Building muscle as a prospect sounds uncomplicated. The basic premise of all weightlifting is simple: Tear it down to build it up. Of course, anyone who’s ever tried to accomplish the task of adding a few inches to their biceps knows that there’s more to it than that. Much like a young sapling, your body doesn’t grow without the right fertilizer. And the best fertilizer to use? Well, that’s where the confusion comes in. What is it that your body needs to pack on muscle?

Looking at the really big boys, the repulsive heaps of muscle that bedeck the stage at your average Arnold’s Classic, the answer seems pretty clear. There’s no way to build up to those levels of size without steroids. From Dianabol to Trenbolone, the Ronnie Colemans and Jay Cutlers of this world are on them all, and bodybuilding authorities have ceased to present even a pretense of monitoring their chemical abuses.

On the flipside, you have the world of supplements. Now, where do you find out what supplements to take to build muscle? It’s a tougher question than you might initially guess. Most of the biggest muscle rags out there are owned by the big supplement companies. Weider owns Flex, Muscle Inc. owns Iron Man, TwinLab owns Muscular Development. You’d have to be more than a little foolish not to see that each issue of these magazines is just another glorified, long-winded advertorial for the muscle industry’s equivalent of big pharma.

To make matters worse, government sponsored studies even of the biggest, most ubiquitous supplements have shown them to be little more than sugar pills. A study by daily health central found no improvement in the health of elderly people taking multivitamins as opposed to those on a placebo - both got sick just as often, and died at roughly the same age. In fact, a study by the US National Cancer Institute actually showed that taking too many vitamin supplements may increase the advent of prostate cancer in men by as much as 30%. That’s a nasty statistic, and not one you want to contribute to.

The best solution to all these problems is maintaining a healthy diet. Of course, this is an area in which there’s no less dispute over best practice that any other. From Atkins to Apple-Cider, Holford to Whole-Grain, there’s as many sides to the story as there are authors. All of them depend, of course, on different goals, but that doesn’t account for the varied number of approaches. And even once you’ve decided on a diet plan, you have to contend with issues like the mercury levels in your fish, the chemicals in your water. Is your green tea green enough? Was your beef fed on grain? Do your chicken breasts come from cannibal poultry?

Take a step back for a moment, take a deep breath, and recognize that most of these factors lie outside of your range of control. Short of spending your entire day thinking about everything that goes in to (or comes out of) your body, you’re never going to be entirely certain. Forget for the moment about securing eternal health and probable immortality, and come back to the question of the v-shaped physique. All that really matters is your carb, protein and fat counts. Once you have this under control, adjusting other areas (such as the quality of those elements) is relatively easy, and, truth be told, not nearly as important as those three, initial elements.

Get yourself a kitchen scale, and get in the habit of calculating your caloric intake. Start off by measuring what you’re eating already. You’ll be able to find out the calories, carbs, fat or protein per gram of any food within a few minutes of getting online. To gain lean muscle mass, you need to up your caloric intake by about 18 to 19 calories per day, meaning that in a month you’d add on up to six hundred calories to your diet. This is of course during bulk up-phases. To shred down, you either need to decrease your overall caloric intake, or decrease the quantity of carbohydrates and fats you’re consuming relative to your protein intake.

This is the approach favored by just about every serious lifter out there. Every other consideration is very much secondary. For a guide to the more important among those secondary principles, and how best to approach calorie counting with relation to training, check out Vince Delmonte’s acclaimed e-book, “No-Nonsense Muscle Building.”

© Vince Delmonte www.VinceDelMonteReviews.com 2009. All rights reserved.