Post-Workout Supplements for Hard-Core Athletes: 6 Benefits: Post-workout supplements accelerate your body’s recovery, particularly after the most difficult workouts.
These supplements combine a variety of compounds such as branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs), creatine, and anaerobic buffering agent with electrolytes to increase your recovery and elevate your fitness.
These are the top benefits of a post-workout supplement. We also have tips for optimizing dosage and minimizing side effects when you include a post-workout supplement in your supplement mix.
Post-workout benefits
1. It’s more than your workout. It’s also how you recover.
Your workout recovery abilities can be boosted to help you better adapt to your workouts. It can also enable you to train harder and for longer sessions.
You can use both these abilities to enhance your fitness with the right post-workout supplement.
2. A post-workout supplement should contain a few key ingredients.
It doesn’t matter if you are training for strength, speed, endurance, or power.
Branch chain amino acids are a key ingredient in any post-workout supplement.
Branching chain amino acids have been shown to protect muscles from injury and increase muscle recovery after exercise. Researchers from Japan have described the mechanism in a 2006 scientific paper published in the Journal of Nutrition.
The researchers found that post-workout muscle soreness was less in people who did squat exercises after receiving a branched-chain amino acid supplement.
3. Branched-chain amino acids prevent muscle breakdown
According to the authors, branched-chain amino acids prevent the breaking down of skeletal muscles during exercise because your body can use the supplementary branched-chain amino acids in place of the Branched-chain amino acids are the building blocks of muscle tissue.
One specific branched-chain amino acid, leucine, seems to increase muscle protein synthesis after exercise. This means that supplements containing leucine and other branched-chain amino acids will improve your body’s ability to adapt to your training.
This is great for two reasons. First, you’ll get more out of the same workout. Second, you can train harder without worrying about overtraining your body or exceeding its recovery capabilities.
These are the reasons why you should use branched-chain amino acids as a post-workout supplement.
4. Creatine is essential for power athletes
Creatine is likely to help power athletes who train for short periods of time.
Creatine is a great supplement for increasing your strength. Its effectiveness has been proven in numerous studies. The effectiveness of creatine supplementation was demonstrated in a 2003 paper published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.
The authors looked at several papers about the effects of creatine on strength. The creatine supplement users had an 8% increase in strength compared to the placebo recipients.
Both tend to improve after strength training but those who take creatine supplements tend to be more successful.
5. Beta-alanine may be helpful for anaerobic power-athletes
For athletes who exercise for longer periods of intense, high-intensity training that lasts at least 60 seconds, it is a good idea to look into post-workout supplements that contain compounds that increase your anaerobic power like beta-alanine.
Beta-alanine is used to improve the muscle’s ability to work when there is too much acidity from anaerobic training.
Beta-alanine is a precursor for a compound called L -carnitine which buffers acidity in high-intensity exercise. You can keep your workout intensity higher if you can buffer more acidity.
A review article published in 2014 reviewed the efficacy of beta-alanine supplementation and found moderately strong evidence that it had a direct performance-enhancing effect in high-power physical exercise tasks.
This advantage is greatest for “power sports”, which require intense energy expenditure for at most 60 seconds. However, it does not apply to long-term, low-intensity activities like running marathons or hiking.
6. After a hard workout, glutamine can reduce soreness and prevent muscle loss.
Glutamine can be synthesized in your body under most conditions.
Some research suggests that it may be useful as a post-workout supplement to improve recovery after very difficult training sessions.
The Journal of Exercise Science & Fitness published a 2011 study that found that glutamine may reduce muscle soreness after a hard workout.
The glutamine supplement resulted in subjects experiencing less soreness after performing a fatiguing box jumping protocol.
These results suggest that a glutamine-rich post-workout supplement is a smart idea, especially if you do a lot of fatiguing exercises at the gym like deadlifts or squats.
Side effects of post-workout
These key ingredients of a post-workout supplement can be found in many foods so it is difficult to have serious side effects.
Similar to creatine. Its excellent safety profile is one of the main reasons it has been so popular.
Long-term creatine use is safe. A 2002 study on long-term creatine use in college football players.
You may feel tingling or flushing after taking beta-alanine post-workout. Higher doses of beta-alanine could cause side effects in the short term.
Flushing, a rush in blood and warmth around your extremities or face are the most prominent symptoms. It can occur when people consume high levels of beta-alanine, but it does not seem to cause long-term health problems.
Post-workout dosage
Although branched-chain amino acid is well studied, there are many variations in how athletes receive them.
BCAAs – Aim for 3-18g per day. The majority of research protocols require between three and 18g per day.
The average daily intake is six to nine grams, but larger athletes who have more muscle mass might want to go higher.
Creatine – Start with 20-25g per day and then reduce to 5 grams daily. To increase your creatine levels, you should aim for 20-25g per day for the first few weeks. You can then move on to the maintenance phase, where you will need to take 5 grams daily.
Beta-alanine: You should aim to take between 2-6 grams of Beta-alanine per day. To further increase your muscle carnosine, it is best to use a progressive strategy. You would take more in the second few weeks.
If you don’t want to flush, the dose should be broken up into smaller portions to be taken throughout your day.
FAQ about Post-Workout Supplement Benefits
Q. How does a post-workout compare with a pre-workout?
A: Preworkout Supplements are intended to improve your exercise performance the day after you take them.
They help you perform better and work harder. This is possible because these supplements contain compounds such as caffeine and green tea extract.
They may contain some ingredients that can help you recover from a workout, but the main focus is on your immediate performance.
A post-workout supplement, on the other hand, is focused 100% on recovery. These supplements won’t contain stimulants; instead, they will have much higher levels of protein, amino acids and creatine to name a few.
Q. What’s the difference between an Intra workout and a post-workout supplement?
A: Mid-workout Supplements are intended to sustain your workout performance (e.g. between sets). The post-workout supplement is meant to help you recover after your workout.
Sometimes, there are crossovers between ingredients in pre- and intra-workout supplements and post-workout supplements.
These compounds are excellent examples. They could be used to improve your workout performance, but they should also be studied as a medium-term supplementation strategy to increase anaerobic power output.
Q. How can you reduce soreness after a workout?
A: Muscle damage can be detected by the soreness you feel after a hard workout. There are many nutritional strategies to counter this. Muscle soreness after a workout is often accompanied by a decrease in muscle strength over several days. It’s not just fatigue in the legs or arms.
It is more common to feel sore after a workout if you did eccentric exercises such as deadlifts or squats. This is because eccentric exercise can cause more muscle damage.
Researchers will experiment with eccentric protocols to induce soreness, such as drop jumps and single-leg squats.
Even a simple protein shake can help with post-workout soreness. However, research shows that glutamine-rich supplements could be beneficial in reducing soreness and muscle weakness.
Many of the top-rated post-workout supplements currently on the market include glutamine along with other primary ingredients. This makes them great for relieving soreness from a challenging workout.
Q: Which macronutrient is most important after a workout?
A: Protein is the most important macronutrient after a hard workout. Protein is essential for building and repairing muscle fibres that are damaged by exercise.
These amino acids are essential for building new muscle tissue. It is crucial to get protein after a workout in order to build muscle mass. Despite the importance of protein, carbohydrates are also important.
Your muscle glycogen stores can be depleted after a hard workout, especially if it involved cardio. Research suggests that a mix of carbs and proteins is the best way to replenish muscle glycogen.
Protein is still the king of post-workout macros. However, it works best when combined with carbs to replenish muscle glycogen.
An Overview
Do you need a supplement to help you recover from your most difficult training sessions? You need a post-workout supplement.
These supplements allow you to capitalize on the stimulation to your body that comes from your hardest, longest workout days. They are also used by elite athletes to help them reach their peak fitness levels.
