Certain fitness activities, mostly anaerobic such high-intensity interval workouts, while contributing greatly to health and fitness, make body exhaustion faster. Post such exercises many athletes and gym enthusiasts are trying to find the right nutrition for faster recovery. Among other supplements and food vitals, there is beta-alanine that takes place in the front stage. Let’s see what the known benefits of beta-alanine supplementation are and see whether it can help us to better recover.
Beta-alanine is a non-essential amino acid which means body knows to self-produce beta-alanine from other amino acids. Unlike several amino-acids which our body needs and can be only consumed by nutrition.
Amino acids are basically the building blocks of proteins which use for body’s growth, repair body tissues and other functions, also for energy. Amino acids also have other specific functions separately in our body’s cells.
You can further read about amino acids and protein in this article.
Beta-alanine, together with histidine forms carnosine which helps reduce acid build-up during exercise, while stored in skeletal muscles.
Although the conclusions of researches on that field are sometimes not fully agreed it is known that carnosine during exercise has a role for the following process:
Glucose breakdown for muscles fueling, lactate also in use during intense anaerobic energy processing. This process also creates hydrogen ions which degrade muscle performance.
You can read further about lactate in our lactate explained article.
When fatigue sets in due to the acidity, carnosine takes place in buffering the acidity from the muscles in the high-intensity activity duration.
By doing so, Beta-alanine improves athletic performance. It can reduce muscle fatigue, increase duration and boost overall performance mainly in high-intensity workouts.
Studies have shown that beta-alanine helps increase the time to exhaustion. It means you exercise for longer period of times. Not only you can train longer, it means your endurance and strength are better due to those training.
It is found that providing a beta-alanine supplement to athletes can increase by up to 13% their time to exhaustion.
Alternatively, by improving strength and stamina, you can also benefit by having shorter exercises and still to keep efficient muscle growth workouts as muscle acidosis remains lower for high-intensity exercise lasting for several minutes.
A study targeted testing of middle age trainers showed significant improvement in tested endurance body’s parameters of a group that uses beta-alanine compared to a group used placebo.
There are other studies that showed additional benefits for such supplementation.
Those benefits include cognitive function improvement, may reduce tumor function and aggressiveness, and may fight aging (or lack of it in the body by self-production may cause faster aging).
An additional study showed that beta-alanine combined with creatine supplementation increased lean body mass and decreased body fat more than creatine supplements alone.
most studies show that 2.5 to 3.0 grams a day are sufficient to support the body’s effort during strength and intensity workouts.
Efficiency may vary person to person and mostly suggested to consume as a pre-workout supplement.
Beta-alanine supplementation showed a good potential of increasing body capacity during high-intensity workouts and there are additional indications for additional health and fitness benefits.
A trainer that would like to improve endurance and strength may check his own improvement by supplementing and may get visible improvement in several measured parameters. This goes hand in hand with supplementing of creatine which together can further support strength training.
While having all these potential benefits of using beta-alanine supplements, one needs to stick with doctors/studies recommendations for the amount consumed in order to not increase any side-effects or other potential risks of uncontrolled supplementing.
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