“Russian Secret” Builds SUPER MUSCLES

Maintaining muscle mass as you get older isn’t about looking good in your swim trunks or impressing ladies at the gym (although that never hurts). 

Instead, it’s about being able to climb the stairs… open spaghetti sauce jars… and walk with steadiness and confidence. 

In other words, it’s about maintaining your independence. 

But instead of sitting back and letting your muscle mass steadily decline with age, there’s something you can do that will actually increase it…  

It’s one of Russia’s greatest health secrets… and it doesn’t involve any exercise whatsoever. 

If you’re like me, you probably grew up watching Popeye the Sailor Man, the cartoon character that used spinach to make him strong. 

Your parents might have even tried to get you to eat your spinach by saying you could be big and strong like him. 

Well, Popeye might have been fictitious, but the ability of spinach to boost your muscle mass is 100% FACT. 

For this double-blind study published in the journal Archives of Toxicology, one group of athletes received a spinach extract, while the other received a placebo. 

After 10 weeks, the spinach extract group experienced significantly higher increases in muscle mass and increases in one-repetition bench press performance.  

Even better? There were no signs of liver or kidney toxicity. 

The active compound in the spinach extract is called ecdysterone, and it has a rather shady history as a performance–enhancing compound. 

Back in the 1980s, ecdysterone was called the “Russian Secret” because people believed the Russian Olympians were using it to enhance their performance. 

Ecdysterone is a phytosteroid, which basically means it’s a steroid that occurs naturally in plants.  

Athletes are known for taking artificial steroids to enhance their performance, something that is banned by sports organizations.  

Because it is natural, ecdysterone has never been banned. But the benefits shown by this study are so strong that the researchers are using as it as a basis to call for a ban on ecdysterone in sports. 

Chances are you’re not playing professional sports… you just want to keep your muscles from wasting away. 

And it seems like spinach could be the perfect way to do just that. 

In order to achieve the results seen in this study, you’d have to eat more than a cup of spinach per day.  

That’s very doable, especially if you put the spinach in smoothies, omelets, or as the star ingredient in a summer salad.