The Muscle and Strength Pyramid: Nutrition

Just finished reading this (and the Muscle & Strength - Training) books and can say they are absolutely excellent!! You see, I'm in a little different position than many people starting out - I'm mid-50s, coming from 16 years of sitting on my ass in front of a computer (engineering position) that I allowed to wreck my posture and conditioning, and am working to reverse the damage I allowed. In short, if I was going to reverse all this crap I let happen I was going to need help in 2 areas, Strength and Nutrition. Let's talk about the Nutrition (you can read my Training review under that product). I love eating!!!! And thankfully I love cooking too...because boy do I love eating!! I think you get that picture ;) I actually don't eat too bad. I'm not a junk fooder (yeah, I made that word up) and mostly good quality food. Actual food, not processed crap simply referred to as food at the stores. 90+% of the time it's home made meals from raw ingredients and rarely go out to eat at restaurants where there are days worth of sodium, sugar, and/or fat in one simple meal. But for a couple decades now, I slowly gained body fat to an unnecessary level (~25% at my worst a couple years ago). At 5'11" I got up to about 200lbs with weak muscles, you might think "not bad" but I'm active and that only served to hold me back from being as active as I like to be. Through strength training I got myself down to about 185lbs with about 21% BF. Yes, I suspect I lost a little muscle mass but here's where the information I got from Andy's site (RippedBody.com) comes in. I wasn't eating nearly enough protein for the approach I was taking to fix myself. Remember, I love food! But I thought I needed more veggies and fruits and oatmeal, and yogurt and..Bah...I was eating more than enough of that daily already, in fact, I was eating way too much of them! I neglected protein in favor of all the yummy stuff, carbs and fat! I knew from Andy's site that this book (ebook only up until a couple weeks ago) would have more detail, and it sure does. The additional information I got from this, just like the Training book, is just what I need to end the constant doubting if I was doing this right. I am all of 5'11" 166lbs at about 17.3%BF (Navy measure). I know I've lost additional muscle mass but I can see I was dieting a little too aggressively. Thanks to the way the additional info is conveyed in this book, I'm thankful to end that and get back to eating more before I wrecked myself going too far. Daily tracking (weighing myself and macro/calorie documenting), weekly averaging, combined with monthly measurements are showing my body is responding positively just the way Eric, Andy, and Andrea's information contained in these 2 books are supposed to. I now have the understanding to calm my impatience to "get this over with fast" and progress efficiently. I'm still impatient but knowledge is now keeping me from acting on it! I'm paraphrasing but the comment for people like me (non-competitor) questioning "...why we'd subject ourselves to a dieting extreme if we weren't preparing for a competition..." was gold! Just what I needed to hear! The bottom line with this book: It won't disappoint!

I’ve never come across a resource like it. Its genius is in how it manages to be both accessible and well-referenced at the same time. I thought I knew a lot about nutrition before, but a lot of this information was new to me. For example, I had previously thought DXA was the gold standard for bodyfat measurements. I had no idea the margin for error was around 10%. This is just one of many things I learnt from this book. I loved the suggestion to eat in maintenance calories for the first 6 months of your lifting career, or as long as you’re enjoying ‘newbie gains’. From there, you would have a better foundation from which to cut or bulk. This advice resonated with me because it was a live issue I was dealing with. This book helped me to resolve many of the concerns I had around food, supplements, bodyfat tracking etc. Where Instagram posts seem to bring confusion, this book brings clarity. I found the information about carb cycling/calorie cycling and refeeds to be particularly insightful. In theory, carb cycling sounds great, but as Helms points out; recovery and adaptations are occurring on our non-training days, so it makes no sense to be in a deficit then. Further to this, our energy expenditure on training and non-training days is only a difference of 200-400 calories, so not enough to justify huge swings in carb/calorie intake. While worthy of consideration, we don’t ‘know’ these strategies work and even if we had more data, individual responses vary. I expect I’ll always come back to this book for reference. It condenses the science, all we know about nutrition at this point in time; and packages it all up in one highly readable book. I have the deepest respect for Eric Helms and 3DMJ for this work, and I’m grateful to have found it. I’d definitely purchase updated editions.

El libro me encantó porque va directo al grano, no se anda con rodeos y te enseña las bases de la nutrición no solo para aficionados si no también para profesionales que se dediquen al fisicoculturismo, aparte es súper fácil de entender y no solo te dice que hacer pero también porque hacerlo ya que dice cómo es que reacciona el cuerpo a diferentes comidas

Bought both Muscle and strenght Pyramid: Training and Nutrition for my brother ( who is a fitness nut) for his birthday. He was so happy!!! He says it's the most complete books he's had so far and learned a lot of new things. Thinking of borrowing them when he's done :)

This book is amazing. Eric Helms and his co-authors are among the best experts when concerning fitness, bodybuilding and sport nutrition. Concepts are clearly explained, but the most important thing is that Eric Helm tells you the truth about sport nutrition and lays out the fundamental principles. If you seriously want to know more about sport nutrition, make yourself a gift and buy this book. You won't regret it!