements that are on the market
  • What supplements companies are should be trustworthy (bigger or smaller? Why??)
  • How the Natural Standards Database (you have access to it in the immersion account through cockpit) can help you pick supplements
  • Step by step how to intelligently choose and test supplements
  • What side effects really are and how it applies to you when you take supplements (or drugs)
  • Pilon’s sneaky techniques he used to sell supplements in the past

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All About Supplements Part 1

Getting in shape and staying in shape can be viewed as having a two pronged approach.

What should you take?

1. Diet

2. Workouts

However if you’ve got the budget it can also have a third prong – Supplements

In the order of importance I would say diet and exercise are 1 and 1A. You can certainly get in great shape without every using a supplement, but if budget allows there are some interesting supplements that can likely help you along the way.

To be clear, they are called ‘supplements’ for a reason…and that is because they’re not meant to replace diet, or replace exercise, but only to supplement the work you are already doing in the kitchen and the gym.

So what is a supplement anyway? Do you even know? The definition of a supplement changes from country to country as does the requirement for scientific proof of the efficacy and safety. The concept of ‘supplement’ is a legal definition based on the governing bodies of your given region. A supplement can be legal for sale in one country and illegal in the very next country over (United States vs Canada for example).

The legal definition and status of a supplement can change throughout it’s lifecycle as well. In some cases a supplement can be in a grey area where it does not have government approval for sale, but it’s not quite illegal yet either. In these cases the supplement in question is being sold while it’s legal definition is ‘pending approval’. In some cases a product can be determined a drug and thus illegal for sale as a supplement.

If you’ve been a regular consumer of sports/bodybuilding supplements over the past decade then it’s likely you have taken a product that has been re-categorized as a drug and thus illegal. In some sense you could even say that you’ve been taking a ‘banned’ substance that would definitely have you failing a drug test in any organized sport!

Supplement manufacturers move fast getting new products onto the market. So fast that in some cases regulatory bodies cannot keep up with the pre-market regulatory review process to determine if a product is safe and effective for sale. Some products can gain a significant market share while regulators scramble to figure out what is being sold and if it should be classified as a supplement or drug.

This is a dynamic struggle between supplement manufacturers and regulators, and it’s been going on since supplements hit the market. As long as supplement manufacturers can find new ingredients and new derivatives if existing ingredients there will always be this grey area between what is known and studied, and what is new and not fully understood yet.

In this first part we discuss the definition of what a supplement is, how the industry got started, and what it has evolved into.

John

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Can You Go Past Your Genetic Ideal with More Protein?

Here’s the second part of this month’s UNCENSORED Podcasts Season 2.

Here’s what you discovered in the first part (link to the 1st part here):

  • What’s catch up growth
  • What’s the disinhibition/inhibition model and how does  it apply to muscle growth
  • How taking drugs basically means adding another engine to your car (body) meaning what bodybuilders do, doesn’t apply to your case in any way
  • That fitness media completely loses touch with scientific research
  • You can’t stimulate your body to grow more than it’s designed to, you can only remove inhibitors to allow your body to keep growing to its full ideal
  • Different inhibitors that are preventing your muscle from growing
  • That almost every single image you see of bodybuilders is enhanced, but after a while you’ve gotten used to it and started thinking of it as your genetic ideal

What Role Do Protein and Amino Acids Play in Muscle Growth?

It’s generally accepted that higher amino acid intake allows for muscle synthesis in the otherwise fasted state, but…

Can higher protein intake stimulate more muscle growth?

…the truth is, you can’t eat your way to muscle growth.

That’s just not going to happen.

In reality your goal should be to hit an adequate amount, in both calories and protein. Everyone thinks the key is in some sort of excess, but that’s the “stimulation model” forced at you by fitness media.

You have to realize that everybody has an energetic reserve. In fact a large person can go days without eating and still not have it affect the metabolic processes in his body.

It’s no the deficit itself that’s the determinant, but the ability to handle it, which depends on the amount of the reserve. In other words, the leaner you are the more and more frequently you will eat.

…And what if you try to eat more?

Well, in a nutshell your body deals with excess by burning it, storing it or by getting rid of it.

So, let’s say you buy a weight gainer product and you try to dose your way up to bigger muscles.

Well, once you listen to todays podcast you’ll understand that you’re consciously investing in storing these excess calories as fat! That sucks, doesn’t it?

But that’s pretty much what the food and supplement companies are selling you. You are paying to be fat, how crazy is that?

Now that applies mostly to excess calories, but too much protein works almost the same. Most guys think you have to take a protein shake five times a day and even in the middle of the night, because your “body is starving“, right?

The truth is that your body is pretty well-designed and it handles excess protein in a smart way – it stores it as a reserve and uses it during your fasted state.

There is a sweet spot to every biological process. You can also imagine each process as a spectrum. On the left side you have a malnourished, 14 year-old marathon runner and on the right side you have the wanna be bodybuilder who is mega dosing calories and protein, but he is just getting fat. Both are extremes, you want to be in the middle, eat enough protein and calories to maintain what you have and build even more muscle while losing all the fat and getting ripped.

One of the keys to understanding how all this works is realizing that your body is not static, it’s dynamic.

Your body is breaking down and building things up every day – you are not built of the same stuff as you were a year ago.

Just like your bank account, something goes in, something goes out, so over time it may look the similar, but it’s never the exact same money.

In today’s UNCENSORED training, you will discover and learn:

  • What’s the genetic ideal and genetic ideal shape for you and if you can go beyond it
  • What role does protein play and what you need to do to remove protein intake as an inhibitor
  • The answer to whether extra protein intake helps with muscle building
  • What happens when you get from the adequate intake spectrum below to the low levels of caloric and protein intake or on the other hand to high levels of excessive intake
  • What are your only ways of affecting the shape of your body
  • How the environment you live in translates into your ability to get in shape
  • What body are you capable of building when you remove all of the inhibitors
  • What’s novel stimulus and how it relates to muscle growth
  • What’s the difference in muscle gains and strength gains
  • If small forearms are preventing you from making your arms bigger
  • How a calf injury can mean shoulder pain and inability to work out properly
  • Revealing an argument why you should fast to remove yet another inhibitor
  • Whether working out and or running is removing an inhibitor, introducing new inhibitor or accelerating your growth (hint: it’s not the one you think)
  • How to look at your life with a new mindset and target all the inhibitors and remove them

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