Articles & Guides
Learn how to build muscle, burn fat and stay motivated.
How to Set Up Your Diet Based on Your Goals
Training and diet are two sides of the same coin. Your training creates the potential for change and your diet will dictate if you reach that potential. To maximize your results, your training and diet should work synergistically. If they do, it will amplify your results. Sadly, this fact is often l...
How to Manage Stress & High Cortisol while Dieting
Cortisol is known as “the stress hormone.” It helps fuel our “fight or flight” response to stressful situations, such as attacks or threats to survival. Though many of us are not often faced with life-or-death situations, we still experience cortisol fluctuations in response to modern stressors, suc...
How to Make Meal Prep Sunday an Easy Habit
Meal prep is a pain. Cooking takes time and most individuals would rather scroll through Instagram or binge watch an entire season of Game of Thrones. Not to mention, a lot of guys can barely make grilled cheese or forage through the pantry for a bowl of cereal, good luck making an entire week’s wor...
How to Make Meal Prep Work For You
If you ask anyone who has been successful in achieving their fitness goals, they’ll tell you that nutrition is the number one factor in their success. The old adage “you can’t out train a bad diet” is most certainly true. But how can you make sure you have the right food in the right amounts on hand...
How to Properly Incorporate Cheat Meals Into Your Diet
The idea of a “Cheat Meal” is so ubiquitous that it belongs on the highest shelf of wherever the plaques for Hall of Fame of Fitness Ideas are stored. Preferably with a platinum finish and surrounded by pizza boxes, brownie tins, ice cream cartons, and 3 or 4 bottles of your favorite local craft bee...
How To Eat Healthy And Develop A Smart Diet
The phrase “You are what you eat” has been around for a long time. When we were kids, we interpreted the phrase as “if you eat a lot of grapes, then you would turn into a big grape!” Keep in mind, many kids also humor the idea that eating watermelon seeds would cause a watermelon to grow inside thei...
How to Diet to Get Visible Abs
Remember that episode of Oprah where she gave everyone cars and yelled, “You get a car, and you get a car, and you get a car”? Today’s article is kind of like that. Except you don’t have to pay taxes on a car. Basically this article is “You get abs, and you get abs, and you get abs”. Now I know what...
How to Create a Bodybuilding Diet
Ok, so you want to get huge?! All you have to do is make it to the gym, crank out reps until you get a sick pump, head home and get on with the rest of your day, right? If bodybuilding were only that simple. Nutrition plays a very large part of recovery, growth and general fitness and without it you...
How to Create a Muscle Building Vegetarian Meal Prep
You can do a lot for your health simply by consuming more plant based foods during the course of the day. But if you’re an average gym rat, your sole focus probably lies around getting enough grams of protein each day. What if I told you, you could do both? Veganism and vegetarianism get bad raps be...
How to Calculate the Perfect Macros for Your Fitness Goals
The title probably drew you in. I mean, it really is one of the most popular questions in the health and fitness scene. Let me be straight with you, if I had the exact answer for how to calculate the perfect macros for your goals I wouldn’t be writing this article. I would have cashed in on my geniu...
How To Build A More Enjoyable & Sustainable Diet
Dieting for fat loss can be difficult and almost seem like a never-ending journey, but it certainly doesn’t need to be if you learn how to build an enjoyable and sustainable diet plan. Despite what many think, weight loss is not always about intense restriction and rigidity, but rather finding ways...
How Much Protein Should I Eat Each Day for Optimal Performance?
For decades, bodybuilders have been focused on their protein intake and the intervals at which it should be consumed. Specifically, lifters have experimented in an effort to find the optimal protein intake to enhance their performance and body composition. It seems recent years, even non-gym rats ha...
How Do You Know Whether You Should Cut or Bulk?
One of the most common questions people have is whether or not it’s a good idea to begin bulking or cutting. Sadly, there’s no “one answer”; it’s such an individual question, with many different factors playing a role in making the right choice, ranging from current body composition, experience, gen...
Dietary Fats: How Certain Fats Affect Your Heart
Controversy. Flame Wars. Facebook Skirmishes. Entire walls of books at Barnes and Noble. Really, really stupid article titles like, “Eggs are as Bad as Smoking”. These are the things that come to mind whenever someone brings up the topic of dietary fat and heart disease. I think the biggest issue wi...
Taking a Closer Look at High Protein Foods
So you want to pack on some serious muscle? Well you’re going to need to start eating a lot of protein. Protein forms the base for all muscle development, without it nothing in your body would grow. How much protein you consume every day can mean the difference between being built like a truck or sk...
High Fructose Corn Syrup - Is It Public Enemy Number One?
It seems that every couple years our society targets a new food, which is then blamed for every possible ailment and natural disasters alike. In the 1980s it was dietary fats. Then Dr. Atkins rolled around and carbs became evil. Lately, trans fats have been pretty much outlawed, red meat will kill y...
11 High Protein Meals You Can Cook in a Crock Pot
If you are busy professional or student and find it difficult to cook high quality meals, let me reintroduce you to the crock pot. You know, that thing your mother and grandmother used to cook with every once in a while. A crock pot (or slow cooker) is a great way to automate the cooking process whi...
Hidden Dangers Of 6 Hyped Health Foods
Let me preface this article with the following disclaimer: You may disagree with me because your body can tolerate the foods discussed below without issue. Additionally, you may have successfully incorporated these foods in to a “healthy” diet. With this in mind, you should know that the purpose of...
Should You Eat a "Low Carb" or "High Carb" Diet?
Billy Shakespeare is believed to have written the famous words, “To be, or not to be. That is the question”. What most people don’t know is that he was actually a nutrition nerd and what his original version said was, “High carb or low carb. That is the question”. But his editors didn’t understand h...
The Poor College Student's Diet Guide to Healthy Gains
When the editors at Muscle & Strength asked me to write an article on “Healthy Poor College Student's Diet Guide to Gains” I got a good hearty chuckle because I might one of the best people on the planet to write this article… Why do I boast such a claim? Well, because I was in school forever. Remem...
A "Handy" Approach to Never Count Calories Again
Counting calories can be a tedious, time-consuming, and potentially obsessive restraint on one’s life. Weighing foods, measuring a cup of this or a tablespoon of that, and updating calorie counting apps can be quite stressful. Or worse, you panic when a friend, family member or co-worker offers yo...
Gut Health: The Next Big Thing in Health & Fitness
Key Facts Your body is 90% bacteria and only 10% human. Your body contains billions of gut microorganisms. Gut health is linked to a vast array of allergies and diseases including obesity, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers. From the minute we are born our gut health is...
Kris Gethin's Bodybuilder Grocery Shopping Check List
If you’re looking to improve your health and build a head turning physique, you’ll need to establish a healthy shopping routine at the grocery store. The moment you walk through the doors, you’ll be met with displays of candy, energy drinks, and other “quick fixes” which can hold you back from your...
Complete Guide To Building An Eating Plan You Can Live With
Brad Borland is a strength & conditioning specialist, cancer survivor and the founder of WorkoutLab. Overcomplicating the simple things in life seems to be a trend these days in hopes to confuse the consumer into thinking they need rescuing with a pricey product or service. Of course this rings so t...