What Are The Best Supplements For Faster Muscle Gain?

There is no shortage of supplements that claim to boost muscle gains, but truly elite physiques are built by hard training and serious nutrition first and foremost. Supplements are just the icing on the cake.

But when your training and nutrition are locked in, these four science-backed supplements can definitely help you get your new physique a little faster, boost the quality of your workouts, and help you recover. Those three things can definitely help you gain weight—the good kind!

Here's everything you need to know!

Creatine

Creatine is a naturally occurring substance within our muscle cells, and it is one of the primary sources of cellular energy. Whenever you blink your eyes, scratch your elbow, chew your food, or perform most other movements, it's creatine—or rather, the creatine phosphate energy system— mass gain tablets that are powering you through it.

As a supplement, creatine has been popular since the 1990s and has been the subject of hundreds of studies since then. It comes in numerous forms, but none have been shown conclusively to be as effective as the cheapest and most popular variety, creatine monohydrate.

Benefits Of Creatine Supplementation

• Increased lean muscle mass, particularly with strength training[1,2]
• Improved muscular strength[1,2]
• Decreased muscle soreness and lower levels of exercise-induced inflammation[3]
• Improved blood flow during training[1]
• Improved performance during high-intensity training[1,5]

Many athletes follow a "loading" protocol of around 25 grams a day for five days, but this isn't essential. But as Ciaran Fairman notes in the article "Do I Need to Load With Creatine," you can also get the same benefits with around 5 grams a day, potentially with none of the mild side effects of the loading protocol, which include stomach pain and water weight gain. The catch is that you have to take it consistently. Don't skip it!

Recommended Dose: 5 grams, taken whenever works best for you. If it helps you remember, take half of your daily serving pre-workout, and the second half post-workout.

Beta-Alanine

Beta-alanine is a naturally occurring non-essential amino acid that comes into the body through foods that are rich in protein. The performance-enhancing aspect of beta-alanine (BA) is due to its ability to increase intra-muscular levels of carnosine. Increasing beta-alanine through supplementation may raise carnosine levels by over 60 percent in as quickly as four weeks.[6]

This is significant because, during high-intensity exercise, our bodies accumulate a large number of hydrogen ions, which cause the blood pH to drop. This acidification can cause severe fatigue, decrease muscle performance, and shorten the time to muscular failure. What people chalk up to lactic acid is actually usually happening from hydrogen.

Beta-alanine is thought to "buffer" these ions, delaying the buildup in the blood and allowing you to knock out a few more reps, last longer in your workout, and increase your gains over the long term.

Benefits Of Beta-Alanine Supplementation

• Delayed fatigue during intense training[7]
• Increased total training volume[7]
• Improved power production[8]
• Increased muscle building[9]
• Improved endurance during hard training[10]
• Increases effectiveness of creatine, and vice versa[11,12]

Recommended Dose: 4-6 grams per day. Beta-alanine has to be taken regularly to be effective, so don't trust your pre-workout to give you everything you need. Consider taking it in smaller doses throughout the day to reduce the harmless skin-tingling sensation that can accompany higher doses.

Tips for a Bride Planning Her Own Wedding

First thing’s first: planning a wedding can feel pretty overwhelming at first (trust me, I do it for a living). While recruiting professionals to help out can be pretty ideal, maybe you’re working under a tight budget, or maybe you simply love going the DIY route. It may be a lot of work, but it is possible to plan your own dream wedding!

It just takes a bit of organization to keep everything on track when you’re faced with endless decisions, lists, deadlines and, you know, your own life to deal with. The trick is taking things one step at a time and recruiting friends and family (including that future spouse of yours!) to help. And give yourself plenty of time to plan. You’ll make things so much harder on yourself if you try to plan and oversee every detail and try to do it all at the last minute. A longer timeline is your friend here—aim for around a year if possible. Now, where do you begin?

Once you’ve spent some time spreading the news of your engagement and actually enjoying that special time, the budget will need to be the very first thing you finalize to get the wedding tips planning train going. And that can involve some uncomfortable conversations if you have any family members who are planning to chip in for the big day. So don’t delay! Have those conversations early and determine the amount everyone is comfortable spending, and then build in a 10% “splurge cushion” for any unexpected costs or urges you’ll inevitably succumb to. Be prepared for a reality check when it comes to budgeting for this big day. Many couples don’t realize the costs involved and may find that their dream wedding is a bit out of reach. In that case, be prepared to prioritize. You really can have your ideal wedding on almost any budget if you iron out what exactly is important to you and focus on those few things.

With the budget in place, it’s time to start getting inspired and delving into the nitty-gritty details! Have some fun with this part; now’s the time to indulge in all those bridal magazines (ahem, BRIDES!) and blogs to get a sense of the style of wedding you want. Think about weddings you recently attended. What did you like? What would you do differently? Real-life experience is always the best form of inspiration. Don’t forget to involve your fiancé in this step as well! Your wedding should represent both of you as a couple.

The organization is key when planning your own wedding. You’ll have so many balls up in the air at once, you’ll need a way to keep track of everything. You can use spreadsheets or one of the many wedding planning management apps or programs out there. Just find what works best for you and stick with it. Just remember that even with the most meticulous planning and organization system, there is bound to be some chaos from time to time. Try your best to plan ahead and don’t be too hard on yourself.

The most important thing to keep in mind: Try to have some fun! This is your wedding after all! Don’t get too hung up on those tiny details and focus on what’s truly important: a happy marriage with the person of your dreams.

Now that you’re armed and ready to begin the planning process, here are some of my top tips for planning an unforgettable wedding.

(And for more specific info on what to do the week before your wedding, check out our guide here!)

Mindy Weiss, a wedding planner to the stars and The Wedding Shop by Shutterfly’s Style Partner, is our go-to expert on all things wedding. With more than 20 years of planning weddings and events for top Hollywood personalities (think Sofia Vergara and Joe Manganiello, Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi, and so many more), her best-selling The Wedding Book, and line of stylish bridal flats with Rollasole, Mindy is the ultimate authority on planning an unforgettable wedding.

The Most Shared Facebook Content 2017. The Top Viral Posts, Videos, and Articles

To answer this question we reviewed two billion articles and Facebook posts that were published this year. We set out our findings below, including:

• The content (articles, videos, and blog posts) that were most shared on Facebook 
• The viral Facebook posts that gained the most engagement
• Expert reflections on the findings and the lessons for content marketers

Reality check for the rest of us: These top articles and posts were exceptional outliers and we cannot expect to replicate their success. However, we can learn from them to gain deeper insights into the kinds of content that engage Facebook audiences. In this post, we discuss the implications for content creators with commentary from marketing and publishing experts.

The two tables below show the most shared content on Facebook and the top viral Facebook posts this year. The links to the content items are in the discussion of the articles after the table.

Most Shared Content On Facebook 2017

As we can see below Facebook audiences readily share entertaining, inspiring and heart-warming content published outside the platform. Music videos topped the charts this year with three of the top ten posts. We can also observe a strong tribal element when it comes to the sharing of political and opinion content. There were two political posts in the top ten.

The Most Viral Facebook Posts  2017

When it comes to Facebook posts the top posts were almost exclusively videos. Only three of the top 20 posts were not videos. The most popular topics were:

• Practical hacks (5 of the top 10 posts were practical tips)
• Awesome and inspiring content
• Food and recipes (5 of the top 25 posts were food posts)
• Cute animals
• Music videos

Four of the top 20 most shared Facebook posts were in Spanish. One of the top 20 posts was in French.

For a detailed analysis of the most engaging videos see our previous analysis of 100m Facebook videos.