Getting in shape and getting that beach body you’ve always wanted isn’t as easy as just working out consistently. Having a great diet is very important for getting in shape.
Sometimes, it makes sense to supplement your diet as well, and in this post, you’ll learn about 7 great workout supplements.
Hitting the gym, eating a balanced diet, and getting in shape are great habits to practice to lead a healthy life.
Maybe you want a little more from your life, and want to be very healthy and attain your dream body.
Part of becoming the master of your life is being physically and mentally healthy. By putting beneficial foods and supplements into your body, this can lead to feeling better over time.
While it is possible to attain an amazing physique with natural food, sometimes our bodies need a little boost from other healthy sources.
For me, for example, I don’t always eat enough protein during a day, and when I’m working out, I feel the need to replenish my muscles with a protein shake or protein bar.
Over the past few years, I’ve been experimenting with different workout supplements and believe I’ve found 7 workout supplements which are best for me.
Maybe they won’t be best for you, but by learning, experimenting, and seeing what works for you, you can work towards your dream body.
In this post, I’m going to share with you the 7 workout supplements I use to supplement my diet, and talk about the uses and benefits of each.
Let’s get into the article!
7 Workout Supplements to Take for Your Dream Body
Below is a list of the 7 workout supplements I personally use and think are great to become more healthy and reach your physical fitness goals.
I’m not a doctor – some of these may not be for you. Please check with your doctor to make sure these different products are suitable for your use.
The 7 workout supplements I use and believe are great for helping you get healthy are:
Let’s dive into each of these workout supplements in greater detail below.
1. Whey Protein
Protein is the building block of muscle, and is essential to have if you are looking to get stronger over time.
Whey protein is one of the most common workout supplements as it contains all 9 essential amino acids (the building blocks of protein). Essential amino acids must be obtained from food, whereas non-essential amino acids can be created internally.
For working out, building muscle, and having a healthy diet, having a lot of protein can possibly help you reach your goals faster.
I try to get at least 100 grams of protein a day, and on most days, I’ll get upwards of 150 grams (also, for reference, I weigh about 165 pounds – as of writing this).
Depending on your goals and bodyweight, you’ll want to research and figure out how much protein you need.
To supplement my workouts and overall health, I use whey protein powder once a day. Some people will have multiple protein shakes a day, but for me, I try to only have 1 “non-real” protein based “meal” a day for my stomach’s sake.
2. Creatine HCL
Creatine is one of the most cost effective and powerful workout supplements. Our bodies naturally have creatine running through them, but with a creatine supplement, you can get extra energy and muscle stimulation.
The one downside about creatine is there are no FDA approved supplements on the market.
That being said, I’ve used creatine on and off for the past few years and never had any issues (but I have had cramping a few times – you need to drink a lot of water with it – and have been careful if I ever had an upset stomach).
Make sure to do your own research and due diligence on these different supplements before using them.
While there is a lot of controversy on using creatine, again, it is a naturally occurring compound and one of the most commonly used supplements.
When buying creatine, I’ve been able to get 45 days worth of supplement for only $14.
With creatine, you get massive bang for your buck, and can see some good results, both in body composition and performance.
3. Pine Pollen
Pine pollen is one of my favorite supplements. This naturally occurring super food has many benefits and nutrients.
I was turned on to pine pollen by a friend because he mentioned pine pollen provides a natural testosterone boost.
In addition to this, there are many nutrients, anti-oxidants, minerals and amino acids which can provide you a nice boost for your workout and general well-being.
Pine pollen is available both in powder and tincture. I’ve tried both the powder and tincture, and recommend the tincture (the powder tastes like tree…)
For me, I cycle through a 4 oz bottle of Pine Pollen every few months. Over time, your body builds up a resistance to pine pollen. For this reason, I don’t take pine pollen all the time.
However, when I do take pine pollen, I love it and definitely would recommend giving it a try (but be aware it is a natural supplement, and not necessarily “regulated” as some other vitamins and supplements).
4. Bee Pollen
Bee pollen is another super food I take as a health supplement. Similar to pine pollen, bee pollen is a naturally occurring substance which has many enzymes, nutrients, minerals and amino acids.
In addition to being a super food packed with nutrients, there are some other benefits of having bee pollen.
One unexpected benefit I’ve found is how bee pollen contains some protein, and also can help with allergies.
Most Spring seasons, I’m hit with bad allergies. However this year (this is anecdotal), I didn’t get hit at all by allergies, and I’m wondering if it had to do with the bee pollen.
I typically take my bee pollen straight, or mix it in with a yogurt or fruit smoothie.
Again, this is a naturally occurring substance, and falls more into the “hippy” and “organic” supplement camp (though that doesn’t negate or lessen effects of bee pollen).
5. Fish Oil
Fish oil contains Omega-3 fatty acids, which are essential nutrients that are important in preventing and managing heart disease.
Much of our food is Omega-6 fatty acid based (from corn), and Omega-3 balances this out.
Since our diets do not include fish that much, that’s where fish oil comes in.
Taking fish oil over time has shown to be beneficial for a person’s heart. As you probably know, a healthy heart can allow you to perform exercise at a higher level!
I take fish oil for prevention of any heart issues, and for some of the other proven benefits of these fatty acids.
6. BCAAs
BCAAs are another workout supplement I take to supplement my exercises. BCAAs stands for Branched-chain amino acids.
Branched-chain amino acids are a group of three essential amino acids: leucine, isoleucine and valine.
While you can get these amino acids from your whey protein and other protein sources, it sometimes can be helpful to get them directly.
BCAA supplements can help you with muscle performance, prevent muscle fatigue, and help stimulate growth.
I usually take my BCAA supplement before I work out, and I have definitely felt a slight difference in how I’m able to move throughout my workout.
7. Beta-Alanine
Beta-alanine is a non-essential amino acid. Our bodies use beta-alanine to create the amino acid carnosine, an amino acid which regulates the build up of acid in our muscles.
Beta-alanine helps your muscles perform and promotes muscle endurance and power.
Beware though! If you have too much of a dose of beta-alanine, you’ll get the tingles! (something which has happened to me a few too many times!)
Get Your Dream Body with These Amazing Supplements!
No matter if your dream body is a 6 pack, being able to walk 5 miles straight, swim a mile, or just feel more confident, you can become healthier with the right diet and supplementation.
Hopefully this article has provided you with some new information and resources for your health.
Depending on your health goals, maybe it makes sense to try one of the supplements above and see how you feel with it.
We only have one life and one body – with the proper diet, you are capable of doing anything.
While workout and diet supplements won’t get you your dream body alone, with consistent good eating habits and exercise, you can see the results you want and deserve.
Thank you for reading!
Readers: what supplements do you use to get your dream body and be healthy? Are there any supplements you’d recommend I check out?
Deep breath in… hold it… lengthen the spine… lift the heart… roll the shoulders back… and exhale.
2 weeks ago, I joined the yoga studio 2 blocks from my house and have attended 4 classes since starting.
In November, I’m getting back to prioritizing my health and wellness. One of the goals I set this year was to lift weights 3 times a week, but this has been quite the failure.
In May, I dropped my gym membership, started biking to work a little bit over the summer, and started pursuing other ways to stay fit and healthy.
Now that I’m seriously prioritizing my exercise schedule, I’ve decided to choose body weight exercises and yoga over weight lifting.
In this post, I want to discuss my plans for my exercise, talk about the balance between mind and body, and touch on some other things health-wise which I’ve found to be true for myself in the past few years.
Personal Exercise is Personal
Just like personal finance, personal exercise is personal and depends on your goals, wants and dreams.
If you don’t want to become the next famous body builder, that’s okay.
Maybe you want to be able to walk and run around doing errands without getting tired on the weekends.
It’s possible you want to look good for dates when you go out on the town.
What ever the reason you want to become healthy, it starts with asking thoughtful questions on what you want your dream life to look like.
I want to become more healthy because I’m a weirdo who is on the pursuit of an overall life mastery.
One of my wildest dreams is to push my body to the limits in some sort of high performance training system (which would cost a ton of money, but could be fun and interesting).
But, in my life today, I want to become more fit and healthy because if I’m healthy, then I will be able to push myself mentally in my hustles and not get tired. I’m also looking to find a future wife, and in theory, I should have more options if I become more attractive.
My Experiences with Exercise
Growing up, I played organized baseball and basketball, and would always be open to playing pick up football, soccer, hockey, or really any sport or physical activity.
I love being outside and am pretty competitive, so playing sports was a natural outlet for my energy.
Playing baseball for my high school, I lifted weights during the winter and spent a lot of time training to become faster and stronger.
Going into college, I joined a few intramural teams (volleyball and softball), and lifted weights 2-3 times a week.
Around the time I was 20, I started experimenting with a bunch of different exercises and diets, trying to figure out what would work for me.
As I started down the path of eating 3,000+ calories a day and working out 4-5 times a week, I was making great gains but something was still missing.
Also, at the time, I weighed about 170 pounds, and was lifting weights well above 200 pounds – which may or may not have been great for my joints.
After college, I definitely relaxed on the heavy lifting, but joined a gym near my house and stayed fit with pick up basketball and lifting weights 2-3 times a week.
I described above to you what I’ve been doing in the last year, and that brings us to today.
The Powerful Connection between Body and Mind
Something so commonly ignored when thinking about fitness is the powerful connection between body and mind.
As someone who is constantly trying to learn and push mentally, I’ve only just started to recognize and adjust my habits to try to tap into this powerful connection.
What is this connection?
The body and mind connection is the connection between our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and our biological functioning.
This means that we can positively (or negatively) influence these thoughts through what we eat or do with our bodies (and vice versa, we can positive (or negatively) influence our body with our thoughts and feelings).
Everything is connected inside of us through a similar chemical language and the nervous system.
If we ignore what we put in ourselves, then we might not have the optimal mind state. Garbage in, garbage out.
Likewise, if we perform negative self-talk, then our body will feel a little worse.
At the same time, with activities like positive affirmations, we can feel better and perform better.
Why I’m Choosing Yoga and Body Weight Exercises over Weight Lifting
Now that I’ve decided to take my exercise and health more seriously, I had to make a choice. Would I go back to my old habits and do weight lifting? Or, would I try to tap into something more powerful and discard some of the thoughts I had around having strength?
I’ve decided to go with the latter, and have chosen yoga and body weight exercises over weight lifting. Specifically, I’ve been doing Kundalini Yoga, a yoga focused on mediating to release a spiritual energy located at the base of the spine.
The goal is to become more self aware through different exercises and meditations, and to help remove blockages which are restricting me from being my best self.
I feel this yoga ties in amazingly with my purpose and goal with The Mastermind Within. I’m looking to tap into my full potential, also, I want to help you become the best person you can be.
With this yoga, it is surprisingly quite physically demanding, and has pushed me to become more flexible, work on my breathing and lung capacity, have better posture and work on muscles I haven’t focused on before.
In addition to this new practice, I’m doing push-ups, squats, rows, and planks to become stronger in the more traditional sense, but all without needing a gym membership. These body weight exercises I’m doing every other day, but maybe start to ratchet up the heat as I get more comfortable doing them.
For now, I’m going to look to do yoga 2-3 times a week, and do the body weight exercises every other day to get my physical goals.
Getting to Your Dream Self through Fitness, Diet and Exercise
Personal exercise is personal. I’ve figured out a plan for myself to get in to great shape and I’m excited to pursue this path.
Something I didn’t mention here is clean eating and how what you put into your body is so critical for success physically.
Drinking water and staying hydrated (8 glasses of water a day works for me) has made a HUGE difference for my mental state and how I feel on a daily basis.
For me, mixing in fruit and greens with most meals has proved beneficial, as well as having a diet high in protein and fat.
All of this has worked for me, and may not work for you – you have to figure out what’s best for you (except the water recommendation, that’s a must try).
I’m excited to continue down this path of pushing my body, both physically and mentally, and will share with you the results over time if this interests you.
Thank you for reading!
Erik
We have a guest post today from Troy who runs a hedge fund in Austraila and blogs about his historical market research.
Everyone talks about the importance of budgeting and cutting down on expenses with regards to getting wealthy. If you think of your life as a business, adhering to a strict budget is akin to rigorous cost control. While it’s important to not wasting money on non-essentials, I believe that we should try to maximize the “revenue” side of our life instead of minimizing the cost side.
Theoretically speaking, you can only cut the costs side down to $0, while you can increase the revenues side infinitely.
As you work, save, and invest over the years, your investment income from real estate or stocks will perhaps one day become greater than your income from your full time job.
That being said, what if you aren’t healthy enough to enjoy your investment income!
I want to share with you an aspect of investing many people don’t talk about: physical and mental health. Investing is ultimately a game of decision making. Your health will impact your decision making capabilities. For example, someone who has poor health will probably become easily frustrated in his/her life. This will result in poor decision making skills when things turn sour.
Instead of making a rational decision about whether to sell an asset when the market turns down, the individual might make an irrational decision based on his/her emotions instead. Living a healthy lifestyle via healthy dining and abundant exercise provides many benefits to investors.
Benefits of Being Healthy
A healthy body is a temple for a healthy mind. Scientific studies show that exercise trains your mind to think quicker and analyze situations in more detail. It also improves your memory – you don’t need to waste time on finding studies/research that you’ve done in the past.
Eating delicious, nutritious food makes you happier by releasing hormones called endorphins. People who are happier are also more optimistic in life. Since the stock market goes up more than it goes down, you need to have an optimistic bullish bias if you are to succeed in the stock market. Perma-pessimists inevitably get killed in stocks.
In addition, investing is a long term game. Warren Buffett said you have to treat your body as if it were the only car you have in your lifetime. You need to change the oil frequently, take it to the repair shop, and run it every once in a while (or else the engine will die).
People who live healthier lifestyles live longer than those who don’t. You can just imagine the final difference in wealth between someone who dies at 65 and someone who dies at 85. The person who dies at 85 benefits from an additional 20 years of compounding!
Investing isn’t all about money. The purpose of money is so that you can have a good quality of life. Healthy living isn’t only beneficial for your investment decision skills, it also leads to a markedly improved quality of life.
My Healthy Lifestyle
My lifestyle revolves around 4 tenets.
- Eat vegetables/fruits and foods that are high in protein.
- Exercise regularly.
- Take a lot of mini-vacations.
- Wake up early and sleep early.
I recognize that not everyone can follow my lifestyle. Being young and single, I don’t have many of the constraints that other adults have.
I believe in spending modestly but not too modestly. This means I don’t tighten my belt too strictly when it comes to groceries. Although the monetary benefits of having a tight budget are obvious, there is no way to be “cheap” in when trying to live a balanced life and to eat healthy.
Start in the Kitchen
My diet is high on vegetables and protein while low on carbs. In addition, I prefer organic, natural, and low salt foods. I stay away from frozen foods. While a diet rich in carbs such as pasta/bread is definitely cheaper, I don’t eat many carbs because they aren’t the best for me. Here in Sydney, a loaf of wholewheat bread is $3 while a single head of lettuce is $3.50 (Sydney is ridiculously expensive)!
By eating healthy foods I feel better, have more energy, and think more clearly. Sugar-rich foods may provide the body with an immediate boost in energy, but that energy drops precipitously after a few hours. Meanwhile, vegetables and fruits cause energy levels to rise and remain elevated for many hours, after which it declines rather slowly. It is important for an investor to stay sharp at all times.
I find I’m always hungry when I’m investing and working. This is a common problem that many hedge fund managers, traders, and professional investors have (that’s why so many hedge fund managers are overweight).
Eating too many sugary foods or carbs makes you feel bloated and slightly dizzy, thereby worsening your investment decision making skills. That’s why I’ll usually eat fruits while I’m working. Eating while working acts as a good semi-distraction and relieves stress.
While I spend a lot more on groceries than most people, my expenditures are far from extravagant. I cut down on the non-essentials in life to save more money. I don’t eat out (which for a person of my appetite can become ridiculously expensive!)
Another frugal thing I do is I still use an old phone instead of keeping up to date with every iPhone refresh! It’s all a matter of spending the same amount of money but improving your quality of life.
Working Out
In addition, I work out a lot. I lift weights for 50 minutes and run on a treadmill for 20 minutes 5 times a week in my home gym. Science shows that consistent exercise improves your memory and quickens your decision making skills. It also improves your ability to think rationally.
You’ll probably make poor investment decisions after you’ve had a tough day at the office. Working out is a great way to release stress because your body produces more feel-good hormones called endorphins.
Mini-Vacations
I go on a lot of mini-vacations. It doesn’t have to be a big multi-week trip that includes 10+ hour flights (flying to anywhere from Australia takes forever). It might just be a day trip to a remote beach. Getting out in the world has 2 main benefits for investors.
- It broadens your view of the world! I have gained so much knowledge that aids my investing. For example, I’ve learned a lot about the economies of different states in the U.S. and different countries just by talking to taxi drivers.
- It does miracles to your body. A vacation is a nice break from everyday life. Certain investments decisions are hard to make because there are too many factors to consider. When I come back from vacation, my thinking becomes a lot more focused. Thus I can more easily strip away the factors that don’t matter and focus on the factors that are important to the particular investment.
Early to bed, Early to Rise!
I wake up early and sleep early (I understand this is hard for adults with kids). Certain studies show that the body starts to regenerate after 9 pm and stops regenerating by 5-6am. However, this regeneration occurs at a much faster rate if you’re sleeping during this time. That’s why I usually sleep from 9:30 pm – 5 am.
“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise!” – Benjamin Franklin
Conclusion
If you are looking to maximize your returns in the stock market, it might be best to supplement your market research with some gym time and time in the kitchen!
Start trying to get to bed a little earlier and you will reap the benefits!
Troy is an investor who shares his thoughts on stocks, commodities and currencies on the web.