Are there any muscle-building supplements that actually work? You don’t want to waste your hard-earned cash on supplements that simply don’t work, so what does actually work? I’m a performance nutritionist, and today, I’m going to run through five supplements that actually have a good evidence base behind them for building muscle and are ones that I regularly recommend in my coaching practice.
5 Muscle Building Supplements That Actually Work
Before we get stuck into this, I do want to caveat this discussion by saying, no supplement is going to work, unless you have your foundational nutrition, sleep, stress management and training habits dialled in. Very often, people look for a magic supplement that will fix all their issues, but in reality, they would be much better off actually focusing on getting their foundational habits dialled in. With that out of the way, let’s get stuck into the muscle-building supplements that work!
CreatineÂ
The first one on the list is creatine monohydrate, and I put this one at the top of the list because it has the most substantial effects on your muscle-building capabilities. By supplementing with creatine, you’re looking to improve the energy output from high-intensity exercise, specifically things like sprinting and lifting weights. In relation to muscle building, we’re looking to improve the performance output of heavy exercises in the gym, which will result in long-term muscle gain. Creatine essentially can facilitate you getting an extra couple of reps at the end of a heavy set. And while this might not seem like much, when you extrapolate this across a training plan, it can have some noticeable impact on your muscle-building capability from that training plan.
The great thing about creatine is that it’s very well studied and it’s super cheap, so the cost-benefit ratio is pretty high. You don’t need to worry about using other alternative forms of creatine, as creatine monohydrate has been proven to be the most effective or at least as effective as other forms that are more expensive. Now, it is true that creatine will create some water retention as it pulls water into the muscle cell with it, but it’s not going to make you look watery or bloated. If anything, it might make you look more full because it is sitting inside the muscle cell. You don’t need to cycle on and off it, and you also don’t need to load it, although if you do decide to do this, you will gain the benefits faster if you haven’t supplemented with creatine before. If you’re looking to do this, you can supplement with 20 grams per day for seven days, and then you can go down to the maintenance dose, which is recommended around three to five grams. People often ask me, ‘Is there a best time to take creatine, before a workout or after a workout?’ And honestly, if you can just keep remembering to take it on a daily basis, you’ll be doing a good job. But the key thing really is just to make a routine of supplementing it on a daily basis.
Caffeine
Number two on the list is caffeine. Many of you will have experience using pre-workouts, and I would say about 90 per cent of the positive impact that you get from pre-workouts is coming from caffeine. Caffeine’s effects are different from creatine. Creatine is going to take a little bit of time to build up in your system, and then your benefits will be expressed. Whereas with caffeine, you’re going to feel the effects within 60 to 90 minutes of consuming it.
How is caffeine impacting our ability to build muscle? Caffeine is a central nervous system stimulant, and this improves your muscles’ ability to contract and produce force. If your muscles are able to work better and produce more force, that transfers over to a better training stimulus and improvements in muscle building. Caffeine also seems to have other effects on muscle metabolism, such as the handling of calcium ions in the muscle cell, and this might also contribute to the improvements in performance that you get from using caffeine.
When you look at the sports nutrition literature, they use a dose of around three to six milligrams per kilogram of body weight. This means if you are 80 kilograms, you’d be using between 240 and 480 milligrams of caffeine for your workout. This is actually a fairly high dose of caffeine, so if you haven’t experimented with it before, what I’d recommend that you do is start at a lower dose, around 100 to 200 milligrams, and see how you feel after using that. The reason we don’t want to be overzealous with caffeine is because it can have a disruptive effect on your sleep (as discussed in our foundational sleep article), and sleep is a much more important component of building muscle than any boost that you’ll get out of caffeine. So, try and save caffeine for your early morning workouts and have a cutoff point around 12 pm.
Protein Powder
Next up on the list is protein powder, which seems like an obvious choice, but it does need to be mentioned. With protein being a critical macronutrient in the process of building muscle, it makes sense that you’ll have a very high-quality, convenient source of protein ready to use at a moment’s notice. Whey protein has consistently been shown to improve muscle-building outcomes, and this is due to its excellent amino acid profile. In particular, we’re looking at leucine, which is a signalling molecule that increases muscle protein synthesis, particularly after a workout.
If you tolerate whey protein well, it’s best to go for a good quality source and a flavour that you like. You can figure out the quality of a whey protein by looking at the back of the label and making sure that whey protein concentrate or isolate is the first ingredient on the list. Whey protein isolate is generally a better choice for those of you who are lactose intolerant, as most of the lactose gets removed in the filtration process of making whey protein isolate. Other varieties of protein powder are also absolutely fine to use, such as beef protein, soy protein, vegan blends, and even insect protein powder.
Citrulline and Nitrates
Number four on the list is citrulline and nitrates. I’ve lumped these together because although they’re not identical, they do have the same downstream mechanisms as it relates to improving muscle-building outcomes. Citrulline or citrulline malate is a very common ingredient that you will see in “pump pre-workouts”. Citrulline works by increasing levels of nitric oxide in the blood, and this essentially widens the blood vessels and improves the feeling of a pump that you get from being in the gym. This is where you can enhance muscle-building outcomes because it improves nutrient and oxygen delivery to the muscles. Dietary and supplemental nitrates, like what you’ll find in beetroot, will also increase nitric oxide levels in the blood, but as I mentioned earlier, the mechanism is slightly different. Supplementing with beetroot shots or beetroot juice will increase NO in the blood and will potentially improve some of these performance parameters and recovery.
Now, there does appear to be some positive research around the use of nitric oxide boosters. I wouldn’t be getting as excited about these as I would about creatine, caffeine, or protein powder as it relates specifically to muscle-building outcomes. If you’re supplementing with citrulline, the recommended dose is six to eight grams around an hour before exercise. If you’re supplementing with beetroot, you can use 500 mL of beetroot juice or 70 mL of concentrated beetroot juice, and this should be taken around two hours before you exercise.
Carbohydrate Powders and Mass Gainers
Finally, we have carbohydrate supplements and mass gainers. The reason that I’ve added this one to the list is because I have many clients who actually really struggle to get their calories in when it comes to bulking and building muscle. Carb supplements are quite cheap, and you can use something like cyclic dextrin in the middle of your workout. This is an easy way of getting extra carbs into your diet during a muscle-building phase because resistance training is primarily fueled by carbohydrates. Having something like this on deck is pretty damn useful.
Mass gainers are also quite useful in this domain because they typically add carbs and protein together, and some of them even add creatine as well. There is nothing special about them; you can make your own mass gainer shake at home. But having a convenient source of protein and carbohydrates like this can be quite useful if you’re trying to hit those calorie goals.
Muscle Building Supplements That Work
So, as you can see, there are a few muscle building supplements here that actually work. But overall, the vast majority of your results are going to be dictated by your diet, training, sleep, and stress management. If you need help with your nutrition or training, we do offer comprehensive online coaching. If you want to learn how to coach nutrition and become a nutrition coach, our certification program would be ideal for you. You can also follow us on our YouTube channel, if you want to stay up to date with our latest videos.
Dean McAloon
Hey I’m Dean, performance nutritionist and coach at Triage. I have a post graduate diploma in performance nutrition, and have been coaching people to transform their health, performance and body composition since 2016.
I love lifting, BJJ, reading, music, food and spending time with my family and friends.
