Muscle Building

What if I told you that you could retain or even gain more muscle mass and strength with less training? The secret lies in your nutrition.   As a personal trainer, most of my clients exhibit a similar behavior: they train hard, but they don’t give a damn about nutrition. So the time and effort they spend on training is wasted. Why do they sabotage their own success? Because they think nutrition is complicated and want to avoid the topic. But ignoring nutrition isn't an option. Knowing how nutrition works will help you utilize it for your fitness and strength gains. This works for anyone and everyone, for general fitness maintenance or muscle mass gain.   To get you started, here is my list of the top ten foods to help you gain more muscle mass and strength. Lean Beef This should be a staple of your diet if you want to gain muscle mass. Lean beef is loaded with all sorts of things conducive to muscle growth, including iron, zinc and B-vitamins. More importantly, it provides your body with high quality protein (not all proteins are equal), and a high level of amino acid that works with insulin to promote muscle growth. For those who are trying to lose weight, this should come as great news – a 3oz serving of lean beef provides roughly the same amount of protein as 1.5 cups of beans, but at half the calories.   2. Skinless Chicken Like beef, chicken is an excellent source of high quality protein, which is important for muscle maintenance and repair, bone health, and weight maintenance. And of course, there are so many ways you can cook and prepare chicken. Go down to the store and you can easily find chicken meat cut into single serving sizes that can be seasoned and quickly cooked.   3. Cottage Cheese Not many people know this, but cottage cheese is almost entirely pure casein protein. Casein is a slow-digesting protein, which means it is perfect for muscle maintenance. This is useful especially for people who have no choice but to go long periods without eating. Cottage cheese is also an excellent source of vitamin B12, calcium, and other important nutrients.