The Muscle and Strength Pyramid: Nutrition

The third edition perfectly encapsulates the nutrition fundamentals any lifter needs to know whether competitive or not in a beautifully put together and easy to understand format. Quite literally an essential for any lifter.

Just finished reading this (and the Muscle & Strength - Training) books and can say they are absolutely excellent!! You see, I'm in a little different position than many people starting out - I'm mid-50s, coming from 16 years of sitting on my ass in front of a computer (engineering position) that I allowed to wreck my posture and conditioning, and am working to reverse the damage I allowed. In short, if I was going to reverse all this crap I let happen I was going to need help in 2 areas, Strength and Nutrition. Let's talk about the Nutrition (you can read my Training review under that product). I love eating!!!! And thankfully I love cooking too...because boy do I love eating!! I think you get that picture ;) I actually don't eat too bad. I'm not a junk fooder (yeah, I made that word up) and mostly good quality food. Actual food, not processed crap simply referred to as food at the stores. 90+% of the time it's home made meals from raw ingredients and rarely go out to eat at restaurants where there are days worth of sodium, sugar, and/or fat in one simple meal. But for a couple decades now, I slowly gained body fat to an unnecessary level (~25% at my worst a couple years ago). At 5'11" I got up to about 200lbs with weak muscles, you might think "not bad" but I'm active and that only served to hold me back from being as active as I like to be. Through strength training I got myself down to about 185lbs with about 21% BF. Yes, I suspect I lost a little muscle mass but here's where the information I got from Andy's site (RippedBody.com) comes in. I wasn't eating nearly enough protein for the approach I was taking to fix myself. Remember, I love food! But I thought I needed more veggies and fruits and oatmeal, and yogurt and..Bah...I was eating more than enough of that daily already, in fact, I was eating way too much of them! I neglected protein in favor of all the yummy stuff, carbs and fat! I knew from Andy's site that this book (ebook only up until a couple weeks ago) would have more detail, and it sure does. The additional information I got from this, just like the Training book, is just what I need to end the constant doubting if I was doing this right. I am all of 5'11" 166lbs at about 17.3%BF (Navy measure). I know I've lost additional muscle mass but I can see I was dieting a little too aggressively. Thanks to the way the additional info is conveyed in this book, I'm thankful to end that and get back to eating more before I wrecked myself going too far. Daily tracking (weighing myself and macro/calorie documenting), weekly averaging, combined with monthly measurements are showing my body is responding positively just the way Eric, Andy, and Andrea's information contained in these 2 books are supposed to. I now have the understanding to calm my impatience to "get this over with fast" and progress efficiently. I'm still impatient but knowledge is now keeping me from acting on it! I'm paraphrasing but the comment for people like me (non-competitor) questioning "...why we'd subject ourselves to a dieting extreme if we weren't preparing for a competition..." was gold! Just what I needed to hear! The bottom line with this book: It won't disappoint!

I have had the pleasure of following Eric and Andy's online content for years now. I have a stupid number of bookmarks linking to articles and/or Saved Facebook posts for podcasts. I've experienced Andrea's content far less, but have enjoyed the few podcasts I've caught where she has been the guest. I passed up the first editions of The Muscle and Strength Pyramid e-books because I'm an old-fashioned fuddy duddy who prefers having something physical in his hands. Now, with this release of print format, I've had a chance to course-correct. Given the content here, I might even go so far as to say I've had the chance to rectify a previous mistake. I'm not a strength or physique athlete. I'm not even a particularly gifted recreational lifter. But lifting was a correctional life change that has become a thus-far decade-long habit, that also contributed to shifting the focus of my academic career toward a master's degree in nutrition. There have been setbacks along the way, but this habit continues to be ammunition for both physical and mental health. The nutrition field can be a rough place. There are no shortage of individuals propagating their ideas or hypotheses of health and unhealth, some through jovial ignorance (the anecdotal "this is what worked for me!"), some others through a willful preying on ignorance. There are times that credentialed nutrition professionals fall into these patterns, and there are times that their attempts to combat these patterns do no favors for credentialed nutrition professionals or the field at large. Sometimes all we want is the "quick fix," or some short list of simple guidelines to follow ("this, not that") to make sense of what has become a complicated, conflicting, sometimes-misleading mess of information. The authors of this text accomplish just that, without needing to tell us not to eat after 7 P.M. or to eat acai or adopt a certain fad diet. By framing the information in the shape of a pyramid - from most-important at the base to least-important at the peak - the authors have already provided readers with a method to navigating the madness. If your life is hectic and you only have the attention and/or time to navigate the very basics, the base of the pyramid gives you the crucial information you need to begin making the changes you're seeking to make. You can progress and fine-tune those changes when you have more time and/or attention later, but aren't missing out in the meantime just because you may not be able to commit to making it past the first fifty pages. Spoiler warning and pro-tip: don't just skip to the end. On the other hand, if you have all the time in the world to commit to reading this, you'll come away with an abundance of knowledge without ever having wasted time on magical macros, whether intermittent fasting allows you to defy gravity, or whether it's high carbs or high fat that makes Jack a dull boy. On a closing note, Eric gets bonus points for being a Baldur's Gate fan. Pretend this is six stars, not the paltry five stars I must settle for.

This is an amazing book that will teach you everything you need to know about nutrition for powerlifting, bodybuilding or just overall fitness in general. The text is very easy to understand, yet incredibly detailed, and it does a great job of teaching you exactly what you need to know about nutrition (in order of importance) in order to reach your goals. Most importantly, the authors do not lose sight of the fact that most people cannot be machines at all times when it comes to nutrition, the information focuses on the "human side" of the equation, if you will. The amount of incredibly useful information in this book cannot be understated, it's a total must have, and you will not be disappointed!

Perfect for the fitness professional. Easy read, great info. Discusses best practices in fitness and health promotion

These books will change your life! No b*****it!! Dr. Helms is well known in the fitness and health industry’s and there is good reason for that. The strength and diet books (recently brought to print) are all you will need to start, sustain and exceed all your fitness and lifestyle dreams and needs. I have maintained an 8-11% body fat between winter (higher body fat) and summer (lower body fat) using his nutritional guidance while crushing my strength goals. BUY THIS BOOK!!.

This book as the the Training book is excellent in it’s clear, evidence based approach to help you build and understand the concepts from most important to less important things. It’s really like holding someone in hand who teaches you what you should do, why you should do that and what you can except from it. The nutrition part has always been hard for me and I have tried to find and use some ”quick fixes” during the years and thus avoiding to look on it as a whole big picture. I’m confident that this book will allow me to gain the knowledge and confidence that I can be my own master and be able to make adjustments in my thinking as well in what I put in my mouth. There is a lot of information and as non native English it’s sometimes takes me time and effort to read and understand the concepts. And as someone who hoped that nutrition would be the ”easy” part to get and apply, I was really surprised with the amount and detail of information. I guess that it will take a loooong time to feel that you get it all and understand it. So, make sure that you purchase this book, and even better, together with the Training book and you will for sure be able to take your understanding to a whole new level. Thank you for these amazing books!!!

I’ve never come across a resource like it. Its genius is in how it manages to be both accessible and well-referenced at the same time. I thought I knew a lot about nutrition before, but a lot of this information was new to me. For example, I had previously thought DXA was the gold standard for bodyfat measurements. I had no idea the margin for error was around 10%. This is just one of many things I learnt from this book. I loved the suggestion to eat in maintenance calories for the first 6 months of your lifting career, or as long as you’re enjoying ‘newbie gains’. From there, you would have a better foundation from which to cut or bulk. This advice resonated with me because it was a live issue I was dealing with. This book helped me to resolve many of the concerns I had around food, supplements, bodyfat tracking etc. Where Instagram posts seem to bring confusion, this book brings clarity. I found the information about carb cycling/calorie cycling and refeeds to be particularly insightful. In theory, carb cycling sounds great, but as Helms points out; recovery and adaptations are occurring on our non-training days, so it makes no sense to be in a deficit then. Further to this, our energy expenditure on training and non-training days is only a difference of 200-400 calories, so not enough to justify huge swings in carb/calorie intake. While worthy of consideration, we don’t ‘know’ these strategies work and even if we had more data, individual responses vary. I expect I’ll always come back to this book for reference. It condenses the science, all we know about nutrition at this point in time; and packages it all up in one highly readable book. I have the deepest respect for Eric Helms and 3DMJ for this work, and I’m grateful to have found it. I’d definitely purchase updated editions.

El libro me encantó porque va directo al grano, no se anda con rodeos y te enseña las bases de la nutrición no solo para aficionados si no también para profesionales que se dediquen al fisicoculturismo, aparte es súper fácil de entender y no solo te dice que hacer pero también porque hacerlo ya que dice cómo es que reacciona el cuerpo a diferentes comidas

Bought both Muscle and strenght Pyramid: Training and Nutrition for my brother ( who is a fitness nut) for his birthday. He was so happy!!! He says it's the most complete books he's had so far and learned a lot of new things. Thinking of borrowing them when he's done :)

I've always been putting way more focus on my training than my nutrition, and this book really helped me to gain a better understanding of how the two relate to each other. Just like the training pyramid, this book is so well structured and easy to read. Everything is in an easily understood language, all the while backing up all claims with scientific evidence. The things that really sets this book apart is it's focus on context and nuanced. Teaching you to not think too black and white about all this stuff. It doesn't so much teach you what to think, but how to think. It speak's in terms of guidelines and principles, all of which has some nuance, rather than just force feeding you information. I highly encourage anyone who is interested to learn more about nutrition and/or body composition to read this book!