12 BEST VEGAN BODYBUILDING DIET TIPS

Vegan bodybuilding and plant-based fitness are becoming more popular every day.

Contrary to an outdated paradigm in bodybuilding, going meat-free doesn’t mean you can’t build muscle or achieve your fitness goals.

If you’re a looking to build more lean muscle by way of eating more plants or a vegan bodybuilding diet, we have some great tips for you!

1. Address Deficiencies

When using a vegan bodybuilding diet, getting sufficient nutrients is critical.

Pay special attention to these common vegan deficiences:

• Protein
• Calories
• Iron
• Iodine
• Omega-3 Fatty Acids
• Vitamin B12
• Vitamin D
• Calcium
• Zinc

• 2. Utilize Vegan Protein Powders

  When using a vegan bodybuilding diet, getting enough protein is critical.

  Vegan protein powders, for many, are a game changer.

  Consuming two to three protein shakes a day will dramatically boost your protein intake, without excessive carbs. This is what helped me dial in my macros and turned my muscle building game around.
  And it’s super convenient and cost effective. Look for powders that are sourced with multipls protein to better ensure the spectrum of amino acids needed for muscle growth.

3. Get Sufficient Calories

When using a vegan bodybuilding diet, getting enough calories is critical.

A healthy plant-based vegan diet has much lower calorie content than a typical meat-eating diet. If you don’t consume enough calories, your body can shift into a catabolic state. This means your body is basically wasting away. The larger the calorie deficit, the more your body may feed on your existing muscle tissue for fuel.

4. Supplement Flax Seed Powder

Bodybuilders and athletes know that getting enough omega-3s is critical.

Consuming a lot of plants can get us close to the amount of omega-3s a vegan athlete needs, but supplementing for good measure is a good idea.

Also, ground flax has fantastic fiber profile and can be easier on the digestive system than flax seed oil. You can take this when you wake up, after training, and before bed.

5. Take Vegan BCAA

Vegan BCAA can help protect your muscles from the catabolic effects from a low-calorie diet and can help you gain mass. According to a 2010 study published in Med Science Sports Exercise, BCAA reduces muscle soreness after intense training.

Try taking five to 10 grams of BCAA with breakfast, five to 10 grams immediately before and after training, and five to 10 grams before bed.

6. Consume Nuts for Fuel

You’ll definitely want to add this power-packed snack to your arsenal. Consuming nuts (and nut butters) provides a long-lasting form of energy. They’re a much needed source of healthy fat.

This is also a great way to quickly boost your calorie intake, especially since they’re super-convenient: I carry a bag of lightly salted almonds in my backpack at all times.

7. Make Meals From Tempeh, Chickpeas, and Legumes

Tempeh is one of the most overlooked sources of vegan protein, but once you try it a few times, you may prefer it over tofu. Chickpeas and other legumes can provide a filling, low-fat source of protein and carbohydrates.

These should become staples for making protein-packed meals that are filling and loaded with nutrition.

8. Vary Your Vegan Diet

Vary the foods in your diet, as this will help prevent nutrient deficiencies. This goes without saying for any bodybuilder. Also, variety in one’s diet makes eating more enjoyable.

9. Monitor Body Weight and Body Fat

Since most vegans are concerned with lean muscle mass and not losing it, be sure take effective measurements.

By this, I mean that you should be regularly measuring your body fat levels and comparing it to overall body weight. This will provide a more accurate assessment of your progress in the gym than stepping on the scale alone.

10. Don’t Take Spirulina for B12

One of the biggest misconceptions in vegan bodybuilding circles is that spirulina contain significant B12. In a way this is true, but not in a way that’s useful to us.

The problem here that this claim has been supported by lab tests for B12 based on the USP (U.S. Pharmacopeia) assay methods. Unfortunately, as explained in Herbert et al. [1984] and Herbert [1988], the USP assay method for B12 is unreliable.

Spirulina and tempeh contain mostly analogues of B12. Herbert [1988] reports that tests on tempeh, a fermented soy product, and spirulina revealed that they contained almost no true B12.

The presence of analogues, rather than true B12, in fermented foods makes them unreliable sources for B12.

11. Swap Rice for Quinoa

Rice is a staple of the vegan bodybuilding diet, so here’s an effective method to boost your protein and nutritional intake. Simply swap your rice for quinoa.

Quinoa has higher quality protein and is a complete source of protein, whereas brown rice is not. Quinoa is gluten-free and contains calcium, B-vitamins, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, vitamin E, and fiber.

And the good news is that it tastes (and feels) similar to brown rice and shouldn’t throw your taste buds off.

12. Journal Your Diet

The key to your success adopting a vegan bodybuilding diet is not necessarily food intake – it’s also having an accurate awareness of what you eat. Human memory alone is not a reliable source for the kind of awareness required. For this, we need to take meticulous notes in a food journal.

Write down every sip of water and every crumb of food you consume throughout the day. Otherwise you are wasting your time. It may seem like a pain in the butt at first, but it becomes effortless after a few days.

As a beginner, without this precise information, you’re flying blind in a storm without radar. It’s simply too easy to have a misleading impression of what you’re actually eating and what’s actually working.

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Attention Bodybuilders: This is Your Simple Guide to Building an Outstanding Workout Routine

Bodybuilding workout routines are like songs.

New ones come and go, and most of them aren’t that different. It’s easy to get “hooked” on one for a few weeks before getting bored and trying a new one.

But if you look at the songs that have endured over years or centuries, they all have common principles that make them great. I’m not a musician, so I won’t pretend I know exactly what these are. But my musically inclined friends do, so I trust them.

The same thing is true with bodybuilding workouts. No matter what new routines emerge, all successful workout plans will have some principles in common. And just like music, most people don’t know what these principles are.

In this podcast, you’re going to learn what principles tie together many of the most successful bodybuilding programs. You’ll learn about daily undulating periodization, wave loading, high volume versus low volume training, and much more.

At the end, physique coach Russell Taylor will tell you how to make a a bodybuilding program that works for you.

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                  Top 10 Training Tips For Better Results!

Tip ONE

Warm up prior to and stretch frequently during your workout. Before participating in any athletic activity, you should raise your peripheral body temperature. Get your heart beating and increase the blood flow to your extremities by participating in 5 minutes of a low intensity cardiovascular activity. Following your warm up, stretch your muscles gradually to a point of mild discomfort, not outright pain. Never bounce. Instead, hold stretched positions for about 20 seconds. Rather than limiting yourself to a pre-training stretch, continue to stretch during and after your workout to promote circulation. By increasing blood flow to your muscles, waste products like lactic acid are rapidly removed to help prevent soreness. In addition, more blood-borne nutrients are available for energy and growth.

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                   Top 10 Training Tips For Better Results!

Tip TWO

Learn to isolate specific muscles. Steady, controlled movements are the key to learning what it "feels like" to work a specific muscle or muscle group. It takes about three weeks for the novice to maximize the neuromuscular coordination necessary to identify and fully recruit muscle fibers from individual muscle groups. At this stage, you will be able to efficiently target these groups and minimize cheating with sympathetic muscles. This will also enable you to use virtually any unfamiliar piece of gym equipment (and invent your own exercises) simply by duplicating the appropriate "feel" when trying a new exercises for the same body part.

                                                                          Tip ONE Click here !!

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              Top 10 Training Tips For Better Results!

Tip THREE

Employ proper form. Movements should be accomplished with strict attention to form in order to achieve maximum benefit with minimum risk of injury. Always remember to avoid sharp, jerky repetitions and using momentum to lift a heavier weight. These cheating tactics will not make you grow faster or become stronger, but they will place harmful stresses on your joints. I suggest holding the full contraction for a short pause to accentuate the pump. Concentrate on both the concentric and eccentric phase of the contraction to maximize every repetition. Be certain to flex and extend fully to avoid muscle shortening and weakness at the extremes of the motion range.

                                                                            

                                                                         Tip TWO Click here !! 

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                Top 10 Training Tips For Better Results!

Tip FOUR

Train to muscular fatigue. Many people approach an exercise with a preconceived notion of the exact number of repetitions they will do for each set. (Ten seems to be a popular choice.) These misguided souls are training inefficiently and will never reach their full potential. When performing an exercise, your goal is not a certain number of repetitions. Do not start your set saying, "I'm going to do X number of reps." Depending on the muscle group and your particular athletic objectives, you will probably want to stay within a certain range of repetitions. However, your goal is to fatigue the muscle by performing each exercise (with good form) until you no longer can.

                                                               Tip THREE click here !!

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                  Top 10 Training Tips For Better Results!

Tip FIVE

Use a split system. If you have never trained with weights, or have taken a significant break from weights, I do not recommend training at maximum intensity right away. Training to failure during the first crucial work outs will result in tremendous muscle soreness and you may never return. Start slowly by doing a full-body work out  consisting of three or four sets of lighter weights for every major muscle group. After the first couple weeks, you can increase your intensity and move onto a split system. An example of a three-day split might be: 

                                                                     Tip FOUR click here !!

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             Top 10 Training Tips For Better Results!

Tip six 

Train each body part once per week. With the exception of abs, directly training a body part with high intensity more than once a week is usually overtraining. If you are striving for maximum strength gains, power, and muscular growth, high intensity translates to low reps and heavy weight. Three to four sets of three to four different exercises per body part is optimal. Large muscle groups like chest, quads, and glutes do well in a rep range as low as 6 or 7. With smaller groups like biceps and triceps, and difficult to isolate groups like shoulders and back, stay within a more conservative rep range of at least 8 to 10 per set. View exercises for all the muscle groups here

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Tip FIVE click here !!

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                 Top 10 Training Tips For Better Results!

Design your training regimen to conform to your athletic objectives. Many athletes cycle their training according to their competition schedule. Three to four months out from a fight, a boxer might "train heavy" for strength and power. By eight weeks out, he/she has decreased the weight, increased his reps, and cut back on free weights to emphasize cables and machines. During the last four weeks, he/she eliminates weight-training altogether, concentrating entirely on speed drills and boxing. A power lifter will employ the opposite strategy. Three months out from a meet, he/she may incorporate many different exercises into his/her routine including machines, cables, and free weights. Two months out, the reps have dropped and so have the number of different exercises. The last weeks before the meet may include sets of only two or three reps of the most basic movements: bench press, squat, and dead lift.

                                                       Tip SIX Click here !!

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              Top 10 Training Tips For Better Results!

                                                                    Tip EIGHT

Maximize your body's response with new challenges. Even the most brilliantly designed training program will gradually lose its efficiency. In simple terms, your body is too smart for its own good. As you become more and more adept at performing a particular movement, the results you get from that movement will reach a plateau. It's time to mix things up  Your entire work out should be modified every few weeks for best results. I urge you to constantly try new exercises to add to your repertoire. Look around the gym. Talk to people. Consult magazines. Experiment on your own: change bench angles; alter foot stances; switch the order of your exercises; trysupersets;strip sets; etc. Be creative.

                                                         Tip SEVEN click here !!

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             Top 10 Training Tips For Better Results!

                                                                   Tip NINE                                                                                                                                              

Listen to your body. After bad form, overtraining is the most common mistake I see in the gym. If you find you are losing enthusiasm for your work outs, if you are constantly tired, if your progress has slowed or stopped, it's time for a break. If you have been training consistently, I recommend taking a week off every two to three months. You will return to the gym reinvigorated, renewed, and rested. You will not lose strength in one week. Even after a month off, chances are you will surprise yourself by returning to the gym stronger than when you left. Following a break is the ideal time to modify your training program.

                                                        Tip EIGHT Click here !!

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ATTENTION :10 FITNESS TIPS

      10 FITNESS TIPS

1.   Define your challenge. Write down your ultimate physique goal and how you’d like to look. Include weight, body fat, and any physique improvements you’d like to see. Now divide it by 3. That’s roughly your 90-day goal—to get you a third of the way there.

2.   Make time for your health. Work up to 60 minutes of physical activity each day. That doesn’t mean you’ll be on the weight-room floor seven days a week, but strive to get some kind of activity—even if it’s a walk with your dog or a leisurely bike ride. Take advantage of great weather when it happens by taking your workouts outdoors. If you’re new to fitness, start with two 15-minute sessions or three 10-minute sessions to help you become acclimated.

3.   Discover what you enjoy. Weights are one of the best ways to make significant physical changes to your body. Unfortunately, not everyone enjoys lifting. The most important determinant of long-term success with fitness is how much you enjoy an activity. Choose something that make fitness fun! Explore new exercise classes and activities to determine which you prefer. As a beginner, almost anything you choose will be challenging, but gains will be made starting your very first week.

4.   Don’t go it alone. Train with a friend who’s at about your level of ability and has similar goals. You’ll be far less likely to skip your workout when you know someone is depending on you. It’s also more motivating when you push each other, and you’ll be far less likely to cut your sessions short.

5.   Be around people whose goals align with yours. Friends can help in other ways too. Surround yourself with five new friends at the office, school, or in your personal life who are committed to health and fitness. People who choose healthy lifestyles will engage in behaviors that will rub off on you. Similarly, if your friends are just the opposite, they’ll likely reinforce the wrong kinds of behaviors.

1.   Avoid comparing yourself to others. Instead, compare yourself to you of last week. If you make every week better in some way than the preceding week, you’re moving forward and making progress. Aim to improve yourself 5-10 percent versus last year’s version of you. It’s hard for any of us to feel good about ourselves when we try to measure up to physique athletes who may have been training for a decade or more. What these champions have in common with you is that they decided to improve their fitness one day, and then came back for a second, and kept going.

2.   Read to get motivated and learn. An easy way to get inspired and increase your knowledge of fitness, training, and nutrition is to commit to reading one online fitness article each day. Thousands of such articles cover a huge number of areas on this site alone! You won’t know everything there is to know in a week, but knowing a little more every day helps you better understand the what, why, and how of what you’re doing. Here’s a starter’s guide to fitness terms that’ll help you find your way around the gym. Just be aware there’s a ton of garbage advice available on the Web, so stick to sites you trust.

3.   Embrace physical challenges outside your comfort zone. We all want to live comfortably, but workouts produce the best results when they make a little—or even more than a little—uncomfortable. Your body adapts to changes when you ask more of it than it’s used to giving. To make improvements, you must push just outside your comfort zone. Adjust your mindset to seek greater challenges over time, and you’ll see your body respond.

4.   Don’t rush to self-judge. Many individuals will drop out of their training program because they’re not seeing results fast enough. However, physiological adaptations occur incrementally. You most likely won’t see much—if any—improve­ment from one week to the next, but you surely will over 90 days. That’s why you should make an iron-clad commitment of at least three months when starting any exercise program. Only then should you compare before-and-after pictures and measurements.

5.   Enter a 90-day transformation contest. Want to see the greatest changes in your physique possible? Dive into a transformation contest! Don’t do it for the money; do it for the personal challenge. Going all-in and attaching a deadline provides daily moti­vation that can become self-perpetuating. Countless people have used this method to achieve incredible results, and so can you! Our site offers transformation contests every year for individuals of all levels, which you can find more about here.

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Why the Lean Mass Diet Will Work For You!

     Why the Lean Mass Diet Will Work For You!

Just Eat the Food, Tina

Gaining quality, lean mass is nearly impossible without enough calories.

Get the fork and knife ready, it’s time for some action! We spoke of the results

pyramid in Game Over—The Final Cut Diet You’ll Ever Need and it applies here

as well.

The Most Important Component—Synergy

We have all heard it before, “Diet is the most important thing.” From our

experience, this is partially correct. You can do a lot with diet, but without

adequate training with both resistance and with cardiovascular training, you will

be undermining your results. If you add in proven, effectively dosed

supplementation, you’ll be amazed at what these three components can do for

you.

The Big Hoax

“Gain 10 pounds in two weeks!” “Take this pill and mass is yours!” We

have all heard these promises, but yet we get tons of emails from people who

can’t gain weight. What gives? The answer is that we’ve been lied to. As

consumers and physique enthusiasts, we are always looking for the next big

thing and hoping for the magic pill. Unfortunately, there is no magic pill. Yes, we

believe in supplements and advocate their use. But for optimal results, the other

two corners cannot be ignored!

Why The Lean Mass Diet?

By eating small, frequent meals, you create a small insulin spike. By

eating infrequent meals, you cause a large insulin spike that will result in a crash

that can make the body more prone to fat storage. We do NOT want this! We

want to gain as much lean mass and as little fat as possible as possible. We

want maintain stable insulin levels throughout the day and provide frequent,

smaller meals to keep your metabolism revving and keep your body filled with

nutrients to provide your muscles with what they need to grow.

We also always include fat with our meals. When you eat fat with any

meal, especially one containing carbohydrates, it will encapsulate the

carbohydrates and make your body release insulin at a much slower and steady

rate than eating carbohydrates alone.

Why The Lean Mass Diet Works

The Lean Mass Diet takes many factors into consideration on a meal by meal

basis. The areas we pay the most attention to are:

• Amount of calories consumed

• Macronutrient composition

• Insulin control

• Maintaining an alkaline state

Using Food to Build Rock Hard, Dense Muscle

Eat Enough Calories, But Gage Your Progress!

You will probably eat more on this diet than any time in your life, the

biggest factor in a diet is calories in versus calories out. What the Lean Mass Diet

will do is give you the food choices and program you need to help fuel muscle

growth while keeping fat gain to an absolute minimum.

Macronutrient Manipulation

The key to gaining mass is to ensure you get the right amount of calories

and that those calories go toward lean mass, not fat. How do we do this? By

eating the right kind of food at the right time!

Insulin sensitivity is lowest at night and highest earlier in the day. What we

do is taper carbohydrates as the day goes on switching from starchy

carbohydrates to fibrous vegetables. This takes advantage of your body’s

biological rhythm and also allows you to eat carbohydrates when you tend to be

more active (during the day) and less when you are more inactive (nighttime).

Control insulin levels

• Eat 5-8 meals per day: Large meals create an enormous insulin spike,

which can cause your body to store fat. Small meals create a much

smaller insulin spike thus less fat storage and more fat loss.

• Never skip a meal: We don’t care if meal one was at the local buffet and

you ate until you had to unbutton your pants. Do not skip your second

meal! Keep the motor revving.

• Eat fat with every meal, especially meals containing carbohydrates.

• Do not combine carbohydrates and protein alone because this elicits the

highest insulin response. For example, a cup of oatmeal has a moderate

insulin response, but when you combine oatmeal with chicken, you get a

much higher response. If you do combine these, be sure to add a fat

source such as almonds or avocados.

Keep it Base

We are talking about controlling the acidity of your meals. Why would we

do this and why does it matter?

Your body's pH level is slightly alkaline, with a normal range of 7.36 to

7.44. To maintain optimal health and results, we should attempt to keep our body

in an alkaline state through diet. An imbalanced diet high in acidic foods can

make your body acidic. This can deplete the body of alkaline minerals such as

sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium, making people prone to chronic

and degenerative diseases and potentially disrupting nutrient absorption.

For example, when you eat a meal like Oatmeal and egg whites, you are

eating a very acidic meal. But when you put raisins and almonds in your Oatmeal

and have some steamed vegetables with it, you are lowering the acidity of that

meal drastically. All of our sample meals keep this factor in mind.

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Tips

FIGURE OUT HOW MUCH YOU NEED

For most individuals, 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day is a good target. Those who are looking to add size may need as much as 1.5 g protein/lb. body weight/day. You should also plan on eating some extra protein (1.25-1.5 g/lb/day) if you’re trying to lose weight on higher-protein, lower carbohydrate diets, as some of the amino acids will be burned for fuel. These amounts include all of the protein consumed through foods, beverages, and supplements. What’s more, your daily protein allotment should be spread out over 4-6 smaller meals to enhance absorption and utilization. If you’re a big meat, fish, poultry, egg, and dairy food eater, you can probably get by with a smaller “hit” of protein from your powdered mix. Vegetarians and others who eat lots of starchy foods will benefit more from a higher-protein formula.

DETERMINE WHAT YOUR BUDGET

& SCHEDULE ALLOW

Single-source proteins offer more precise benefits. Ideally, you might use a fast-acting whey protein first thing in the morning and 30 minutes before workouts, a recovery product containing protein plus carbohydrates immediately after workouts, a moderately-digested egg protein in between meals, and an all-micellar casein protein at bedtime for sustained amino acid delivery throughout the night while you sleep. Now, here’s where you need to be realistic and honest with yourself. Even if you can afford multiple products, are you the type of person who’s disciplined enough to follow such a regimen? If you answered “no,” consider a protein blend. While not as fast as the fastest or as slow as the slowest single-source proteins, blends offer many of the desirable qualities of a variety of different proteins.

MAKE YOUR SELECTION AND STICK WITH IT – AT LEAST FOR A WHILE

To do something positive for your physique, you need to take your protein(s) continually and consistently for at least 60 days. After a couple months, evaluate and, if necessary, modify your program to add in other proteins, to increase or decrease the amounts used, or to change to a different type of protein altogether.

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