There are so many different diets out there, such as vegan, paleo, ketamine, low-carb, and more. For people who want to build muscle, especially if you're going to follow a plant-based diet, you might wonder if you can get the workout results you want.
There are many considerations when choosing to follow any diet plan, but when it comes to muscle growth and athletic performance, your body generally depends on a few things that are easily achieved even with a plant-based diet. In this article, we will show you how you can build muscle on a plant-based diet.
Notable Vegetarian Athletes
Numerous athletes follow strict vegetarian or vegan diets and continue to excel in their sport. Some of those athletes include names like:
- Nate Diaz (UFC fighter)
- Jake Shields (UFC fighter)
- Carl Lewis (9 times Olympic gold medalist)
- Venus Williams (Tennis star)
- Zack Belknap (Professional bodybuilder)
Those are just a few names out of thousands of athletes that follow a plant-based diet. But if anyone tells you that you need meat for athletic performance, just point at what those names above have accomplished in the world of sports.
Train Consistently For Optimal Results
In many cases, when people don't see the results they expect, their exercise routine has some flaws that need to be addressed. Consistency is key, such as sticking to a schedule, as well as the type of exercises you do.
For building muscle, you want to focus primarily on resistance-based strength training. You want to stress your muscle fibers to the point of micro-tears, which your body repairs and rebuilds stronger than before.
However, it's not simply a matter of doing a set of reps every day. You want to be sure you are pushing your body to its limits and increasing the amount of weight resistance; otherwise, you're likely doing just enough to maintain your current muscle mass but not add new mass.
Furthermore, be sure you're changing up your exercises. For example, your arms may grow accustomed to vertical push-pull exercises, such as prone bench presses, so it's beneficial to mix in other movements such as standing lateral bicep curls.
Optimize Your Energy Intake
Your body requires energy to function normally, and so the foods you eat play an important role. Energy comes in three forms: carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, but carbs are the primary energy source for your body. Not all diets are the same. For example, you can check out the results of plant-based diets compared against a vegan bodybuilding diet.
Whole-food sources of carbs include grains, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Carbs trigger a release of insulin, which will stimulate how your body absorbs amino acids from proteins. On a plant-based diet, you want to focus on plant-based proteins, and the best sources of plant-based proteins come from whole-grain bread, peanut butter powders, quinoa, broccoli, lentils, and a few others.
There are also plenty of healthy fats for people following a plant-based diet. Avocados are 19% healthy fats, for example, while nuts like cashews and walnuts contain high levels of unsaturated fats.
Proteins from animal meat can provide similar levels of amino acids to what your body requires, but that doesn't mean a plant-based diet isn't equally effective. It just means you'll need to more stringently measure the amounts of protein you're getting from plant foods and eat larger servings of plant-based foods than you would meats.
A basic guideline for the daily recommended protein intake is 0.8 grams per kilogram of bodyweight. That means a person who weighs 70 kg (154 pounds) should be getting around 45 grams of protein each day for maintenance. For muscle growth, you may want to increase this to 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight.
You can get all the energy you need from non-meat sources quite easily. However, you also need to be aware of alleviating risks associated with strictly vegan diets if that's a route you decide to take. However, plant-based diets are not the same as vegan diets, so ideally, you should research all the various diet types and their benefits and drawbacks.
