#031 A Based View on Hyped Supplements

Welcome back to the 31st edition of the Boats & Logs Lifting Club. I really appreciate you being here. We are the based fitness community that focuses on mastering the basics instead of getting lost in the details.

I hope you enjoy this newsletter.

Today, I will give you my non-bs view on hyped supplements.

But before we start, here is a quick overview of what’s coming next. Are you interested in a topic I should cover in depth? Just send me a message, and I will consider adding it.

• June 2nd: May Q&A Roundup

• June 9th: Form vs. Overload

• June 16th: Building your Home Gym

Creatine

I feel like there are always waves where people start talking about creatine and then forget about it again. And both probably for a very good reason.

Let me start with why you should consider taking creatine:

Creatine is great. It’s very cheap, has a proven benefit for performance and look, and is safe to use. Without getting into too much detail on how and why creatine works, let me tell you the basics:

Creatine helps your body store more ATP. Quite conveniently for us, ATP is our body's preferred fuel.

So, the biggest upside of creatine is that by releasing the ATP during your workout, you can deploy more energy, become slightly stronger, and do slightly more reps than you could without creatine.

Additionally, creatine will save water in your muscles, which will make you gain weight. This is not fat or muscle weight but just water weight. However, as it is in our muscles, creatine will make our muscles look bigger, which is a great benefit!

There is also some evidence that creatine has a positive effect on the brain and general mood; however, this is not fully confirmed yet.

And while other supplements - especially protein, as I will discuss in the next section - can be made fully redundant by a good diet, the same is not (practically) possible with creatine.

Unless you eat a very meat-heavy diet, you need to supplement creatine to reap the benefits.

Unfortunately, there is always some guy who praises creatine a little bit too much and starts to associate it with effects that creatine can’t deliver. So let me tell you: Creatine is NOT a “natural” steroid. It will have the positive effects I listed before (I also take it myself), but you shouldn’t expect to gain an unreasonable amount of muscle just because you have started taking creatine. It will just be a little help.

If you decide to take creatine, just use creatine monohydrate and take 5g per day (you don’t need to cycle). Everything else is overpriced and just another attempt of supplement companies to invent a new product to get your money.

Whey/Casein/EAA/BCAA (Protein supplements)

I’ve written about this in more depth in this post, and the short answer is that you don’t need to drink protein shakes to build muscle.

For some reason (probably because all influencers are advertising protein powders), most inexperienced lifters believe they must take some (special) protein supplement if they are serious about building muscle. But if we look at the science behind it, that’s bs.

You should consume 0.7-1.0g of protein per lb of body weight, and if you can do this with your normal diet and through REAL foods, you are good.

But if you can’t reach your protein goal through your normal diet, you should consider using a protein supplement to ensure you get enough protein to capitalize on the hard work you put into the gym and gain muscle.

There are countless different protein supplements, but a basic whey supplement should be your best bet. Whey protein is a very cheap and high-quality source and helps you with your goal: Hit your protein target.

I discussed the other ones in the post I linked before, but to make it quick, You don’t need them. Some of them can be useful for minor use cases, but in this case, we are talking about optimizing our muscle gain by <5%.

Probably significantly less.

Ask yourself: Is this really worth your money or, in the end, only a marketing scheme from a supplement company?

Fat Burner

Fat burners are another supplement that promises (as the name suggests) to help you to lose fat. And as you know, you need to be in a calorie deficit to lose fat, which you can achieve by consuming fewer or burning more calories.

Fat burners usually promise to help with one of those two things: They will either suppress your appetite (→ you eat less → calorie deficit) or promise to increase your calorie burn.

We can make this one quick. There are no fat burners (you can buy without a prescription) that will greatly impact your weight loss. Maybe suppressing the appetite works for some as a placebo, but if you really want to lose fat, you need to find a sustainable diet that works for you. I’ve also written a post about losing fat, which I’d advise you to consult if you are not making the progress you want with your fat-loss journey.

Multivitamins

Multivitamins basically work with a “shotgun approach”. Instead of supplementing with the vitamins you need, you consume a bunch of different vitamins to make sure to hit as many of them as possible.

That is a decent idea, in theory.

The problem with multivitamins is that a lot of them don’t work as they should be:

1. Many brands sell poorly formulated multivitamins, which contain vitamins in the same pill that actually block each other, making them useless. I don’t need to explain why we don’t want this to happen.

2. It could be that the dose of a given vitamin in the multivitamin supplement doesn’t cover your deficit for that given supplement. In that case, taking a multivitamin will help you somewhat but still won’t solve the problem, as you can’t fully cover the gap you need to fill.

So, my advice would be to focus on eating a well-balanced whole-food diet, including meat, fish, eggs, milk, vegetables, and fruits/berries. If you do that well, you shouldn’t need to supplement with a multivitamin.

But if you want to ensure that your body isn’t missing any vitamins or minerals, you should be doing your bloodwork and checking your deficiencies. Because then, you can ditch the “shotgun approach” and precisely target your deficiencies.

But to be fair, there isn’t a real risk of taking multivitamins besides potentially wasting money on supplements that don’t work/don’t solve the problem and the opportunity cost of not supplementing the vitamin you really need because you never did your bloodwork.

So, there is a point to be made that with very little effort, you can significantly increase the odds that your body gets all the vitamins and minerals it needs by supplementing multivitamins.

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Stay strong,
Boats & Logs

Disclaimer

This is not Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. Before starting any workout program, diet plan, or supplement protocol, please consult a medical professional. These are the opinions from an AI voice.