A Beginners Guide To Supplements

David Kingsbury is an online personal trainer and also works one on one with actors on Hollywood’s biggest film productions. He has helped 1000’s of people achieve results during his career. His success is due to his knowledge of training, nutrition and supplementation.

We are bombarded with supplement advertising, everywhere we look there are products promising the world, just take one scoop or 1 tablet per day.

The truth is anything that is promising something this spectacular is often over hyping the miraculous formula.

Having said this, supplements do help achieve results (the key word is help) but the limiting factor to getting into shape will rarely be supplements, it is nearly always training and food related.

Before considering supplements its worth making sure your training and nutrition are on point. The supplement aspect will be brought in to reinforce your training and nutrition never to replace it.

There are millions of different supplements on the market and each of these can be associated with separate needs and goals.

Different products for different goals

To show how supplements are GOAL SPECIFIC we can look as these three imaginary people – Gary is looking to regulate blood sugar, to reduce sugar cravings he can use chromium and cinnamon. Susan is aiming to improve fat metabolism to drop some body fat, she could use L-Carnitine. Tim is looking to naturally boost his testosterone levels to help build muscle he could use tribulis or d-aspartic acid.

You can see here how there is a product for many different scenarios. These are all products I use with clients and they do work very well. The end result however still comes down to effective training and nutrition.

Gary still needs to reduce the sugar in his diet to control his blood sugar.

Susan still needs to be training with weights and cardio and be in a calorie deficit to drop body fat.

Tim still needs to effectively stimulate his muscles to grow and to be in a calorie surplus with adequate protein to build muscle.

3 products you should get to know

These three products work well across many goals and should be considered to help achieve a variety of goals.

BCAA

The branched chain amino acids leucine, isoleucine, and valine are essential to human nutrition. It is very well established that branched-chain amino acids stimulate protein synthesis, even to a greater extent than a normal protein by itself. They may also  extend life and combat age-promoting cellular injury perhaps through BCAAs’ ability to boost mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell).

Vitamin D

Vitamin D is often overlooked and nearly always under-consumed. This nutrient plays a major role in your overall health and performance for reaching fitness goals. Vitamin D is known as the sunshine vitamin but unfortunatly most of us don’t get anywhere near enough of it. It can improve muscle function, improve cardiovascular health and reduce the chances of cancer and cardiovascular disease.

L-Carnitine

L-carnitine is synthesized in the body from the amino acids lysine and methionine. Your chances of success for any goal can increase with this in your supplement arsenal. Regardless of what your fitness goals are, losing fat, gaining muscle or bossing fitness l-carnitine will help support you. As well as supporting body composition goals it will also help boost immune system as it is an antioxidant and improve brain function.

All of these reasons are why it hits my list of 3 supplements for people new to supplements to start with.