Regardless of your fitness goal, be it becoming a bodybuilder, a crossfitter or a powerlifter, you should understand the importance of taking supplements to achieve it faster. If you’ve just started working on your fitness resolution and want to transform your physique and increase strength, it might be a bit intimidating walking around the gym, listening to all the “big guys” talking about their daily intake of supplements. I am certain you are aware you need to take some too, but you just don’t know which ones and where to start.
The thing is, fitness requires a lot of discipline, time and hard work. Most of the hard work is done at the gym, however, having a good nutrition plan is crucial for reaching your fitness goal. Therefore, besides sweating buckets while working out in the gym, fitness enthusiasts also spend some time meal prepping. However, food alone is not enough to get the ripped body you so desire, plus, not everyone has the free time on their hands for meal preps that will satisfy their daily intake of protein, amino acids, vitamins and minerals.
For this reason, adding endurance athlete supplements (which you can easily find online and in many drug stores) is a worthwhile option to consider. Remember, you still have to eat clean and stick to your diet to reach your end-goal as fast as possible – supplements are here to only complement your diet.
Protein
Start off with using some of the more generally known and popular endurance athlete supplements, like protein powder. Protein will feed and help heal your muscles, reducing the amount of time that they will need to recover after a work out. Protein is especially important for beginners since their muscles will tire faster than they’d like, affecting their performance. Furthermore, it contains amino acids, which quickly break down and are absorbed into your bloodstream. That way they reach your muscle tissues faster where they start doing protein synthesis – a process that produces stronger and bigger muscles.
Creatine
Besides protein, a gym beginner’s best friend is creatine. It improves muscle performance as it helps recycle the Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP), which fuels power energy of the working muscles. ATP releases a short burst of energy, increasing the oxygen capacities of your muscles and enhancing your endurance. It’s something that can be found in lean fish and meat, but is unfortunately removed when cooked. This makes creatine supplements all the more important in increasing the duration of your endurance training and strength.
BCAAs
A mechanism of central fatigue when exercising is the blood-brain barrier crossing the free tryptophan. The downside of tryptophan is that it helps the release of serotonin, which causes sleepiness, affects arousal, mood, and ultimately, fatigue. And since tryptophan and BCAAs compete for the same protein carrier, by increasing your BCAA intake, you reduce the amount of tryptophan crossing the blood-brain-barrier. By doing so you delay fatigue. BCAAs also reduce skeletal muscle protein breakdown and boost immune response from exercise and recovery.
Remember, taking supplements alone won’t make you reach your fitness goals without hard work and discipline, but they will surely assist you in getting there faster. And as Brofessor Dom Mazzetti says – “The day you decide to start lifting, is the day you became forever small, because you’ll never be as big as you want to be!”
