Can you really turn this into Muscle?

If you walk into any health food store you’ll see a wall of supposed muscle building supplements. Each one with fantastic claims about protein synthesis, strength, power, weight gain, boosting hormons and enzymatic pathways and on and on.

There are muscle building supplements for pre workout, post workout, morning, night, morning AND night, testosterone boosters, nitric oxide stimulators, amino acid products of all kinds, plain creatine, mixed creatine, protein, meal replacements, weight gainers, GH boosters, prohormones etc.

With an unlimited supply of money it would appear that each one of these is worth taking (based on their claims). But most people have a limited supply of money.

If these things worked, even a bit, how much money would you realistically spend for a few extra pounds of muscle?

Leave you answer in the comments section.

note: I’m assuming no amount of supplements can produce steroid like gains

John

One too many supplements?

About 20 mins from my place there is a mini market that has a great salad bar. You can get a really good salad with just about anything you want on it. It’s easily the best salad bar I’ve ever been too and it’s also the most affordable (nice!).

This same market is joined to a supplement/health food store that promotes a supplement remedy for just about any ailment you can think of (they advertise heavily on the local radio stations).

Part of their marketing is a free magazine they distribute and give out in the store about natural remedies for health. This free ‘magazine’ is really just a catalog for every product that they sell. I picked one of these magazines up that had the following title “Top 50 health products”

50…Seriously.

Does this mean that I would be 50 times healthier if I took all 50 of them? I showed the magazine to a friend of mine to point out how ridiculous it was and we started flipping through the list. She proceeded to tell me that a friend of hers (who introduced her to the market) has purchased no less than 30 of the items on the list!

Wow…just wow.

These are not cheap items either, probably ranging from $15-$40 per item (each item meant to last anywhere from 1-3 months)

This is just an example of how crazy the marketing of natural health products can get.

I asked how her friend is measuring any improvement in ‘health’ from using these products…she just shrugged her shoulders and said “she doesn’t measure anything”.

John

Supplements are more than just ingredients

A dietary supplement seems like a pretty simple concept: Find a few herbs or ingredients that have some sort of effect on the body then sell them to anyone who is looking for that effect.

But when you start to look at it closer it isn’t this simple.

Consumers typically focus on the ingredients in a supplement and the claim being made on the label.

Supplement companies on the other hand look at the whole product including all of the following factors:

Size of the box/container

Price Point

Dose

Cost per dose

Doses per package

Color of the package

How the product looks compared to competitors products on the shelf

Shelf life

Industry saturation for the product category

This is just a short list of items a typical supplement company might consider when making a new product. As you can see, the ingredients and what they might do isn’t on here. This is because all supplement companies typically have access to the same ingredients so the ingredients themselves are never going to be the big selling feature.

Getting the packaging and the story about the product right is what will make or break a supplement.

In todays Philife podcast Brad Pilon and I discuss supplement packaging and how it’s just as important and maybe more important than the ingredients in a supplement.

Listen to the podcast here -> Supplement Packaging

John