Exercising boosts your strength and helps you to stay fit. It requires more time and energy because the harder you’ll train, the better the results you’ll get. However, your body can limit you by forcing you to rest. Fortunately, beta-alanine is an ideal option that boosts your power and energy to push past your limits.
What is beta-alanine?
Beta-alanine is a non-essential amino acid. However, it does not synthesize proteins like other amino acids. Instead, beta-alanine produces carnosine that it stores in your skeletal muscles. Carnosine production is essential and can benefit your athletic performance and workouts.
What does beta-alanine do?
Beta-alanine can do a variety of things, including:
- Producing carnosine
Beta-alanine supplements help in producing carnosine. Carnosine works to reduce exercise-induced lactic acid buildup in your muscles. The buildup is a natural process that interferes with your exercise performance. Therefore, you’ll need the right carnosine levels, which depend on your beta-alanine levels. Your muscles will absorb beta-alanine easily, allowing an increase in carnosine levels.
- Improving performance
Beta-alanine supplements can promote a longer, healthier workout. It improves the capacity and your power during high-intensity exercising. Also, beta-alanine will enhance lean body mass.
- Delaying fatigue
Beta-alanine lower the amount of lactic acid during workouts. The reduction delays exhaustion and fatigue, allowing for enhanced endurance.
- Fights muscle aging
Beta-alanine users experience positive benefits by taking it regularly. You’ll enjoy optimal muscle functionality and capacity, which is key in fighting muscle aging.
- Increasing workout volume
Since it delays fatigue, beta-alanine allows you to work out longer. Your time to exhaustion will increase, allowing you to take extra sessions. An increase in workout volume will increase your strength and peak power.
What are the side effects of taking beta-alanine?
Beta-alanine is a naturally safe supplement and has no serious risks. However, you can experience paresthesia. Paresthesia is a tingling effect that results from taking too much dosage. Though it is annoying and uncomfortable, paresthesia is temporary and harmless. You can avoid it by lowing the dosage that your body can sustain.
How to take beta-alanine
You can take beta-alanine naturally or combine it with sports supplements. You can combine it with carnosine as the two naturally work together. You’ll enjoy a longer time to exhaustion and muscle endurance during your exercise.
However, you should consult your doctor before taking the supplement to prevent side effects.
Why should you not supplement with carnosine?
Many people think it’s more effective and practical to supplement with carnosine. However, it is not advisable as carnosine is not absolvable when supplemented orally. If you ingest carnosine, your body will break it down into beta-alanine and histidine. One of the free-form amino acids enters a muscle cell, and your body uses them to produce carnosine. Typically, you will supplement with carnosine to get beta-alanine which could later be used to produce beta-alanine.
Beta-alanine supplements eliminate unnecessary steps, helping speed up the process. Also, research has shown that supplementing with beta-alanine is more effective in increasing carnosine levels.
Final thoughts
It is evident that amino acid is an essential part of human nutrition. Beta-alanine is a type of amino acid that your body produces naturally. However, sometimes you may need an extra boost and take beta-alanine supplements. The supplements are safe and can do many things, ranging from better performance to delaying fatigue.
