5 Essential Juicing Recipes for Muscle Gains

From The Desk of Vince Delmonte

Juicing isn’t just an awesome thing to do for your overall good health – it’s also one of the best nutritional steps you can take to speed up your muscle gains. The fresh fruits and vegetables you use for your juicing boost your immune system, reduce inflammation, repair your digestive system, help to balance out hormone levels (especially testosterone and cortisol), improve insulin sensitivity and help to regulate blood sugar levels. All of these effects help your body to add muscle.

Write Your Own Muscle-Gaining Prescription

Choosing the right blends of fresh, whole vegetables and fruits for juicing is a lot like writing a prescription. You can actually tailor your juicing ingredients to match certain health goals, whether it be boosting immunity or raising testosterone levels. This is one of the great benefits of juicing because you can address specific needs with specific ingredients and change it up as needed.

Because fresh, whole vegetables and fruits are loaded with a variety of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants, you’re never accomplishing just one thing at a time. The same vegetable that boosts immunity also regulates blood sugar and reduces inflammation and so on. You don’t just get one micronutrient with one vegetable, so while you can create a juice that addresses specific goals, you will also be getting plenty of other micronutrients that your body needs on a daily basis.

Start With These Five Awesome Recipes

When you first start juicing, you might feel a little overwhelmed by all of the choices and trying to figure out which fruits and vegetables you need specifically to improve muscle gains. Fortunately, that work has already been done for you. Thanks to my personal juicing coach and health expert, Drew Canole, we already have a ton of fantastic juicing recipes at our disposal. This makes it super easy for you to get started with juicing recipes that were created to target your muscle-gaining potential.

Today I want to share five awesome juicing recipes with you, all of which were designed by Drew to help boost your muscle gains. They’re all really easy to make and taste phenomenal. Add just these five juices to your weekly nutrition plan and you will start to see terrific muscle gains very rapidly. You’ll also have a ton of energy, more stable moods and better mental clarity and focus.

1. Tropical Body Booster

This recipe helps reach your muscle-gain goals by providing important digestive enzymes that will help speed up the process of protein metabolism and synthesis. Mangoes are loaded with Vitamin C and beta carotene as well as several of these important digestive enzymes. The lemon and strawberries add extra Vitamin C and the strawberries and apple also contain resveratrol, which slows cell aging.

3 strawberries
1 apple
1 mango
½ lemon
Peel the mango and cut the fruit from the pit before juicing. Stem the strawberries, but try to get organic lemons and apples so that you can juice them with the peel on. Juice everything together and enjoy.

2. Apple-Watermelon Super-Cleanse

Watermelon Super CleanseThis is a really powerful kidney-cleansing juice. Cleaning out your kidneys helps them to work more efficiently at producing and releasing several hormones, including testosterone. This increases your ability to add lean muscle mass, but is also incredibly good for your overall health. If the watermelon makes it too sweet for your taste, use a tart apple like Granny Smith or use a bit less watermelon. Try to get organic apples – a lot of the antioxidants and the resveratrol in apples is located in the skin, so you want to juice them skin and all if at all possible.

One 1-inch thick slice of watermelon
2 apples
Remove the rind from the watermelon and the seeds from the apples before juicing. Juice everything together and drink up.

3. Probiotic Power

This juice is loaded with probiotics. Probiotics add beneficial bacteria to your digestive tract so that they can attack the bad bacteria that are causing inflammation and making it hard for your body to absorb important nutrients. This is good for anyone at any time, but especially for people who have just taken a round of antibiotics, which kill good bacteria as well as bad. This is also great for attacking free radicals caused by environmental toxins and oxidative stress. Reducing free radicals frees up your immune system to fight inflammation.

Try to get organic spinach, celery, collards and cabbage for this recipe. Adding pesticides and herbicides to your juice defeats the purpose of drinking something that fights free radicals!

1 cup of spinach
1 cup of purple cabbage
2 stalks celery
4 large collard leaves
The celery helps neutralize the bitterness of the other veggies, but add half an apple if you need to.

4. The Blood Booster

Blood BoosterThis juice is a miracle for purifying your blood, helping to rid your body of toxins and building up your iron level. Did you know that a cup of spinach contains more iron than a hamburger patty? It has a lot less fat and calories too. Iron is what your body needs to make hemoglobin, the red blood cells that get oxygen to your muscle tissue. If your blood is low in hemoglobin, your muscles will be starved for oxygen and you won’t see the gains that you’re working so hard to get.

The beta carotene in the carrots boosts immunity, as does the ginger. The carrots also add a little bit of sweetness to this recipe. If the carrots are not organic, please peel them before juicing. Also, parsley is a lot more than a garnish. It’s loaded with folic acid and antioxidants that prevent oxygen-based damage to your body’s cells by specific free radicals known as oxygen radicals. This just further enhances your muscle-gaining potential.

6 leaves of spinach
5 medium carrots
4 large dark green (Romaine is good) lettuce leaves
2 radishes
2 sprigs parsley
1-inch piece of ginger
Add the ginger in the middle of these ingredients so that the maximum amount of juice is extracted. If this juice is a little bit too bitter for you, add ½ an apple.

5. Mexican Metabolism Mix

Mexican-MetabolismHot peppers and cayenne pepper are great for opening up your blood vessels and increasing the efficiency of your entire circulatory system. This will have an incredible impact on your muscle gains because it increases the amount of oxygen being delivered to your muscles, both during and after your lifting sessions. That means you have to work harder for muscle fatigue (a good thing) and that your muscle recovery will be sped up. Hot peppers also give your metabolism a really serious boost that lasts more than 30 minutes after you eat them. Boosting your metabolism means faster protein synthesis and better fat-burning, both of which work toward your muscle-gaining goals. The beet contains several valuable antioxidants, but also is a powerful liver-detoxifier to help speed up your metabolism. The Swiss chard and lemon add vitamin C and several other antioxidants to boost your immune system and speed fat-burning. Most of the micronutrient content of lemons is in the peel and white membrane, so it’s best to use organic lemons for this recipe.

2 leaves Swiss chard
1 lemon
1 beet
1 jalapeno pepper
Dash of cayenne pepper
Trim the stem end of the beet before juicing and remove some of the jalapeno seeds if you don’t like too much heat. Juice all of the veggies and then stir the cayenne into the finished juice.

If You Do One New Thing, This Should Be It

These are just five of the best recipes I know for muscle gains, but there are so many other combinations and recipes that provide a 360-degree approach to improving your body’s ability to add lean muscle and burn body fat. All of this is reachable without busting your budget on expensive supplements that contain less bio-available and lower-quality micronutrients.

I’ve said many times over the last few weeks that juicing is hands down the best nutritional change I’ve made in the last ten years. This is not only because of what it does for my overall good health, but also because of the impact it has on my muscle gains.

If you’re trying the same things over and over again and expecting to get new results, you are wasting your time and energy. If you do one new thing this year to improve muscle gains, this should be that one thing and you should start as soon as possible. After just a couple of weeks on a juicing program, you’ll wonder why you waited so long to try it and you will never go back to paying hundreds of dollars on vitamin supplements.