Multivitamins Will Help You Build Muscle

With all the processed foods inundating our supermarkets, it’s almost impossible to get all your nutritional requirements from food alone.  Even if you eat nothing but whole foods, you would have to eat a large amount of food to meet all your nutritional requirements due to the inferior soils used today. 

Your body is a complex machine that conducts millions of functions simultaneously.  Each nutrient contributes to thousands of essential reactions that make these functions possible such as B12 for healthy red blood cell production, Iodine for thyroid regulation, and B6 for protein metabolism.  Being deficient in just one nutrient is detrimental to thousands of chemical reactions within your body, which in turn will make it much harder for your body to run at its full potential.

People who put their bodies under physical stress 3-4 days a week have a higher nutritional requirement than people who live a sedentary lifestyle.  I’m sure you’ve noticed after a hard workout you’re very hungry.  It’s your body telling you it is low on fuel and needs to be replenished.   

To make sure my body is not lacking in nutrients, I like to take multivitamins with a higher potency for two reasons: 

1. Some multivitamins use inferior ingredients and not all of that 4000% Daily Value of Riboflavin or whatever it may say will be digested by your body.   On the higher potency multi vitamins, I sometimes like to split up the dosage throughout the day as there are some medical doctors that think there are too many nutrients for your body to digest at one time. 
2. My body’s demands for nutrients on days that I workout are not the same as the days that I rest.  I don’t want to be low on any nutrient if my body needs it. I’ve even heard some people on days of extreme stress like to take two doses a day; one in the morning and one after a really hard workout.  The good thing about multivitamins are many of the nutrients such as vitamin C and Vitamin B are water soluble and will be excreted out of you, depending on your body’s needs. 

A good multivitamin I would suggest is Animal Pak by Universal Nutrition.   It is made with ingredients that are easily digestible by the body and they contain a good balance between key nutrients for building muscle, minerals for performance and amino acids for recovery.