Should i take beta alanine

At the end of 28 days, the supplemented group had a 9. It is important to note that beta-alanine is best taken daily regardless of training schedule. Because beta-alanine works by increasing muscle concentrations of carnosine , it does not need to be taken around a training session to produce results.

News, videos, and Thorne stories delivered to your inbox each month. Most Recent Articles Videos Podcasts. IOC consensus statement: dietary supplements and the high-performance athlete. Br J Sports Med ;52 7 Amino Acids ;43 1 Beta-alanine is found in top food sources like meat, poultry, and fish.

Beta-alanine and histidine-containing dipeptides like carnosine and anserine are absorbed during the digestive process. While food sources of beta-alanine can be sufficient, many people choose to supplement their diet with beta-alanine.

Studies have shown that supplementing with beta-alanine provides significant health benefits like muscle recovery and improved cognitive functioning. Quick tip: Foods rich in carnosine like meat, poultry, and fish provide beta-alanine in our diet, but not necessarily in optimal levels.

Beta-alanine works by binding with histidine in both the brain and the muscles. This binding creates carnosine. By increasing carnosine levels, we can prevent the acid build-up that contributes to fatigue when training. Another study found that beta-alanine improved exercise capacity and power, mainly when performing short bursts of high-intensity exercise.

Quick Tip: Beta-alanine works by enhancing carnosine levels to delay muscle fatigue and speed recovery. Simply put, beta-alanine can fuel better performance, bigger gains, faster recovery, and laser focus.

Many athletes rely on beta-alanine to supplement their workouts and surpass their training goals. Learn more about the benefits of beta-alanine. Delaying the onset of fatigue gives athletes a competitive edge to break through and test their limits. High-quality supplementation is proven to speed recovery time and enhance mental focus, which helps athletes move through tough training and workouts with greater ease. Athletes are constantly challenging their muscles to work harder under greater tension.

Beta-alanine can give that extra edge to push gains to the limit. Improving endurance allows for extended training at harder intervals, pushing out those game-changing extra reps for better gains. Higher levels of muscle carnosine can speed up recovery. Beta-alanine increases muscle carnosine, preventing the acid build-up that contributes to soreness and fatigue.

Quicker recovery means spending more time training. Read more about a day study involving 18 elite soldiers who found that beta-alanine supplementation improved cognitive function during combat testing sessions. Quick Tip: Beta-alanine can fuel better performance and lead to bigger gains, faster recovery, and laser focus. Delving deeper into the science behind beta-alanine, we can explore a process called glycolysis, as well as what triggers fatigue and how carnosine buffers that decline.

Glycolysis is the breaking down of glucose in the body to generate energy. For sustained or intermittent high-intensity exercise, glucose is the primary energy source. When we exercise, highly reactive hydrogen ions cause a fall in pH in our muscle, a process also referred to as acidification.

Throughout our workout, hydrogen ions can be actively transported from the muscle cells and into our circulatory system.

However, at higher exercise intensities, the rate of hydrogen ion production becomes increasingly insufficient. Progressive acidification may then occur, especially in the strength-generating fast-twitch muscle fibers. As the muscle pH falls, it exacerbates the onset of fatigue. This rise in acidity compromises the proteins responsible for power generation and shortening of the muscle fibers. Basically, carnosine buffers that pH decline.

When histidine attaches to beta-alanine, it takes on an additional hydrogen ion. The histidine half of the carnosine molecule acts as a buffer, but the beta-alanine half is equally as important. It prevents the histidine from combining with other amino acids to form proteins. As a result, high concentrations of carnosine accumulate in the muscle cells.

Quick Tip: As acidity rises and pH in the muscle drops, fatigue can set in. Carnosine acts as a buffer during that decline.

Studies have shown that beta-alanine can have a significant impact on body composition. According to one study , athletes have achieved an increase in lean muscle mass in just three weeks. Greater endurance leads to an increase in stamina and strength, which accelerates muscle growth.

Top performers supplement with beta-alanine because it works. See documented results with before and after photos of professional athletes here. Quick Tip: Beta-alanine can boost athletic performance, which leads to an increase in lean muscle mass. Beta-alanine is a naturally occurring amino acid that supports the synthesis of muscle carnosine in the body.

Carnosine acts as a buffer against a drop in pH and delays the onset of muscle fatigue and failure. Beta-alanine is also found in foods such as meat and fish. It combines with the amino acid histidine to form the dipeptide called carnosine. Over time, carnosine acts as a buffer to help delay the onset of lactic acid and muscle fatigue and failure, while building endurance and improving recovery.

Carnosine is a dipeptide, or a compound made up of two linked amino acids: beta-alanine and histidine. More specifically, this compound is in the active tissues of the body, including the heart and the brain.

Carnosine is instrumental in the improvement of muscle strength and performance during exercise. During exercise or training sessions, through the process of glycolysis, glucose is broken down, and pyruvate is produced, which is sometimes converted to a chemical known as lactate. Lactate produces high quantities of hydrogen ions.

The increased acidity lowers the pH level in the muscles. The acidity in the tissues blocks the process of glycolysis reduces the elasticity of the muscles.

That decrease in elasticity is the origin of exhaustion and fatigue during exercise. The introduction of beta-alanine in the body, and in turn, higher levels of carnosine act as a buffer against a drop in pH and reduce acidity levels in the muscles during exercises.

The most significant improvement was noted in the first and fourth minutes of cycling. Four weeks of six grams per day of bata-alanine increased the punch force of amateur boxers by an amazing 20 times. Since that early trial, beta-alanine has been consistently suggested to increase muscle power output, strength, training volume, high-intensity exercise performance and peak oxygen uptake aerobic capacity. Most recently, when players consumed 3. In fact, when all subject responses were analyzed, those consuming beta-alanine improved by a range of 0 to Similarly, researchers out of the U.

However, when long rest periods minutes were provided between sets of a high-intensity strength training session, the effects of beta-alanine were insignificant. Therefore, for the effects of beta-alanine to be most noticeable, I would recommend a high-intensity bodybuilding-style training program, HIIT or interval training , CrossFit, or all-out minute bouts to exhaustion, with short rest periods of less than 2 minutes.

Beta-alanine can provide an acute stimulant response and is therefore a good candidate for being consumed pre-workout. If you take a pre-workout supplement, you might already be taking it this way. However, the performance benefits from beta-alanine are based upon raising muscle carnosine concentrations over time. Thus, the time of day you consume beta-alanine isn't nearly as important as consistently consuming beta-alanine each day. Your muscle fiber makeup and the amount of muscle carnosine you have when you start supplementing with beta-alanine do not appear to impact how you will respond to supplementation.

Likewise, the size of individual doses doesn't appear to affect the maximal concentration of muscle carnosine that you can achieve. Instead, the total dose over a period of time affects the final muscle carnosine concentration that you can achieve. The dose response to beta-alanine increases exponentially over time because of the long clearance time of elevated muscle carnosine concentrations. Once you build up your carnosine concentration with beta-alanine, those elevated levels have been shown to drop by just two percent every two weeks after you cease supplementing.

I recommend consuming taurine when supplementing with beta-alanine. Not only is taurine an underutilized super-nutrient, it's also incredibly important for neuromuscular, cognitive and lung function, blood glucose utilization, and as an antioxidant.

Since beta-alanine and taurine compete for uptake and the concentration of one affects the other, consuming one of them consistently while dosing the other is just common sense. If common sense isn't enough for you, then let's get specific.

Over the long term, there is a possibility that high-dose beta-alanine use in the absence of dietary taurine may lead to health and performance complications. Data in mice seem to indicate that pushing either supplement in the absence of the other can lead to neurological and neuromuscular decreases in performance tests. With beta-alanine, the result was an angiogenic stress-inducing response as serotonin production was compromised. Other research in rats seems to indicate that significant taurine deficiency, in response to chronic, high-dose beta-alanine, reduces nitric oxide production and response.

However, no long-term studies have been conducted to determine the likelihood of such problems with humans in response to typical beta-alanine dosing. Aside from taurine, what you choose to stack with beta-alanine will depend most upon your goals.

Remember, beta-alanine works best when exercise is of a high-intensity and lasts at least minutes. So if your goal is exercise improvement for sessions lasting less than 60 seconds, aim for ingredients that support the ATP-PCr energy system. These include creatine, oral ATP , caffeine, and betaine. If you are training for sports, then also consider adding ingredients such as DL-malate and similar energy system intermediates such as alpha-ketoglutarate, citrates, aspartates, in addition to carbohydrates , BCAAs , glutamine , citrulline , and Co-Q Based upon the available data, I don't see a need for cycling beta-alanine, as long as you're also supplementing with taurine.

If you're not consuming supplemental taurine, then it may be prudent to cycle your beta-alanine every so often. Since taurine uptake is only affected by rises in plasma beta-alanine, and because muscle carnosine remains elevated for up to three months after ceasing beta-alanine supplementation, a weeks "on" to weeks "off" cycling strategy should allow you to consistently reap the performance benefits of beta-alanine.

However, this is just conjecture on my part, and it's a moot point if you just supplement with taurine.