Muscles, myths, and macros: A no-B.S. guide to vegan strength training
- Karina Inkster
- 1 day ago
- 10 min read
Most of us don't wake up in the morning thinking, “You know what I really want today? A deep dive into macronutrient timing, muscle protein synthesis, and the finer points of creatine supplementation.” As a fitness coach, I spend plenty of time nerding out on topics like these, but for most people (myself included), training isn’t about stepping on a bodybuilding stage. It’s about hauling groceries up three flights of stairs, wrestling the dog into the bathtub, or avoiding a trip to the ER after slipping on an icy sidewalk. This article is about practical, no-B.S. strength training and plant-based nutrition that fits into real life, without forcing you to rearrange your entire existence.
Whether you’re vegan-curious or a seasoned plant-powered lifter, I'll show you exactly what to focus on to get stronger, fuel that strength with plant-based eating, and still have time for the rest of your life. Let's get into it!
The health and body composition hierarchy: 4 steps to nailing your goals
Think of your health and fitness activities like a pyramid: broad foundation, narrow peak. The base is your priority, and the peak is least impactful but still part of the big picture. The base is your nutrition — your daily food choices. If that base is solid, your goals (weight loss, muscle gain, general health) have the support they need. If it’s shaky, everything above it falls apart.
Many people assume cardio is the base. They think, “I want to lose weight, so I’m gonna start running every day or using the elliptical at the gym.” I’m not saying you shouldn’t do cardio, but it’s actually the very tip of the health pyramid (which we’ll get to shortly).
No amount of training can outwork a poor diet. Without good nutrition, all your hard work in the gym doesn’t have the support it needs.
So, if nutrition is the foundation, the obvious next question is: What does that look like when you’re vegan, and presumably not living off just Oreos and wishful thinking?
I’ll give you some nutrition basics to put into action, but first I’d like to share with you how my team and I approach nutrition in our coaching — without diet culture, guilt, or unrealistic rules.
Diet culture equates your worth with your weight. Diet culture moralizes food choices by labelling food as “good” or “bad”, and it keeps you stuck chasing a “perfect” body through restriction and guilt.
Diet culture puts weight loss at the forefront of fitness, and values thinness and appearance over physical and mental health. My coaching team and I know that this is straight-up B.S., and we work hard to foster an anti-diet-culture coaching practice.
You don’t need strict rules or shame to build a strong, healthy body. You just need a foundation that works for real life. Here’s how to put that into practice.
Health hierarchy step 1: nutrition
If you want to level-up your vegan nutrition so it’s more in line with your fitness and physique goals, I’ve got 3 steps for you: food quality, calories, and macronutrients.
Food quality
When I say "quality", I don’t mean, "Is this a five-star gourmet experience?" I mean, "Is this food going to help you nail your fitness goals?" Think whole plants, minimally messed with, mostly cooked by you.
In our coaching practice, we’re huge fans of the 80/20 rule. It applies to so many things. For example, 80% adherence to your ideal workout schedule for 2 years is way more effective than 100% adherence for 2 weeks. In nutrition, we aim for 80% of our food to be whole food, nutrient-dense ingredients. And 20% whatever you want! (But still vegan, of course.)
Sometimes, what someone wants is another big-ass salad or two pieces of fruit. Other times, what someone wants is a square of dark chocolate. And sometimes, it’s chocolate mousse, chocolate cake, strawberry sauce, and coconut ice cream all smashed together in a massive goblet (ask me how I know). Either way, the point is: we never aim for “perfection”. We want less restriction, no moralizing, but we still want to have a simple structure to follow to reach our health, fitness, and physique goals.
So, what does the 80/20 concept look like in nutrition? Beans, lentils, veggies, fruit, tofu, tempeh, seitan, whole grains, nuts, seeds. Those are your staples. Plus things to fill the gaps like plant-based meats, ready-made meals, protein powder, and treat foods or “fun foods”!
The goal is not a perfect Instagrammable kale salad every day for lunch — it’s a routine you can actually stick with while lifting heavy things, having a life, and not spending six hours meal prepping every Sunday.
Calories
After food quality, we move to food amount. Not in terms of its volume (how much space it takes up on your plate), but in terms of the energy it gives us.
If weight loss is your goal, you need to eat fewer calories than you burn every day. Folks who want to gain muscle need to do the opposite: eat more calories than you burn in a day.
How does the concept of calories relate to veganism? Whole plant-based foods are generally less calorically dense than animal products. You can eat a salad the size of your torso for next to no calories. A lot of people find that when they first go vegan, they lose weight. Some people want that, while others (especially very active people) do not. If you’re a new vegan and you’re eating the same volume of food (i.e. the amount of food on your plate) as you did before, you might not be getting as many calories as you did before. You can adjust this depending on your goal.
Macronutrients
Macronutrients are the big building blocks in food that your body needs in large amounts to survive and thrive: protein, carbohydrates, and fat. They give you energy (calories) and help your body build and repair tissues, fuel daily activities, and keep everything running smoothly. Put simply, macros are the main nutrients that fuel you and keep you going.
Compare that to micronutrients, which don’t give us any calories but are vital for bodily functions like the immune system, bone health, etc. These are vitamins and minerals like iron, zinc, and vitamin C. Here I’m going to be focusing on macronutrients.
When we work with clients, we always start with protein. We first figure out what someone’s protein goal is, and then we fill in the rest of their calories with carbohydrates and fats, which are lower on the priority list, as long as they’re not way too low or way too high.
Protein needs vary from person to person. Your protein goal will depend on your activity level, the type of training you do, your physique goal, whether you’re currently in a caloric deficit, etc.
In general, strength training vegans need between 1.6 and 2.2 grams of protein per kilo of body weight per day.
Not sure how much protein you need per day? Check out our easy-to-use vegan protein calculator to get a personalized protein amount.
Eating enough protein doesn’t have to be complicated. You need a handful of go-to protein dense ingredients, and you’re good to go. Some of my favourites are edamame, seitan, protein powder, and fava bean tofu.
Nutrition is the foundation of our health pyramid. Now let’s look at the next most important layer: strength training.
Health hierarchy step 2: strength training
Strength training is the cornerstone of health and independence at any age. Strength training uses resistance to induce muscle contraction. That resistance can come from any number of things, including dumbbells, kettlebells, resistance bands, barbells, or your own body weight.
If you trip on the sidewalk, what keeps you from faceplanting the ground? Not your cardio — it’s your strength. Your reflexes, your core, and your ability to stabilize are what save you.
Cardio helps you live longer. Strength training helps you live better. It’s what keeps you climbing stairs, getting off the floor, carrying your groceries in your 80s and 90s — and doing it all without pain.
4 long-term benefits of strength training that you can get only from strength training
Any type of exercise will give you great benefits: heart health, mental health, improved sleep, boosted immune function. But here are 4 benefits you'll get only (or, most effectively) from strength training.
Bone density
Bone density is the amount of calcium and other minerals in our bones. Bone density decreases as a normal part of aging. The good news is you can prevent and slow down this bone loss by strength training regularly!
Increased muscle mass
Muscle is your health insurance. One meta-analysis found that low muscle strength was associated with a 1.5 to 2-fold increased risk of dying from any cause (Li et al., 2018). Another study found that muscle mass was more predictive of longevity than BMI (Srikanthan & Karlamangla, 2014).
Strength training helps you keep doing what you love — for decades longer.
You don’t want to just be alive at 90. You want to carry groceries, get up off the floor, travel, and play with grandkids. Strength training is the most effective way to maintain mobility and independence later in life.
It's the only way to prevent age-related muscle loss
After age 30, you lose 3–8% of your muscle per decade… unless you lift. After 50, muscle loss accelerates up to 15% per decade without strength training. Resistance training is the only thing that consistently maintains or increases muscle mass as we get older.
Start training for your 100-year-old self
Imagine yourself at 100 — still active, still independent, and strong enough to confuse your doctor.
There’s no exact formula, but a good place to start is: Whatever you want to do when you’re 100, you need to be doing 2.5 times that in your 40s, 50s, and 60s.
For example, if you want to be able to pick up a suitcase or a small child from the ground (essentially deadlifting 40 lbs) when you're 100, you'll need to be deadlifting 100 pounds now. If you want to walk up 4 flights of stairs in 2 minutes when you're 100, now you need to walk up 10 flights of stairs in 2 minutes.
Not feeling inspired yet by these long-term benefits? Well, allow me to present to you a few benefits of just a single workout:
Benefits of a single workout
Improved sleep quality. Even one workout can increase the quality of that night's sleep!
One workout helps muscles soak up blood glucose more effectively, which lowers blood sugar levels right away.
If you’re new to strength training, you’ll be learning a fun new skill that’s great for your brain. Improvements in brain-muscle connections happen even within the first week of strength training.
There’s so much in the world right now that we can feel helpless about. But often, doing something for our own strength gives us an anchor when everything else feels unsteady. One of our clients sent us this message just last week: “I’m emotionally more resilient than I would be if I weren’t training right now. Getting stronger doesn’t solve world chaos, but it does ground me and help me feel like I can at least dive into my life each day.”
That sense of resilience – and all the health benefits strength training provides – don’t come from giant life overhauls. Starting with 10 minutes a day is all you need to experience results.
Strength training doesn’t mean spending your life in a gym.
You don’t even have to go to a gym at all, if you don’t want to.
Our clients have performed strength workouts with resistance bands and their own body weight everywhere from airports, to sailboats, empty conference rooms at the office, campgrounds in the forest, and everywhere in between! My team and I work with clients all over the world, some of whom live in extremely remote places, like the middle of outback Australia (10 hours away from the nearest town), or a tiny boat-access-only island in Bermuda with only 20 houses and no roads.
Obviously these places don’t have gyms, and yet these folks were able to make significant strength gains by training with resistance bands, suspension trainers, and even truck tires in one case.
Remember: cardio helps you live longer. Strength helps you live better. But you don’t actually get stronger while you’re lifting; you get stronger while you’re recovering. That’s the next layer of our health and physique change pyramid.
Health hierarchy step 3: recovery
More isn’t always better. The “go hard every day” mentality is one of the fastest ways to stall progress or get injured. You need to balance training time with recovery time.
For vegan athletes, recovery basics are the same as for non-vegans (sleeping enough, taking rest days), with a few nutrition tweaks: make sure you’re getting enough leucine (a key amino acid for muscle repair — think soy, legumes, and pea protein), and don’t skip omega-3s (like ground flax, chia, hemp seeds, or algae oil) to keep inflammation in check.
Health hierarchy step 4: cardio and conditioning
The very tip of our health pyramid is cardio. It’s important for heart health and overall fitness — but it shouldn’t steal the spotlight from strength training. Think of it as a sidekick, not the main event. You don’t need to spend hours on a treadmill, either: walking, biking, or sprinkling in short HIIT sessions will give you the benefits of conditioning without having to block off huge chunks of your calendar.
Making fitness and nutrition work in real life
We’ve covered the basics — strength, nutrition, recovery, cardio — but what does this actually look like when you’re juggling kids, work, low energy, travel, or an all-consuming vegan world domination plan? The goal isn’t to overhaul your entire existence; it’s to build habits that fit into real life.
Most examples from my own life involve "outsmarting" my own brain:
I have 4 strength training partners who keep me consistent with my workouts. I've been working out weekly for 10 years with two of them!
I co-founded an open-water swim club in my city to stay consistent with my own swim training, and to make cardio social and fun.
When we have treats in the house, my husband hides them for me. Out of sight, out of mind.
Don't forget to make things fun (and slightly ridiculous)! My garage gym has multiple disco light machines, rainbow kettlebells, a colourful mural, and strips of disco bling on my squat rack.
Strength training keeps you capable, recovery makes it sustainable, nutrition fuels it, and cardio supports it — but none of it matters if it doesn’t fit your real life. Start simple: pick one thing. Lift something heavy twice a week for 10 minutes, prep a high-protein snack, or put some disco lights in your workout space.
Need support and accountability to implement this health and physique change hierarchy? We can help!
Get not one--but two--vegan personal trainers!
Only a few spots available! If you're ready to level-up your fitness and vegan nutrition, our award-winning coaching programs are for you.
Coach K and Coach Zoe will build a customized workout routine around your busy life so you don’t have to reorganize your entire schedule.
We’ll create a nutrition action plan that lets you eat your favourite foods, while supporting both your fitness and your physique goals. Most importantly, we'll provide an in-depth support and coaching system to keep you accountable and moving toward your goals.
