Many people like to argue that the ketogenic diet is an efficient way to build muscle. Your strength will skyrocket, they posit, and you’ll feel less sore and recover faster. Critics of the diet, however, often say the exact opposite: Ketogenic diets limit your ability to train hard, the theory goes. Trying to build muscle without carbs is like Batman patrolling the streets of Gotham without his utility belt. There’s no way, they say, to add muscle while you’re in ketosis. So who’s right? First, let’s take a look at the science: Back in 2002, researchers from the University of Connecticut looked at how six weeks of low-carb dieting affected body composition in two groups of healthy, normal-weight men. One group switched to a ketogenic diet for six weeks, Prime Boosts Pills while the rest continued with their regular diets. The men who went keto gained just over two pounds of muscle. The control group, on the other hand, gained just under one pound.

On the face of it, Prime Boosts Official that sounds like a win for the low-carbers; they gained twice as much muscle in the same amount of time. When you look under the hood at how the study was done, however, This product there were more than a few problems that limit the conclusions we can draw. For one, there was a big difference in protein intake between the two groups. Subjects on the ketogenic diet ate twice as much protein as those in the control group, which by itself could account for the extra muscle growth. In an ideal world, both groups would have followed the same training program. But they didn’t. Basically, everyone just carried on doing their own thing, so any differences in muscle growth between the two groups could have come down to a better training program rather than diet alone. More recently, a team of Florida researchers ran a similar study.

This time, protein intake was matched between the two groups, and everyone in the study followed the same training program. From weeks 1 to 11, the keto group gained roughly twice as much lean mass as subjects on the regular higher-carb diet. Gains in muscle thickness, measured using ultrasound, were also significantly greater in the keto group. On the surface, this research appears to provide strong evidence that keto diets are the way to go if you want to build muscle. But only until you take a closer look at the way the study was done. The keto group "carbed up" in the final week of the study, which led to a seven-pound gain in lean body mass. In other words, much of the increase in lean tissue came from glycogen (the name given to carbohydrate stored in the body) and water. If you look at the results in the first ten weeks, before the keto group bumped up their carb intake, there was no significant difference in the rate of muscle growth between the two groups.