The 3 Nutrition Pillars for Fastest Muscle Growth [12 Studies]

this video has been a long overdue after my video on the exercise pillars for the fastest muscle growth I've been asked under that video and in the physionic community if I'll deliver on my promise of the best practices for muscle growth from a nutrition standpoint well here we are I'll be leaning on my masters in exercise physiology my past experiences and above all numerous studies to show you what you should consider doing if you want to build muscle the fastest way possible naturally that said I'll go over multiple aspects but we'll be getting into some

of the nuances later on as well as some major takeaways to apply to your life so stick out to the end because things will get more and more hard-hitting as we go along the first pillar energy so what you need to do is rub some crystals all over your body to unleash the internal ener um I'm talking about food energy uh why does this matter and how does this work well let me start by explaining that for your muscle cells to grow there needs to be an imbalance in a process called proteostasis which is the

balance of protein synthesis versus protein breakdown if you are synthesizing more proteins inside your cells than breaking down then you are likely growing muscle as the cell needs to expand to accommodate that new protein acrude now if we zoom into that further the process of protein synthesis is controlled by a master molecule called mtor when mtor is activated via tag applied to it called phosphorilation mtor will further tag other proteins some proteins it will then inhibit like for ebp1 and some it will excite or activate like s6k that information comes from these two studies okay

one more step and then I'll bring us back up for a breath of translatable air the activation of s6k and inhibition of 4 ebp1 along with other factors leads to more mRNA which is the transcript from your genes to be translated to the proteins through the protein synthesis machinery called the ribosomes so let's say that you lift weights your cells receive a signal for growth through similar molecular Cascades like the ones that I just described and leads to more reading or expression of genes that hold the information for key proteins needed for the cell to

adapt to the training stimulas these genes are read expressed and that leads to their information being transcribed into mRNA this mRNA is then acted upon by the aformentioned ribosomes to produce the actual protein that your cell will then use to bolster itself against further resistance training and that's how you get stronger and bigger you jacked animal you as usual I've skipped a lot of steps for time sake but hopefully you have a bit better understanding of what's Happening inside your cells to lead to the seual muscle growth yet that doesn't explain where food energy comes

in here the food that you consume is biochemically broken down through your metabolism if that's glycolysis metabolism for carbohydrates or beta oxidation metabolism for your fats the end result is always ATP or adenosine triphosphate and G TP or guanosine triphosphate these molecules have distinct effects in protein synthesis in two major ways although more could be argued one ATP can bind directly to mtor and stimulate its activity according to this review and accompanying studies this of course would lead to the downstream effects that we discussed two both ATP and GTP are involved in the ribosome reading

or translating of the MRNA into a protein the GTP allows the ribosome to move down the MRNA translating it as it moves and the ATP is responsible for the attachment of amino acids those are the building blocks of proteins onto the molecules called TRNA all of this is part of the protein synthesis Machinery so on a cellular level it makes a lot of sense that if there were fewer GTP and ATP molecules around there's less stimulation of the protein synthesis but is that at what we actually see on the muscle level well these researchers food

restricted people for a few days and even in that short period of time they showed a 19% reduction in protein synthesis although protein was the same between the non-energy restricted group and the energy restricted group additionally there was less inhibition so greater activity of that protein synthesis inhibitor protein for ebp1 that we discussed earlier so the white bar is the amount of inhibitory phosphorilation by mtor on this protein synthesis inhibitor in the energy deficit group as we see it's lower meaning that protein synthesis inhibitory protein for ebp1 is likely more active on the other hand

there have been a few studies looking at muscle growth in people who consume more food energy than their body needs for example this pilot study people did just that they overc consumed and they were able to gain muscle the BL bar group consumed more but both consumed more than they needed so they both gained muscle okay so the takeaway here is you must be consuming enough food to gain muscle and how much is enough food you ask well we'll come back to that the second pillar protein who saw this one coming from miles away I

sure didn't as the dumbest physiologist that there ever was this one seems pretty obvious but why is protein important and is there an upper limit for benefit and are there some other considerations that aren't as obvious well the first question is pretty easy we'll go back to our protein synthesis Machinery I briefly mentioned that ATP is needed to load amino acids on to TRNA which then get used by the ribosomes to stitch together proteins for muscle growth those amino acids come from none other than the protein that you consume you consume protein your body digests

it into the constituent Parts called amino acid molecules absorbs it then delivers them to the muscle cell and then they get latched onto this TRNA to form a new protein but instead of the previous protein that was part of the muscle for a cow or part of a plant it now belongs to you as an enzyme or some structural unit of the cell or anything else that your genes can create okay that's the most obvious influence of protein on muscle protein synthesis but there's another related to mtor that Master stimulator of protein synthesis from earlier

one potent amino acid that is found in some proteins is called Lucine this Lucine amino acid has a host of different ways that it can stimulate mtor it can physically bind to proteins called Rags that ultimately recruit and activate mtor or it can inhibit an inhibitor of mtor called gator if you're staring at me with blank eyes wondering uh what in all this world that we're talking about Rags and Gators I don't blame you uh that's a miniature Taste of the complexity of molecular biology there's more to be found in this scientific review ultimately just

know that this amino acid along with others that I won't go over now stimulate mour activity and that isn't even to mention the other side of the proteostasis that we've been discussing degradation Lucine and other amino acids along with increased food energy in the form of ATP also reduce cellular degradation thereby strongly slanting the cell towards muscle accretion rather than breakdown the complexities of proteostasis are for another time so let's just move on what we now know is that for multiple reasons protein consumption is key to building muscle then the next question is how much

well if we crack open a scientific review on the topic the researchers therein point out that we should be consuming somewhere between the range of 1.6 to 2.2 gam of protein per kilogram of weight to maximize protein synthesis and muscle growth but total protein is not enough of a consideration it's also important to consider the amino acid profile of that protein that major amino acid consideration is Lucine Lucine is the most potent stimulator of entor among amino acids having a high protein intake but having a low Lucine intake will yield subpar results compared to consuming

adequate Lucine as well fortunately many foods contain large amounts of Lucine which you can easily find with a quick search however to give you a Target the goal is to reach around 2 to three gram of Lucine per meal ideally three so if you consume 40 gram of protein in a meal ideally it should contain 3 G of Lucine the third pillar carbohydrates this one is a bit controversial because it probably doesn't matter much if you already consume even a modest amount of carbohydrates in your diet but if you're one of those keto low lives

those freaks of nature I'm kidding I love the low carb uh but if you follow a very low carbohydrate diet there's some mixed evidence indicating that it may not be the best scenario for muscle growth and why is that when we exercise through weightlifting we tend to rely significantly on glucose carbohydrates for energy generation remember when we touched on glycolysis earlier that's the pathway that allows us to convert carbohydrates into a usable cellular energy ATP that ATP is not only used in protein synthesis but allows your muscle cells to contract in a process called crossbridge

cycling of two proteins called actin and mein anyway without getting too much into the weeds where we might get eaten by a gator see recall to earlier in the video but uh this time it's an actual Gator not a protein within the cell signaling mtor so okay anyway we need a ton of ATP to allow our muscles to contract and while fat molecules are an excellent source of ATP our cells generate ATP through fat at a much slower rate so they rely on carbohydrate metabolism glycolysis to get the ATP necessary for short births of activity

like weightlifting on a keto enic or other very low carbohydrate diets the muscle and liver cells are massively deprived of stored glucose carbohydrate and there's none being consumed so that glycolysis system suffers as a result getting sufficient exercise volume can be more difficult since your muscles simply don't have the ability to contract over and over again at higher weights that said there's some nuances here like it may not matter for measures of power and strength since the exercise is so short literal seconds but may matter more when you're approaching those 8 9 10 or higher

repetition ranges there may be some other reasons that low carbohydrate diets aren't optimal for muscle hypertrophy such that's muscle growth but I'll get into those another time ultimately it is still possible to gain muscle on a very low carbohydrate diet just more difficult than if a person consumes even a modest amount of carbohydrates so carbohydrates are a pillar relative to very low carbohydrate diets but probably not much of one in respect to other carbohydrate diets according to this review the idea is to consume enough to keep your tissue levels saturated and that is estimated to

be at the lower end of the range around 3 G per kilogram according to these researchers but even they acknowledge the true number may actually even be lower ultimately the takeaway here is that you may want to consider eating more than 20 gram of carbohydrates a day because it will likely impact your gym performance which will reduce your muscle growth from repeated bouts of suboptimal workouts I wouldn't worry about the exact optimal milligram of carbohydrates but it's probably not really going to matter for you okay so how might you think about all of this here's

the straightforward answer the please be crystal clear this is for the fastest muscle growth with no considerations for anything else you need to be gaining weight Point Blank the first pillar comes down to eating enough food that you are slowly but surely gaining weight this only applies to people who are not severely overweight to be even more exact you need to get on that scale or if you don't like scales use a measuring tape for your arms legs midsection and you need to see those numbers slowly creeping upwards second you need to be consuming a

minimum of 1.6 g of protein per kilogram and if you're already quite lean you may want to bump it up further in that range like 2 G per kilog of weight and don't forget about that 2 to three gram of Lucine threshold per meal finally consider consuming 100 plus grams of carbohydrates a day probably more now there are plenty of other scientifically backed tips like protein timing pre-sleep food consumption sleep itself and much more but these three especially the first two assuming that sleep is also solid will get you 90% there I can cover those

more nuanced aspects another time but I'll tell you something that I didn't mention you won't build much muscle if you don't resistance train so if you got value from this video you should definitely check out this next video on optimal resistance training for muscle growth because I lay it all out there like I did here or if you're interested in more nutrition check out this one but I'm telling you without resistance TR none of this matters so if you'll indulge my bro self do you even lift bruh