Your body’s health is important if you want to meet your fitness goals and watch your muscles grow. Bodybuilders tend to turn to supplements, like protein and creatine, in order to reach a point of optimal muscle growth. However, there are plenty of other options to help you along your journey, like vitamins in foods, supplements, or other sources.
If getting gains is your goal, the experts atMy Fit Foods think that you should consider adding some of these vitamins to your daily diet.
Why Do You Need Vitamins for Muscle Growth?
Bodybuilders need to focus on two foods when they’re in muscle-building mode: macros and micros. Macros, also known as macronutrients, consist of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. Micros, ormicronutrients, are the vitamins and minerals that round out a diet. Too often, bodybuilders end up paying too much attention to the macros in their diet and not enough to the micros, leaving them with an unhealthy balance.
In order to make your muscles larger, you need to eat plenty of protein and carbs. The latter helps with energy production, and the former goes straight to your muscles, adding to them as you work out. Not eating enough can actually lead to a lack of muscle growth.
However, micros also play a large role in this, which is why it’s crucial to ensure that you’re getting enough vitamins and minerals in your diet and adding them via supplements if necessary. On top of this, there are a number of vitamins that can actually assist your muscle growth.
The Best Vitamins for Optimal Muscle Growth
So, which vitamins should you include in your diet? The following nine can help you with your muscle growth goals and make you feel healthier overall. Whether you include them inone of your meals or as a separate supplement, consider including these micros into your daily routine.
1. Vitamin B6
Remember the protein supplements that you take on a daily basis in order to provide your muscles with fuel and spur their growth? For them to do their jobs, you need enough vitamin B6 in your diet.
B6 plays a direct role in helping your body metabolize protein, assisting it in getting into your muscles. In addition, vitamin B6 also helps the body absorb enough vitamin B12 (more on that one shortly), another necessarymicronutrient for bodybuilding progress.
2. Vitamin B9
When you work out, you damage your muscles — in a good way! The process of building muscle creates small micro tears in the muscles. As these tears heal, they build an additional layer of muscle, which is what makes them get bigger. In order to speed up everything up a little, add some vitamin B9 to your diet.
Also known as folate, the micro helps new cells grow, assists in repairing old cells and even provides some energy to the muscles.
3. Vitamin B12
It’s crucial to eat plenty ofvitamin B12 if you’re planning on going to the gym for some weight-lifting sessions. In order for your muscles to grow larger, they need to have plenty of oxygen going to them. This oxygen arrives in the form of red blood cells, which are partially regulated by vitamin B12.
As you eat more of this micronutrient, your amount of red blood cells will increase, thus giving your muscles all of the oxygen that they need. Thankfully, it’s easy to add B12 to your diet, as it’s found in dairy products, fish, chicken, and turkey.
4. Vitamin B3
You’ve probably heard of vitamin B3 by another name: niacin. This vitamin handles a number of different things in the body, including muscle growth. If you want your muscles to appear larger when you pump them like a bodybuilder in an amateur or professional show, then niacin is the key.
In addition to helping your muscles look and feel larger, vitamin B3 also helps with hormone production and the metabolism of glucose. Another benefit is that B3 assists your body in keeping bad cholesterol at bay while creating more good cholesterol to balance things out in a healthy manner.
5. Vitamin B2
Although there are plenty of other B vitamins that are an essential part of a healthy diet, vitamin B2 is the final B vitamin that can really help with muscle growth. However, unlike the others, which provide benefits like boosting red blood cell count and helping the body process additional vitamins, this one plays a direct role in the production of energy.
The line of thinking here is: when you exercise, you exert energy. If you have additional energy, you’ll be able to workout for a longer period of time, thus giving your muscles an extra boost as you get in a few more reps. Thanks to vitamin B2, you’ll have some of the extra energy that you need to spend some additional time in the gym.
6) Vitamin C
The B vitamins aren’t the only ones that can help you meet your bodybuilding goals and help you build lean muscle mass.Vitamin C can as well. This vitamin is good for more than just boosting your immune system, which is why you’ve probably heard of it before.
If you want to strengthen the collagen in your body, keep the cells in your muscles from getting damaged, and even bounce back stronger after a workout, then make sure to reach for some vitamin C supplements.
Vitamin C is an antioxidant, which means that it prevents cells from becoming damaged by free radicals. The cells in your muscles are one example of the ones that the micro helps. Plus, it helps boost your body’s collagen production, which in turn strengthens your bones, ligaments, and muscles. With all of this power, it’s easy to see why vitamin C is so essential.
7) Vitamin D
Vitamin D is tricky. Your body does produce it naturally, but in order for this to happen, you need to sit out in the sun since sunlight stimulates your body’s creation of the micro. Many people don’t get enough sunlight, which is why vitamin D is added to many things, including fortified dairy products.
You might be wondering, “What does vitamin D supplementation have to do with bodybuilding?” Well, on top of helping strengthen your bones to support your muscles, it also helps those muscles function properly. Without enough vitamin D production, you might be spending time in the gym but not seeing the results that you want, since a lack of the micro actually weakens your muscles and can cause muscle tissue loss.
8) Vitamin A
In addition to vitamins C and D, there’s also vitamin A. If you’ve spent any time in the bodybuilding world or even asked questions at the gym, you’ve probably come into contact with someone who mentioned the word “glycogen.” Glycogen helps prevent the creation of free radicals, and it strengthens the bones, keeping you from getting injured while working out.
Plus, vitamin A helps you metabolize protein, which, as we’ve pointed out, helps with muscle growth. Some of the tasty foods that contain plenty of vitamin A include fish, eggs, and numerous vegetables.
9) Omega 3 Fatty Acids
Finally, there are omega-3 fatty acids. In the bodybuilding world, the ability to recover quickly from a workout is a huge advantage. If you aren’t hurting too badly the next day, you can head back to the gym and continue where you left off.
Omega 3 fatty acids help with this, as they provide your body with the fuel that it needs to process your post-workout recovery period quickly. This micro can also help with your overall muscle growth, giving it a bit of a boost, as well as strengthening your bones in order to prevent injuries that could keep you out of the gym.
Other Essential Vitamins and Supplements for Muscle Strength
If you’re looking for additional supplements that help to build muscle, check out the following options:
- Whey protein powder is one of the most popular supplements for strength training and muscle recovery. Often taken as a pre-workout or post-workout supplement, it fits right into a balanced diet.
- Biotin is an essential b-complex vitamin that can help you reach your fitness goals. While high-quality sources of biotin are typically associated with hair, skin, and nails, biotin also plays a vital role in muscle repair.
- Calcium is often taken with magnesium and zinc to help with muscle soreness. It’s also an essential nutrient for immune health and bone health, which is why it’s found in many multivitamins. It’s also found in a variety of whole foods, including nuts and many vegetables, as well as fortified cereals.
The Best Supplements To Help with Muscle Gains
It takes more than just spending time in the gym to help gain muscle mass. In order to see the progress that you want, you have to make sure to eat right and get in all of the vitamins and minerals that will help you meet your goals. The nine vitamins described here all play an important role in this process.
If you have any questions about the best vitamins for optimal muscle growth and gains, or anything else for that matter, pleasecontact us.
Sources:
5 Most Important Vitamins For Muscle Growth & Recovery | Muscle and Strength
Which Vitamins Are Good for Muscle Health? | Health One Family Medicine
These Are the 10 Most Important Vitamins for Muscles | Body Logic MD
About Author: Mario Mendias
