We live in an age when an increasing number of people are going to gyms and taking up sports or physical exercise, which is of course a good thing. Some of these people do this to improve their general health and fitness and hopefully live longer, others do it for enjoyment and recreation, while some do it to enhance the size and appearance of their bodies.
Of the people in the latter group, many will just use physical exercise, usually weight training and sometimes also cardiovascular exercise, to achieve this, and allow their bodies and muscles to expand naturally in response to the increased physical stress they subject them to.
Exercise is essential for muscle growth. When the muscles get placed under physical stress and pushed to their limits, they tear, and then they repair themselves and knit back together bigger and stronger than they were before.
Some people who are looking to get bigger in this way consume various supplements to accelerate this process. Personal trainers that work with clients who want to bulk up their bodies will sometimes recommend some of these supplements.
Many personal trainers also recommend vitamin supplements, in addition to supplements for sheer muscle growth. This is because vitamins play an important role in muscle development. We asked Steele Williams, one of the personal training course tutors for Train Fitness, to tell us why personal trainers are telling clients to take vitamin supplements:
“You don’t develop strong and healthy muscles without consuming the proper vitamins. There are three types of vitamin that are particularly important for us with regards to this:
First you have vitamin D, which comes mainly from sunlight. In addition to being absolutely essential for good immune system function, it’s required for the consumption and usage of calcium and phosphorous within the body. These are two minerals that enable muscular contraction to occur, as well as affect the growth and strength of bones.
Then you have vitamin C, which the body’s muscles simply have to have in order to function properly, because it’s this vitamin that’s responsible for the health of the blood vessels, which are the medium that carries oxygen and nutrients through our bodies to the muscles.
And you’ve got B vitamins, which are required in order for the body to achieves something called protein metabolism, which means breaking protein down into amino acids and then combining those amino acids into entirely new proteins. This process is absolutely critical for muscle building during exercise”.
It is clear from Steele’s comments, and from accepted studies of the effects of vitamins upon the body, that vitamins have an important role to play for people looking to grow their physiques.
Ideally, we should all be getting these vitamins from the foods we eat, but the reality is that sometimes we don’t have time each day to prepare a wide enough range of foods in our meals that give our bodies everything they should be getting. And that’s why lots of personal trainers are telling their clients to take vitamin supplements as well as exercise supplements.