When it comes to dieting for muscle mass and optimal testosterone production, most people think of eating mostly quality foods and hitting their protein, carb and fat targets.
While eating quality foods and hitting your protein, carbs and fats are important, these factors alone are not sufficient.
Another factor that’s important is nitric oxide.
You want to eat foods that increase nitric oxide.
Usually nitric oxide is known as an important factor for improving cardiovascular health and increasing training performance and recovery because it’s responsible for the functions below:
However, there’s another thing that nitric oxide does… it increases your body’s natural testosterone production (and remember, boosting testosterone is one of the most important things skinny-fat guys need to make a complete physique transformation).
This is one of the reasons to why I recommend my Online Transformation Program clients to eat a big bowl of leafy green vegetables per day.
Green leafy vegetables and beetroots are the foods that contain the most nitrates and thereby increase your nitric oxide production the most.
When you include these in your diet in high amounts daily, you will see an improvement in your training recovery, training performance and ability to gain muscle mass.
Within 3-6 months of including these regularly in your diet, you should see a significant increase in testosterone production as well.
There’s just one problem with including green leafy vegetables and beetroot in the quantities needed. The taste.
I don’t like green leafy vegetables or beetroot and I have never met someone who genuinely enjoys these foods.
As a result, it’s very hard for most of us to include these foods in the diet every single day.
I personally just force-feed a big bowl of green leafy vegetables everyday and drink beetroot powder mixed with water. (Been doing the big bowl of green leafy vegetables for about 2 years and just started drinking the beetroot tea).
Both taste terrible and I know most of my friends can’t do this, but I’m the kind of guy who will eat anything if it means an increase in testosterone or training performance.
With that said, the easiest way to hit your daily nitrate intake is to take a greens supplement that contains some of the best nitrate rich foods.
The best supplement that I’ve tried is called Athletic Greens
It contains both spinach leaf and beetroot, thereby helping you boost your daily nitrate intake.
I always recommend that you eat your vegetables, however if you know you can’t consistently eat a big bowl of spinach everyday or drink beetroot, then taking a greens supplement such as Athletic Greens is the next best thing.
Be proud but stay hungry!
Oskar Faarkrog, ISSA Certified Trainer
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