Well, chromium niacin complex or brewer's yeast is still one of the best sources of chromium to this day. It doesn’t tastes very good, but it is a fairly good source of B-complex vitamins. It doesn’t have a lot, but it has more than most other foods. Brewer's yeast basically is a good source of B-complex vitamins and it has something that is called the glucose tolerance factor because it seems to have the ability to allow you to utilize glucose better. Very good for supposedly preventing diabetes and all that.
Then you have your normal vitamin C, vitamin E, that type of thing.
You have pre-workout supplements. Of course, you have the various protein powders, whey protein. And more recently, you have the vegetable-based proteins, pea protein, hemp protein.
Soy protein has been around for many years. In fact, soy protein did exist years ago. Soy protein was actually the most prevalent protein powder.
And you have some milk and egg protein powders which were, you know, not that great. I mean, one of them was called Blair's protein, which was popularized by a couple of top bodybuilders in the 60s, Larry Scott, the first Mr. Olympia, a couple other guys. Blair's protein was 62% protein.
It was a milk and egg protein. it tasted very good. Blair sold a coconut extract that you can add to the protein. And he also advised that if you were trying to put muscle size on, you would mix it with heavy cream.
So I would throw in the Blair's protein, heavy cream, coconut extract, put it in a blender, and it mixed so thick that it had the consistency of ice cream. it was told incredibly delicious.
It was told added up to a lot of calories. And unfortunately, it putted on a pretty good amount of fat. And that was better for, like, skinny guys with high metabolism.
But today, as I said, we have a plethora of all these various so-called sport supplements.
A lot of them are aimed at bodybuilders. Some of them come and go and this and that. But they're all heavily advertised.
There's a lot of claims and hyperbole surrounding them. You know, you build tons of muscle, and then you got the testosterone boosters. With the testosterone boosters, 99.9% of them don't work.
They're like a complete waste of money. There's a couple of them, however. There's a couple of herbal ones like Long Jack, also known as Honkat Ali, that does have a slight effect at raising testosterone.
That might be of use in either younger men with naturally low testosterone levels or in older men who are showing lower testosterone levels. That could be a useful testosterone booster. But most of the other ones are garbage.
They don't do anything. They did have the testosterone boosters of about, what was it, maybe 20 years ago, close to 20 years ago, 15 years ago or so. The last group actually were anabolic steroids that were never really produced or released to the market.
They were just in these esoteric anabolic steroid formula books. In other words, the structural formula. A couple of people with a little bit of background in chemistry had these old books.
They reintroduced these old discarded steroids and they called them testosterone boosters. Yes, they did really work. They really did work because they were anabolic steroids.
There's a reason why they were never released on the market. The reason they were never released on the market was two reasons. First of all, they weren't shown to be any better than existing anabolic steroids.
But the main reason was because animal studies showed that they had increased toxicity, especially in the liver. A lot of them almost immediately caused severe liver problems. This is exactly what happened to a lot of the hapless people that bought these so-called testosterone boosters in the hopes of building big muscles.
They did make you stronger. I mean, they were real anabolic steroids, but they almost always caused side effects. If you are lucky, when you got off of them, the side effects are to receive just like they do with anabolic steroids and you will be okay.
If you are unlucky, you could get effects such as liver failure and all kinds of terrible things, possibly even liver cancer in very rare cases.
In other words, these are sports supplements that are recognized as having a good body of research to show that they actually do something. But I think there's some caveats in order here before I talk about some of these things, in the sense that while some of these supplements that I'm talking about here do have a pretty good body of science behind them, meaning they have some studies showing, and human studies, not just animal studies, but human studies showing that they work. What I found and what subsequent studies showed about some of these substances or supplements is that they work better on paper, unfortunately, than they do in reality.
You know, I'll talk about one of them in particular. But so let's start it off right now. So what I'm trying to say is that the supplements that I'm going to talk about here are recognized by most scientists as being effective sports supplement sources.
But they may or may not work for you. That's the thing. Just because a couple of studies found that they worked well, they may not work at all for you for various reasons.
But anyway, let's start off. The first one I want to talk about, just about everybody knows, not really a supplement. It's more like a kind of natural drug, and that's caffeine.
Caffeine happens to be, well, you know, I'm going to call it a sports supplement only because it's found in so many pre-workout formulas, energy formulas, fat burners. They all contain caffeine in one form or another. So because it's in so many supplements, I'm going to call it a supplement even though it's more of a drug.
Of course, it is a natural substance. It's from a plant. You know, coffee, of course, contains caffeine.
Tea contains caffeine to a lesser extent. But caffeine happens to be a really effective sports supplement. The studies show that if you ingest a dose of zero, a minimal dose, I should say, milligrams of caffeine per kilogram of body weight, it will definitely usually help increase workout efficiency.
It'll increase workout intensity and increase strength. Now, not all studies agree with that. Some studies have found almost no effect, but the majority of studies show that caffeine works.
However, the higher the dose up to a point, the greater the effect on strength and training intensity with caffeine. So what that means in practical terms is the maximal effective, let's call it ergogenic dose of caffeine is 0.6 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. That's equivalent for a guy weighing about 190, 200 pounds.
That's equivalent to about four cups of coffee. If you want to have the best, or if you want to use coffee rather than supplements as your source of caffeine, you want to ingest it about an hour before you work out because coffee or caffeine, I should say, peaks in an hour after oral ingestion. And another thing to keep in mind is caffeine, once you've ingested it, it peaks in an hour and it stays pretty elevated for about another hour, but it still stays in the blood for up to six hours.
What that means, again, is if you take caffeine too late, let's say you take it before an evening workout, the stimulatory effect of caffeine might interfere with sleep. So that's something to keep in mind. Caffeine is probably best used, or coffee, if you drink coffee, is best used earlier in the day so it doesn't interfere with sleep.
Caffeine exerts its ergogenic effects through various mechanisms. Probably the main one is it stimulates the release of body chemicals called catecholamines. Specifically in this case, we're talking about epinephrine and norepinephrine.
Dopamine is also considered a catecholamine, but that's not really involved in what I'm talking about here. Epinephrine and norepinephrine are known to stimulate an enzyme in fat cells called hormone-sensitive lipase that causes the release of fats or triglycerides stored in fat cells. It breaks up the stored triglyceride into its component of fatty acids and glycerol, which then enter the blood and they could be used as an energy source.
Glycerol can be converted in the liver into glucose, which is the main energy source in the blood. But anyway, the point being that the stimulatory effects of caffeine occur. It's thought to occur because caffeine is structurally similar to a relaxing compound called adenosine.
Adenosine is involved in onset of sleep. It's a relaxation chemical and what happens is adenosine can make you feel a little tired, a little too relaxed, and you don't want that before you work out. So if you drink caffeine, this is why people like to drink coffee in the morning, because adenosine builds up during the night because, as I said, it's involved in the sleep process.
So you take your caffeine or coffee in the morning. Because of the similarity of caffeine to adenosine, the caffeine will kind of block adenosine receptors in the brain. Therefore, it'll kind of blunt the effect of adenosine in producing a feeling of tiredness and relaxation, and it'll make you feel alert.
That's the mechanism. That's the stimulatory mechanism. Now, on the flip side, the problem with blocking adenosine, and there's I think at least two types of adenosine receptors, but one of the adenosine also works in the heart.
When you're working out, the coronary arteries, which serve the heart, they dilate to get blood into the heart so that the heart can work more efficiently. Unfortunately, if you drink a lot of caffeine or a lot of coffee before you train, you not only block adenosine in the brain, you block adenosine in the coronary arteries, which means that the coronary arteries are going to have a more difficult time dilating, which means that the heart might not be getting an optimal blood supply. Now, for people with normal heart function who don't have cardiovascular pathology existing or existing cardiovascular pathology, you're not going to notice anything.
Nothing's going to be a problem. However, if you have any kind of, let's say, severe atherosclerosis, which is a narrowing of the current coronary arteries, or if you have some sort of occult, meaning that you don't know you have it, cardiovascular disease, drinking a large amount or taking a large amount of caffeine before you work out, you know, because of this effect on the coronary artery dilation, it could actually prove very dangerous. I mean, in a worst-case scenario, it can make you drop dead.
Now, that's very rare, admittedly, but it's just something to think about. And I should also point out that the greatest source of caffeine for most people, or most bodybuilders, let's say, or athletes, is not necessarily coffee, but a lot of it comes from, like I said, the fat burner supplements and a lot of the pre-workout supplements contain a considerable amount of caffeine. Some of them contain the amount of caffeine equivalent to up to four, maybe five cups of coffee.
Now, so if you, let's say you take, you know, you buy one of these pre-workout powders and you say, well, and the directions are to take one scoop, and you decide, well, I'm going to take two scoops because I really want to get jacked for the workout. Unfortunately, if you take the two scoops and it's a high-caffeine formula, you could be taking as much as the equivalent of eight cups of coffee at once. Now, that's way past the maximal ergogenic benefit of caffeine, so you can have what they call an ergolytic benefit, in other words, an interference with workout.
And worst of all, you'll be putting a good amount of strain on your heart. So, you know, you got to be careful of that. So that's all I would say.
So caffeine, that's the first sports supplement. Again, it's, you know, I know it's not really a supplement, but it's always in all the supplement formulas. But caffeine definitely, I would say, is a definite effective supplement.
The next one that most researchers agree, the majority of researchers agree, is an effective supplement, is creatine. Now, creatine, the original creatine was creatine monohydrate. Monohydrate just means water.
So creatine monohydrate is 99% creatine. Well, it's actually 87% creatine, and the rest of it is something else, and 1% of it is water. So it's mostly creatine.
Now, I'm not going to go into all the nuances of creatine, but let me put it this way. Creatine works for 80% of the people that use it. It's been studied for now about 25, 30 years, and the consensus is that it works for 80% of people who use it.
And the main function of creatine is to act as a backup for ATP or adenosine triphosphate, which is the immediate source of energy for cells. Everything you eat, as far as calories, protein, fat, carbohydrate, they eventually are converted into ATP, because as I said, that's the elemental energy source for all cells. Unfortunately, the energy that's released from ATP, and the energy is released when ATP has three phosphate bonds.
When one of them breaks off, that's your energy. It produces an energy reaction. So now you have adenosine diphosphate.
Now you have creatine. It's stored in the muscle as both free creatine and creatine phosphate, mostly as creatine phosphate. When the ATP is degraded into ADP, the creatine phosphate contributes phosphate to regenerate the ADP back to ATP, and it keeps the energy system going.
So you could say that creatine keeps your muscles supplied with energy for muscle contraction. It does a number of other things. It apparently stimulates intramuscular insulin like growth factor one, which is direct anabolic effect.
It also acts as a buffer. It helps to reduce acidity in muscle, which is a big factor for fatigue.
I would say Creatine the number one effective sports supplement.
Number one. Next one I'm going to talk about is nitrates. Nitrates mare substances that are found naturally in green leafy vegetables, and especially beets.
Beetroot juice is a great source of natural nitrates. What happens there is when you consume these vegetables, like spinach or beetroot juice, you get what they call nitrates. The first step occurs in your mouth.
Some of the bacteria in your mouth produce enzymes that start to convert nitrate into nitrite. And as you swallow the nitrate, further enzymes in the gut convert what is now nitrite into nitric acid. So now you have an increase of nitric acid.
So this is a good way of getting the benefits of nitric oxide without having to take, let's say, nitric oxide booster supplements, arginine, which is not really that effective for boosting nitric oxide.
But suffice to say that this nitrate system from vegetables is pretty effective. It bypasses all the problems involved with amino acids like arginine. And the thing to remember about this is that it takes about maybe two to two and a half hours from the time you consume the nitrate-containing vegetable to the conversion in the gut into nitric oxide.
You've got to give it about two hours. So let's say you want to drink beetroot juice. You're going to do that about two hours or no less than one hour before a workout if you want to get the benefits of nitric oxide increase, which includes dilation of blood vessels.
You get a greater muscle pump, greater delivery of oxygen to muscles, and so on and so forth.
A third supplement here. I'm going to talk briefly about beta-alanine.
It won't be out for a couple of months on how to optimize beta-alanine supplementation. Beta-alanine, briefly, is a supplement that when combined with another amino acid called histidine forms what they call a dipeptide.
That dipeptide is called carnosine. Carnosine represents 8% of intramuscular buffer, meaning in the muscle it buffers those acids that accumulate during anaerobic exercise. When the acidity in muscle increases, it inhibits energy-producing enzymes, so the muscle basically stops working, and that's muscle fatigue.
This is only one cause of muscle fatigue, this acidity. There's other causes, such as an increase of inorganic phosphate. I'm not going to get into that.
Way too complex here, but the point being beta-alanine works by increasing the production of carnosine. You can increase carnosine anywhere from 20 to 60% with beta-alanine supplementation. The optimal dose range is 3.2 to 6.4 grams a day.
There's the one side effect of beta-alanine. It's called paresthesia. When you take beta-alanine in doses larger than about 800 milligrams, it stimulates sensory neurons in the skin.
It kind of feels a little bit like the niacin flush effect, but a little bit different. It starts to subside with, just like niacin, it starts to subside with continued use of beta-alanine. Beta-alanine, like I say, it's pretty effective.
The lower dose, 3.2 grams, doesn’t do much. When went to 6.4, an increase in muscle endurance to the extent can be noticed, when working out, doing a set, and It felt like it makes you ready to do another set about four seconds later. In other words, It has no sense of fatigue at all.
It will make you feel like you could just keep going, like one big set. There is no fatigue whatsoever. That's what beta-alanine does.
There are problems with beta-alanine. Beta-alanine may interact with some heart medications and with drugs for erectile dysfunction and may have other complications as side effects.
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