Put in the hot seat and asked for the best muscle building supplements, Tony Huge refuses to give a product list. He gives a pathway list. The framework is the enhanced muscle matrix he built with a coaching partner while developing the mass blast: androgen, growth hormone, insulin, inflammation, IGF and myostatin, roughly in order of reward for effort. Every pathway gets one or two picks, the insulin pathway gets the most attention because it is the most misunderstood, and the two supplements everyone expected him to lead with, protein powder and creatine, come last, with an explanation of why.
Video: The Best Muscle Building Supplements Explained. Published January 14, 2026. Watch on YouTube.
What the video covers
This video has no chapter markers; timestamps marked ~ are estimated from the transcript.
- ~00:00 The matrix: Pathways in order of priority, ease and reward for effort.
- ~00:35 Androgen and growth hormone: SARMs in general; MK-677 first, ipamorelin or growth hormone second.
- ~01:00 Insulin: Sensitivity before insulin itself, and the ways to reset it.
- ~01:35 Advanced users: Lowering insulin doses, adding Slin pills, carb cycling.
- ~02:05 Why insulin gets extra time: The pathway where too much does the most harm.
- ~02:40 Inflammation: Arachidonic acid, prostaglandins, and the ibuprofen test.
- ~03:20 IGF: IGF-1 LR3 directly, or raised through growth hormone and insulin together.
- ~03:45 Over-the-counter GH boosters: Why amino acid products do not make the list.
- ~04:00 Protein and creatine: Real, useful, and nowhere near the rest.
- ~04:25 The rule: A little on every pathway beats a lot on one.
The order of the pathways
Tony’s matrix ranks pathways by how much return you get for how little effort. The androgen pathway comes first, and his pick is SARMs in general rather than any single one. The growth hormone pathway comes second, with MK-677 as the first choice and ipamorelin or growth hormone itself as the alternatives. Third is insulin, and here the pick is not insulin. It is insulin sensitivity, which means Slin pills in his protocols, or, without them, intermittent fasting, carb cycling, ketogenic eating or fasting itself, all of which he calls effective. The pills are simply the easier route.
He spends the most time here on purpose, because he thinks it is the most understated pathway and the one with the largest health consequence. On the androgen side, he says, there is not much harm in having too little. On the insulin side there is enormous harm in having too much, whether from advanced bodybuilders injecting more than they need or from ordinary people who have lost sensitivity by overeating carbohydrates. His observation from coaching advanced athletes is the reverse of what they expect: instead of raising insulin doses, he lowers them, adds Slin pills to raise sensitivity, and builds in carb cycling so there are breaks from carbohydrates that reset the system.
“No signal, no muscle growth. Don’t believe me? Try taking ibuprofen or Tylenol after every workout and watch your muscle gains disappear.”
Tony Huge, ~02:50
Inflammation is the signal
The fourth pathway is inflammation, and Tony’s pick is arachidonic acid, which he calls possibly the most powerful and most underrated muscle supplement there is. His explanation is mechanistic. Arachidonic acid stores in the muscle, somewhat like creatine. When you train, the muscle converts it into prostaglandins, which create the local inflammation that is the entire signal telling the body to grow that muscle. Remove the signal and there is no growth. His proof is the experiment he tells skeptics to run on themselves: take an NSAID or acetaminophen after every workout and watch what happens to progress.
IGF and the boosters that do not work
The IGF pathway is, in his description, one of the most powerful and another of the understated ones. He uses IGF-1 LR3 directly. The indirect route is raising growth hormone and insulin together, which advanced bodybuilders do, producing higher IGF as a result; raising growth hormone alone works too but much more slowly. On that note he dismisses a whole shelf. Over-the-counter growth hormone boosters made of amino acids seem, in his experience, very ineffective. The protocols he has run, including the mass blast, always used MK-677 on that pathway, and if they added anything on top, it was growth hormone itself.
Protein and creatine, in their place
The two supplements everyone expected him to open with come at the end, and he is fair to both. Protein powder is amazing if you are protein deficient: add more, and powder is a convenient way to do it. Creatine is very effective, and he has a long history with it. He says he took the first bottle to reach store shelves, at around 12 to 14 years old, has used it for something like 25 years, and has no side effects from it. It gives a little extra push in the gym, and pushing harder grows more muscle. But he is direct that it is nowhere near as powerful as anything else on the list.
The rule he closes with is the reason the list is ordered by pathway and not by product. Do not emphasize any one supplement. Think about each pathway to muscle growth, androgen, growth hormone, insulin, inflammation, myostatin, and take a little of something on each. The synergy between them, and the removal of whichever pathway was quietly limiting you, makes a bigger difference than maximizing any single one.
Cheat Sheet Pivot
What Tony named for each pathway and why, not instructions.
- Androgen: SARMs generally. Growth hormone: MK-677 first, then ipamorelin or growth hormone itself.
- Insulin: sensitivity first, via Slin pills or fasting, carb cycling or keto; insulin itself only for advanced users, and often at lower doses than they were using.
- Inflammation: arachidonic acid, on the reasoning that prostaglandin-driven inflammation is the growth signal and NSAIDs blunt it.
- IGF: IGF-1 LR3 directly, or raised indirectly through growth hormone plus insulin.
- Protein powder for a deficiency and creatine for a training push are real but, in his ranking, far below the rest; amino-acid growth hormone boosters do not make the list.
Every compound here is in the Miracle Molecules Cheat Sheet. For the written version of the same ranking, read Best Muscle Building Supplements 2026: Tony Huge’s Take, and for why he thinks most people run the growth hormone pathway wrong, see MK-677 (Ibutamoren): The Oral GH Secretagogue Most Bodybuilders Are Running Wrong.
Where the evidence stops
No studies are named in this video. The arachidonic acid mechanism is presented as reasoning plus a self-experiment rather than a citation, though the underlying observation that NSAIDs can blunt training adaptation appears in Tony’s other videos with reference to published work. The ranking of pathways is his coaching judgment. The claim that amino-acid growth hormone boosters are ineffective is his experience. The insulin section is the strongest part on the merits because it argues for less of a powerful drug rather than more, and because loss of insulin sensitivity from chronic carbohydrate excess is not controversial. What the video does not do is quantify anything; it is a map, and the map’s value is the instruction to look at every pathway before doubling down on one.
Keep going
For the androgen pathway in detail, read SARMs Masterclass: LGD-4033, RAD-140, and Beyond, and for the four-pathway starter version of this framework, see The Natty Plus Protocol Explained. Companion articles go out first to the tonyhuge.is email list, and the archive is on tonyhuge.is.