I was recently emailing back and forth with a friend of mine who wants to build up some muscle mass, but is already very thin. She said that she’s planning on starting the P90X workout program, so we emailed back and forth, and since I spent some time on this last email to her, I thought I would just copy and paste it here since it might be useful to other people looking to start the program. This gist of it, is that for muscle mass on a very thin person, I’d recommend a higher calorie, heavy weight regiment, over the P90X which is designed to put on a little mass and help lose weight… something that my friend doesn’t need to do.
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40g of whey protein sounds good. the body building rule of thumb is to take 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight (in a day including regular proteins in foods) so 40g of whey protein is a good start. i’d take that across at least 2 shakes though, ’cause 40g can be an assault on the digestive tract especially if you’re not used to it. if you start having strange bowel movements or gas, you need to take less, or spread it out more evenly through the day, ’cause it means your body has too much left over that wasn’t used for muscle synthesis. also drink lots of water to keep the kidneys nice and clear. you may also want to try a soy protein (although it tastes terrible) and mix it with your whey protein. they break down at different rates so your body can use it more efficiently, this is essentially the same as designer “time release” proteins that are stupid expensive. I’m not sure what the p90x program says about when to take protein, but immediately before and following a workout is when uptake is most efficient.
Weight gainers usually have a bunch of protein and a ton of empty carbs. If you’re gonna put on mass, you need to take in more calories. your current lifestyle/diet is keeping you at a certain weight. if you want to go up in weight (make muscle) you need more calories in your diet. the simple math is 3500 calories = 1lb. so you should try to figure out how many calories you eat and burn in a day and if you’re looking to gain mass, you’re going to need to have a surplus of calories. i could eat a full rack of ribs, fries and mac and cheese for dinner every night and not gain an ounce, as long as i also started running 18 miles a day at a 10 mile/min pace. and i just did that sweet math at www.calorie-count.com which is a good web site to find out calorie content in foods and rate of calorie burn in activities.
so yeh, anyway a weight gainer usually has like 900 calories per serving. you can obviously take more or less of it depending on your goals. you can also just eat more good, healthy food (protein/complex carbs), but you’re gonna have to up the calories a bit either way.
and i think the p90x recovery drink is just a protein drink with lots of enzymes that help facilitate protein uptake. a quality protein that i like is the gnc wheybolic extreme 60. i know it’s got a meat-head, wannabe steroids sounding name, but it’s pretty effective and unfortunately pretty expensive. you can buy single servings at gnc if you wanna try it out. but yeh, keep me posted, i LOVE gym talk.
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I’ll update this blog when she figures out her regiment and maybe I can do a before/after and some docmentation on this site.
