Question: What food supplements and training programs are good for developing muscle mass?

Overwhelmingly, what matters for muscle mass is working out, eating enough protein, and eating enough calories.

You want to try and hit 10-20 sets per muscle group per week with eat set hitting within 80% of failure. So, if your doing a set of 8 reps but you could have done 20 reps with your chosen weight, that doesn't count. You would want to pick a weight that you can lift no more than 10 times. Ideally, you'll do some sets in the 5-rep range, 10-rep range, and 15-rep range.

For protein, you probably want to be up around 1 gram per pound of body weight or per pound of target body weight.

Then calories, you do need a caloric excess, but you don't want to get fat. If you know how many calories you need to be weight-stable, I recommend titrating the calories up 100 calories a day and then track your progress if you are gaining waist circumference. I know this is a little bit harder when you're a woman because you're going to have more fluctuations in water weight, but in terms of simple things to do to track your progress, waist circumference is valuable, and looking in the mirror is valuable.

If you can get an actual Bod Pod or DEXA scan, then that would give you more reliable information. There's a device called Skulpt. It's bioimpedance, I believe, but it's taking it at many different points where you take so much data that it actually becomes pretty accurate, but it's very time-consuming. Anyway, take your choice of what you're going to use to track your progress.

If you're not gaining any fat, you can very slowly add your total calories. If you are gaining fat, you need to cut back on the calories. But you need to have a caloric excess to maximize your muscle gains. That right there is probably 90% of it and anything else is probably completely pointless unless you are a very good athlete, in which case you're going to be looking for what's the next.

This Q&A can also be found as part of a much longer episode, here: https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/podcast/2019/03/08/ask-anything-nutrition-feb-23-2019

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Chris Masterjohn, PhD, is the Founder and Scientific Director of the mitochondria test Mitome.