Q: In many of the diets in your X-treme Lean e-book you have meal replacements, protein powder and postworkout shakes listed. I’m on a budget, so I’m worried about the extra expense. Do I have to use supplements to see fast results?

A: Absolutely not. You can make amazing progress simply spreading out your meals over five or six smaller feedings a day—without taking a single supplement. If you’re using one of the diets in X-treme Lean, choose appropriate substitution meals to replace the protein shakes in that diet. For example, when a meal replacement is listed, you can use one of the X-treme Lean Meal Options on page 42 of our e-book instead. You could eat the soup with a few slices of cheese as a midafternoon snack or turkey jerky and raisins (only a few; they are high in carbs) or an apple. Even a couple of fast-food chicken tacos can work in a pinch, as listed in the e-book, or a chicken or tuna salad. Always be sure there are at least 20 grams of protein, no more than 20 grams of carbs (10 grams is better) and the total calorie count for the meal is around 300. Those should be your guidelines for every meal (except the one right after your workout; more on that in a moment).

Powders are mainly for convenience. Most people don’t have time to heat up soup, for instance, or even scrounge up some turkey jerky and fruit. It’s easier to rip open a packet of powder with the right protein, carb and fat percentages and blend up a shake (Steve takes his to work premixed in a thermos, so all he has to do is shake and drink—quick and easy).

Do keep in mind that whatever you eat costs money, even if it’s soup and cheese. Does it add up to the cost of a meal replacement packet? Well, we use Muscle Meals, and it costs about the same as most meal replacements: Each packet is about $2, but you get 40 grams of protein with various vitamins, minerals and immune system boosters. Does the time, effort and ingredients of a solid-food meal you have to whip together cost less? You’ll have to determine that. We think protein supplements should be included in your grocery bill because they are food and you use them to supplement your other meals. That means the quantity of solid food you eat should go down if you use powders, which will significantly reduce your grocery bill and make room for at least a few protein supplements.

As for postworkout shakes, they can get pricey. Serious bodybuilders have no problem shelling out a few bucks for a quality postworkout powder because they know it’s their most important muscle-building meal. After a workout is when the anabolic window is wide open, so you need to get enough of the right nutrients. If you simply can’t afford a product like RecoverX, here’s a good alternative, the Postworkout Power Shake:

8 ounces lowfat vanilla yogurt (you can use any flavor)
1 medium banana
1 cup of milk (2 percent fat)
1 raw egg
ice cubes for texture (optional)
water to thin (if necessary)

That will give you about 500 calories, 70 grams of carbs, 30 grams of protein and 9 grams of fat. The drawback is that it’s somewhat slow getting nutrients into your bloodstream. Postworkout powders have fast carbs and fast protien, which is best for optimizing that prime grow time. (See the next answer for more.)

Q: Is Muscle-Link’s CreaSol as effective as the standard type of creatine monohydrate?

A: We used CreaSol for eight weeks before our photo shoot, and that included the four weeks we used X Reps and made the spectacular gains you see in our before and after photos. We know CreaSol helped tremendously, especially considering the extra cardio we were doing. New research suggests that creatine helps curb catabolism, or muscle wasting, caused by cardio, and considering how difficult it can be to put on size without steroids, that means a lot to us.

If you’re doing cardio as well as weight training, try a titrated creatine product like CreaSol. It dissolves completely in water or your postworkout drink, so there’s no grit—except for the kind you need in the gym to grind out more reps for growth!

And of course we’ve always believed in using fast carbs and fast protein after every intense workout. It just makes total sense from a muscle-replenishment standpoint, and research backs that up. It’s precisely why we went to Muscle-Link and asked if they would group their RecoverX postworkout powder with CreaSol and call it X Stack at a special discount price for X-Rep users. Those are the two supplements we believe give you the most synergy when you’re using X-Rep training—you need plenty of glycogen from carbs and loads of ATP power from creatine when you have to hammer out power partials at the end of a set to failure, so the X Stack is a natural fit with X-Rep training.

If you’d like to try it and see how this powerful combo jacks up your gains, click X Stack for more information.

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