As a personal trainer and coach I am concerned with enhancing my athletes’ performance and helping them achieve their body composition goals. Programs are always structured to utilize every tool available to generate results. Foundations are important; as endurance athletes we understand that all of the training in the world will be worthless unless we back it up with good foundational nutrition, and vice versa. Once an athlete has their training and diet in line, it then comes down to execution, motivation, and dedication.
You already have the training, nutrition, and dedication? There is still more that you can do to create success for yourself.
The next step towards performance success is considering dietary supplements to augment or complement your already good nutrition plan. Today there are enough performance enhancing dietary supplements on the market to make your head spin. There are many proven benefits from supplementing with the usual suspects like protein and Creatine, and of course carb replacements, and also many more exotic supplements. Frankly, many are unproven.
But there is one that will maximize your results: Branched Chain Amino Acids (BCAAs). My favorite brand for these is Optimum Nutrition.
Of the many amino acids, BCAAs have been sitting at the supplement dinner table for quite a while and garner much attention for their value to athletes of many backgrounds. It was once thought that these could be received solely from whole protein sources, but research has shown that they are better utilized by the body separately in dosages that reflects individual body composition.
BCAAs are unique from other amino acids in their chemical structure and include leucine, isoleucine, and valine. BCAAs alone make up between 15-35% of muscle tissue by amino mass, are essential in the protein synthesis process, and are now considered critical for rebuilding tissue and organ function for burn victims. They are also used extensively by athletes in the know to aid in muscle recovery after strenuous exercise and/or increase endurance longevity. Once your body has spent through its glycogen stores, your muscle tissue is the next item on the menu. BCAAs stave off this inevitability because unlike other amino acids, your muscle can burn them for fuel. Most importantly to endurance athletes, BCAAs supplementation significantly decreases muscle soreness in both trained and untrained athletes.
In one 8 week study, subjects in different flights respectively gained more muscle, lost more fat, or increased their strength “significantly” over subjects who used just whey, carb replacements, or placebos alone. A multitude of studies document the effectiveness of BCAA consumption.
One doesn’t have to be a fit as a fiddle pro with an inhumanly effective metabolism to fully benefit from BCAA supplementation. Anyone and everyone who beats themselves up with a rigorous multisport training regimen will see a benefit.
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