What Supplements Do Female Bodybuilders Take?
Q: What supplements do female bodybuilders take? Please let me know so I can avoid those products so I don’t end up looking like them. Yuck!!!
A: Men have more muscle mass than women and have the potential to build even more because of testosterone, a muscle-building hormone that also gives men their distinctive sex characteristics. While women also produce testosterone, they don’t produce enough of it, which is why women have less muscle mass than men, typically have a harder time with visible muscle growth, and the potential amount of muscle they can gain is lower in comparison. That being the case, female bodybuilders with exaggerated levels of muscularity look that way because they’re taking testosterone, if not other male hormones.
There’s no specific training program, or workout routine, or weightlifting exercise, or nutrition plan that can make a woman look like Schwarzenegger with a wig on, let alone a fitness supplement. Only those things in combination with steroids can do that. So yeah, there shouldn’t be a fear of any particular supplement making you brolic, toots! Instead, the fear with supplements should come down to wasting your money.
As grandiose as the marketing claims are for many supplements, the overwhelming majority of products don’t work as advertised to help enhance exercise performance and support muscle growth. Of those that do, there’s protein powder and creatine, both of which have strong scientific evidence for their efficacy. So if you want to take supplements, get those. Apart from them, nothing else is really needed.
Supplements promise increased muscle size, greater strength, better endurance, and improved energy levels. But when lifting as a natty, proper nutrition and other lifestyle interventions will bear the bulk of the responsibility for any change in those areas, as well as working out intensely on a consistent basis. The only purpose that supplements have is to provide a boost when you’re already doing things properly, and only a handful of supplements do that. There’s also something else to keep in mind when supplement shopping, especially as a woman.
What else to add to your consumer awareness is that a lot of supplement companies have separate lines of products for women only, all of which are usually more expensive than their male equivalents. But just like men and women don’t have to eat different kinds of the same food to get the same benefits, men and women don’t have to ingest different kinds of the same supplement to get the same reward either.
While men and women are physiologically and metabolically different in some regards due to subtle differences in biology, there’s not so much difference between the sexes that they each have to consume different varieties of bananas and avocados or protein powder and creatine. So outside of saving your money by not buying supplements you don’t necessarily need, save it by not buying supplements that are marketed specifically to women.
Now, does anyone else have a fitness or nutrition question of their own that they want to ask?
Glossary: bodybuilder, exercise, fitness, food, hormones, exercise intensity, muscle, nutrition, natty, program, routine, steroids, supplement, work out
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