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For athletes, nothing is more important than improving their performance and keeping fatigue levels to a bare minimum. If you are a team sports player or a runner, it has to be one of your constant worries about how to extend your training volume.
There are numerous pre-workout supplements gaining the attention of athletes across the world. Beta Alanine is one of the most-talked about supplements. It is a naturally occurring amino acid found in your muscles and brain. Serving as a building block of carnosine, Beta Alanine helps reduce acid formation during your workout session. It can assist you during intense exercise, causing less fatigue and offering shorter recovery periods.
Beta-Alanine supplements are highly effective for people with low muscle carnosine. If you are a workout enthusiast or have to undergo extensive training or sprinting, it is likely for lactic acid to get accumulated in your muscles. Beta Alanine, in such circumstance, helps in curtailing the formation of acid and enhances your overall performance.
This performance enhancing supplement is a safe drug to use that has no adverse effects. The only side effect you can experience is tingling. Beta Alanine reportedly improves exercise power and capacity and can enhance muscle mass.
What Is Beta Alanine?
Beta Alanine is a non-essential amino acid. Your body naturally produces Beta Alanine. This amino acid helps in improving athletic performance and exercise capacity. It can give you lean muscles and improve your overall built and physical functioning.
Beta Alanine is also known as 3-aminopropanol acid. The human body synthesizes it through breaking down the pyrimidine nucleotides. You can also gain this precise amino acid through your diet via carnosine, anserine and belenine. Beta-Alanine, along with histidine, forms carnosine. Carnosine exists in tissues with high energy demand such as muscles and brain.
Why Is Beta Alanine Important?
When you indulge in high-intensity exercise, there is a rise in hydrogen ions and your body produces energy (ATP). Hydrogen ions are a by-product of lactic acid’s production in your muscles. Lactic acid reduces the pH of your body, making it more acidic. When the level of acidity increases in your body, it becomes harder for your muscles to contract. This increases fatigue and lowers your performance.
To defend the lowered pH level in your body, carnosine produces hydrogen ions in the muscle cells. The increased production of hydrogen cells counters the lactic acid and neutralizes the pH value in the body. Meanwhile, ATP storage is also increased which improves the performance of the body by shortening the recovery periods.
Carnosine, constituting of Beta Alanine and histidine, serves as an antioxidant and anti-glycation agent. It activates muscles contracting enzymes which, resultantly, reduce fatigue level during a workout. The functions played by carnosine make Beta Alanine important in the body. You need a sufficient amount of Beta Alanine in you to produce an adequate level of carnosine.
Impressive Benefits of Beta-Alanine
The primary benefit of Beta-Alanine is to improve the physical tolerance during training and sprinting. It helps in modifying the body composition and enhancing your athletic performance capacity. Though there is a lot of research gap pertinent to benefits associated with Beta Alanine, the users’ experience showcase significant positive outcomes of the supplement. Some of the best benefits of Beta Alanine are discussed underneath:
1. Improves Exercise Power and Capacity
According to a couple of studies, the researchers are able to find out that Beta-Alanine has substantial ability to improve athletic performance. Beta Alanine can assist you in short–lasting and high–intensity anaerobic exercises. If you are a team sports player, Beta Alanine can advance your game performance by improving your training volume resistance.
2. Increases Muscle Mass
If taken during high-intensity training, Beta Alanine increases the oxygen intake and enhances overall endurance. It elevates your stamina and reduces the body fat. This results in offering you more lean body mass with enhanced muscle formation.
3. Delays Fatigue
Experiencing fatigue during intense training or workout session is a norm. This reduces the performance of team players and sprinters. Beta Alanine reduces the formation of lactic acid during exercise. Lactic acid in your body curtails muscle contraction and increases fatigue. Beta Alanine counters the effect of lactic acid and improves the stamina of your body during intensive training.
4. Lowers Anxiety
It boosts carnosine and serotonin in the brain. This increases the “brain-derived neurotrophic factor” in the brain. BDNF curtails anxiety and improves “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Beta Alanine serves in maintaining an adequate concentration of BDNF in the brain. This helps in uplifting your mood and lowering anxiety.
Beta Alanine And Tingling
Beta Alanine is a safe supplement. Users report no serious adverse side effects of this nootropic drug. However, the only side effect users can expect to experience is that of a tingling sensation, commonly known as the “Beta Alanine itch.”
Beta Alanine itch is also referred to as the histamine response. It is a prickling or flushing-like sensation that you can feel on the surface of your skin after using the supplement. You can experience this feeling after fifteen minutes of consumption, and it can continue for the next thirty to sixty minutes before vanishing on its own.
There is nothing harmful or concerning about Beta Alanine itch. It is a result of the stimulation of nerve endings under the skin more than the normal rate. This sensation is usually stronger in the new users and as you get accustomed to using it, the sensations are hardly felt anymore. To reduce the sensations, we recommend you to cut down your dose of Beta-Alanine throughout the day. You can either lessen down your supplement consumption by dividing it into two or three servings a day, or by consuming it alongside a meal.
What Causes Short-Term Paresthesia?
Paresthesia is a feeling of numbness or burning that is often encountered in body areas like hands, arms, legs or feet. It is a “pins and needles” like sensation that usually happens when you sit in one position for a long time and one of the nerves that are supplying blood to a limb gets more pressurized. You can encounter Paresthesia during your consumption of Beta Alanine. This usually happens when you are on a higher dose of the supplement.
According to user experience, they encounter Paresthesia when they consume a huge amount of Beta Alanine in a single dose and the dose exceeds 800mg.
Paresthesia literally means “abnormal sensation.” There are different types of Paresthesia, including transient, chronic, acroparesthesia and dental-induced Paresthesia. The tingling you experience in using Beta Alanine is short-term Paresthesia.
The effects of Paresthesia are completely harmless. They tend to pass quickly, usually taking half an hour to sixty minutes. Short-term Paresthesia is often enjoyed by the users as they consider it a pre-workout energy boost. There is no treatment necessary for beta-Alanine induced short-term Paresthesia. You can avoid short-term Paresthesia by taking smaller doses of the supplement. You can increase the dose slowly to attain more lasting and extended effects. Also, there are some sustained release Beta-Alanine supplements that can help you with the Paresthesia. They slow down the amount of beta-Alanine entering into your system and relieve you from any tingling symptoms.
How to Use Beta Alanine?
The standard dose of Beta Alanine is between 400mg-800mg. You can consume it for 4 to 10 weeks. The average daily intake of Beta-Alanine supplements is 4-6grams per day. Taking it for one month can increase muscle carnosine level significantly. You can extend the consumption to over 2.5 months for more muscle mass.
On consuming supplements more than 800mg of Beta-Alanine, you may experience marginal tingling sensations in your body. You can reduce these sensations by increasing your carbohydrate intake. The outcomes of Beta Alanine are evident after fourteen days and you can see a positive change in your performance.
Comparison Between Beta Alanine and Carnosine
Both, Beta Alanine and carnosine, increase the muscular stamina and athletic performance. Beta Alanine, however, serves as a precursor for carnosine. Carnosine plays significant roles in the human body.
There are high concentrations of carnosine in tissues like the brain and muscles. It has proton buffering effects which make it essential for neutralizing the internal body pH value. If you are looking for increasing your muscular endurance and quick recovery from an intense workout or physical activity, you need to increase the carnosine levels in your muscle tissues. Beta-Alanine supplements increase production of carnosine in your body.
Beta-Alanine supplements, as compared to carnosine, are better researched and are more bioavailable. Also, carnosine is a dipeptide biosynthesized from Beta Alanine and L-histidine. It gets converted to carnosine which subsequently carries out all the functions related to fatigue and performance.
Beta Alanine for Muscle Mass
Beta Alanine buffers acid in muscles and helps you gain lean body and muscle mass. It is linked with several antioxidant and anti-aging properties. The bioavailability of Beta-Alanine makes it more effectual in increasing muscle carnosine levels.
According to research studies, Beta Alanine contributes to lean mass gains. The exact mechanism, however, is not known. This particular benefit of Beta-Alanine is generally associated with the level of exercise commenced by the training individuals. This possibility cannot be completely ruled out. The combination of exercise regimen and Beta Alanine supplementation results in producing outcomes which showcase lean muscles and improved body composition.
Beta Alanine for Taurine
There are several rumors regulating the interaction of Beta Alanine and taurine. Users fear to acquire problems if they take these two supplements together. However, there is no clinical evidence supporting such an occurrence.
Instead, some of the reports say that taurine does not impact the level of carnosine in the muscles if it’s taken along with Beta Alanine. Scientific evidence states no significant difference in carnosine levels or any inhibition in the absorption of Beta-Alanine due to taurine.
How Does Beta-Alanine Work for BCAAs?
BCAA or Branched-Chain Amino Acids is also a pre-workout supplement that contains four amino acids providing essential building blocks of protein. BCAAs help in maintaining your body mass when you are on a calorie-deficit diet.
It is helpful for you when you decide to take your physical activity to the lean extreme. It increases muscle protein synthesis and helps you gain more muscle. Beta Alanine where improves your muscle performance and reduces the fatigue level, BCAA contributes to the formation of new muscle proteins and makes your body leaner.
BCAA and Beta Alanine, both, help you get a more intense workout. Where Beta Alanine boosts the serotonin level in the brain along with carnosine, BCAA inhibits the absorption of tryptophan in the blood. Increased serotonin level in the brain can make you feel more fatigued and keep you from pushing as hard during the training session.
BCAA constrains the serotonin production and allows you to perform to your optimum level in training sessions.