10 best carbs for bodybuilding

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Here’s everything new in today’s edition:

• 20-minute muscle-building blitz workouts

• The best carbohydrates for bodybuilding

• How much protein do you really need?

Workouts

20 Minutes to Gains

Even serious lifters can struggle with maintaining what can, at times, be a grueling gym schedule. Between daily cardio and the need to free up multiple hours per day to move serious weights, matching up your training with other real-life demands can become onerous.

Lucky for you, BarBend’s Jake Dickson has the 20-minute lightning workout solution for your time-constrained life. This series of short workouts will help you stay on track with your muscle-building goals while leaving plenty of time for dentist visits and apple picking in the countryside.

Fitting your workouts into 20-minute windows doesn’t leave a lot of time to text in between sets or scroll Spotify for the perfect bench-press anthem. You’ll have to focus and get down to work in order to access these sought-after hypertrophic results. Having some equipment handy is better than having none, but a full reading of this article will give you options for either scenario.

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Nutrition

Carbs to Sculpt With

Protein may get all the press, but carbs are also extremely important if you want to build muscle. But before you go out and invest heavily in King-Size Snickers, we’ve rounded up 10 clean carb sources that are the ideal fuels for your bodybuilding workouts and muscle construction needs. (Just don’t try handing them out at Halloween.)

Rice has long been a stalwart figure in a bodybuilding diet, as has pasta and other starches and grains. Various types of bread, some better than others, can also be used to fill out your macronutrient needs.

If these 10 foods aren’t laying the foundation of your carbohydrate intake, chances are you’re doing it wrong. 

Muscle Building

How Low Can You Go?

Everyone knows that eating protein leads to muscle development, but is the all-too-common adage of “one gram of protein per pound of body weight” really a requirement?

While muscle protein synthesis may be one of the most complex topics in all of nutrition, BarBend wonders aloud, via the written word, how little protein a person could actually eat and still build new muscle.

As long as you’re eating enough food, in general, and not trying to do a hard weight cut, the answer might very well be as annoyingly simple as “It doesn’t really matter.” Recruiting the assistance of PhD and natural bodybuilder Eric Helms, this article looks into how much protein is too little, too much, and just right.

Everything Else

The Shadow Knows

• Dorian Yates hasn’t fallen off a fitness cliff since dominating the bodybuilding scene during the 1990s. Find out how he maintains his shredded figure in his 60s.

• The 2024 CrossFit Games champion, James Sprague, discusses his sporting journey and the mouthpiece that is his secret weapon to success.

• The phrase “stretched position” has gained a lot of traction in the hypertrophy world in the past year. Find out why lifting in this range of motion may be ideal for all of your hypertrophy needs.