Muscle Building Breakfast Guide

Breakfast is one of the most important meals of the day, particularly for those building muscle. What makes the ideal muscle building breakfast? Can you eat any old thing such as your favorite cereal or bagels and expect to build muscle or are there specific foods you should eat? All of these questions will be answered – along with what you should absolutely not eat for breakfast if you are trying to improve your lean muscle mass.

What not to eat:

Let’s keep it simple and cut to the chase: Simple sugars promote lethargy – the opposite of what you want a breakfast to promote – so avoid sugary breakfast cereals, heavily-sugared coffees and fruits.

What to eat:

Eat foods that will provide for your every need. Your brain needs carbs to function properly, so keep your brain stress-free (preventing anti-anabolic cortisol from being released) by giving it some complex carbs such as oats or wholegrain bread. This will also provide some nutrients for basic muscle energy replenishment which is handy if you have a workout within a few hours.

Don’t overdo the carbs though – that’s how you get fat.

No muscle building breakfast should be complete without plenty of complete proteins – there’s no other nutrient which provides the necessary building blocks to synthesize new muscle tissue. Since it’s breakfast time, think whole eggs anyway you like them, whole milk or cheese. Consuming whey protein in the morning is also ideal because it is absorbed and used quickly.

As for fats, supplementing with Omega 3 fats or other healthy fats is good. But, don’t be afraid of the fats in eggs or milk – contrary to the outdated and discredited notion that saturated fats are bad for you, they are actually crucial to healthy body function and survival. Saturated fats also play an important role in the creation of growth hormones and testosterone – which if found lacking, you won’t grow new muscle.

Of course, anything you do eat should be part of your overall nutrient-balanced and caloric-sufficient daily diet, so it’s best to have some kind of structured diet in which everything is pre-calculated so you know what you have to eat and how much to grow lean muscle mass. This also helps alleviate a ton of stress (remember cortisol, the catabolic stress hormone).