CYCLE PERFORMANCE

There are seemingly endless n The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of these supplements have very little evidence to back up their effectiveness, and some may downright be hurting your performance. There are however some supplements that do have evidence to show that they do in fact improve performance, although the list is pretty short. Listen guys, no need to watch the video, let me save you some time. Here at Hypergame Beast Mode we include every supplement that's known to work in our product. We also include stuff that's not known to work, We even include some substances that are probably illegal to sell to cons And while this video won't cover every supplement that could potentially improve performance, it will cover the big ones with the most evidence to back them up. And so these supplements are not without their own caveats. Often timing, amount, how you take them, the source, what other supplements you're taking, and even your genes can play a role in how effective these supplements actually are. In fact, take some of these supplements the wrong way and you may actually see a decrease in performance. Alright, without further ado, let's get into the list and all the nitty gritty details on supplements that actually work. Let'start things off with beta alanine. For those of you unfamiliar, beta alanine is a non-essential amino acid, meaning that we don't need to cons Beta alanine helps with the production of carnazine, which plays a role in muscular endurance at high intensities. The International Society of Sports Nutrition'stand on beta alanine states that it significantly augments muscle carnazine concentrations, thereby acting as an intracellular pH buffer. It appears to be safe in healthy populations at the recommended doses, and the only reported side effect is tingling. The tingling that you experience when you cons It's a small price to pay for potentially improved performance, and research on beta alanine indicates that it may do just that. For example, take this study on beta alanine supplementation and cycling performance in highly trained cyclists. These cyclists were given either beta alanine or a placebo over the course of four weeks. What they found was that beta alanine supplementation was 44% This study on master's female cyclists found the same thing. After 28 days of supplementation, the subjects that took beta alanine saw an increased time to exhaustion and an increase in the total work completed during testing, probably due to the fact that blood lactate levels were 24% lower in the beta alanine group over the placebo. Promising results, but let's not draw any conclusions off of just two studies. This meta-analysis looking at many studies on the topic found a median effect of 2. 85%. It's also interesting to note that exercise lasting 60-240 seconds was improved as well as exercise lasting greater than 240 seconds. However, beta alanine showed no benefit to exercise less than 60 seconds. The last bit about time is important. There seems to be a sweet spot for the kind of effort that beta alanine is going to have the biggest impact on. Your VO2 max zone, if you will, or your 5-minute max power is probably going to see the biggest improvement from taking beta alanine. This study on the effect of beta alanine on cycling time trials of different lengths tested subjects in a 1, 4, and 10 km time trial, and only found improvements after supplementation in the 4 km time trial. No difference was found in either the 1K or 10K time trial. And for many of these studies, it appears that beta alanine needs to be taken for a period of weeks as opposed to just taking a single dose before exercise. Studies that have subjects take a single dose of beta alanine often come up with lackluster results, although at the very least it may decrease perceived exertion. Going back to the International Society of Sports Nutrition statement, they specify a dose of 4-6 grams daily for 2-4 weeks. Beta alanine also has another potential advantage over other supplements, which is that its effects appear to be additive. What do I mean by this? Well, for a lot of supplements, you can't expect to add the benefits of one supplement and another when you take them both together. Oftentimes, the benefit that you get from just that one supplement is the most that you're going to get. Alright, I just want to clarify something here. Are you saying that if I look on the back of the tub and the ingredients list looks longer than the index section of a chemistry textbook, that's a bad thing? This doesn't appear to be the case with beta alanine though, at least in combination with sodi This study on taking beta alanine and sodi What they found was a 7 and 8% increase in total work done with beta alanine and sodi This review on the effects of beta alanine confirmed these findings. This brings us to sodi For example, this study done on competitive cyclists that tested one hour time trial performance. They found that when subjects cons Seems easy, just d Unfortunately, there's one major drawback with sodi For example, this study in which a n This study concluded that sodi Differences in blood responses suggest that sodi However, the GI issues could potentially be mitigated by taking it 3-4 hours before exercise or by cons So in theory, sodi The GI distress associated with ingesting sodi Unfortunately, the research on these topical sodi But if you want to see the science laid out, I made a whole video on amp And while the effects of sodi This study testing the ingestion of sodi However, there were no further benefits when the two substances were added together. Personally, I would rather not risk digestive issues mid-race and just take caffeine if I have to choose one or the other. This is even more of a concern for anyone doing long, ultra endurance events because GI distress is already something that you have to contend with, and you don't want to be adding anything to the mix that's potentially going to make that situation worse. Let'shift gears and talk about a very popular supplement in the endurance sports world, and that is beetroot juice. I put supplement in quotes because you could argue that beetroot juice is not a supplement, it's real food. Although it's not really the beets or the bright red pea that we're after. Fun fact, Hypergain Beast Mode Masking or Raw Edition also turns your pea red. We didn't put any beet juice in it though. What we're after here is the nitrates found in beet juice. These are the real supposed performance enhancers. They serve multiple functions related to increased blood flow, gas exchange, mitochondrial biogenesis and efficiency, and strengthening of muscle contraction. Interestingly enough though, even though beetroot juice gets all the publicity in the endurance sports world, it's actually just one of many vegetables that has high levels of nitrates. Now, I was hesitant to include this one on the list of supplements that actually work because the science on beetroot juice is actually pretty conflicted, but it's one of the most popular ones out there and one that I've gotten a lot of questions about. And it's not without some research to back it up. This study on nitrate supplementation and cycling performance had subjects cons Sure enough, power output and time trial performance improved after subjects cons Further research shows that beet juice may give an even bigger improvement when riding at altitude. However, there are also plenty of studies that find no effect of beet juice supplementation, If we take a step back though and try to find where the balance of evidence regarding beet root juice and performance lies, what do we find? This 2016 meta-analysis found a small to moderate statistically significant effect of beet juice during time to exhaustion trials. With graded exercise tests though, although the results were in favor of beet juice, the effect was small and not significant. This review comes to a similar conclusion, stating that beet juice may provide a modest performance enhancement. So there is Just don't expect it to transform your riding or anything. We're talking about very marginal gains here. And unfortunately, these marginal gains may become non-existent in the presence of other supplements. This is one of those supplements that doesn't appear to be additive, at least not with common combinations And given the fact that the evidence for the benefits of caffeine are very strong, stronger than the evidence for the benefits of beet root juice, I would go with caffeine. Although taking them both together doesn't appear to be harmful. And to be fair, there are other benefits to beet root juice than just performance benefits. For example, beet root juice is loaded with antioxidants, which come to think of it actually is a performance benefit. And with that, let's talk about our last supplement on the list, which is antioxidants. This one should actually be on some sort of anti-supplements list, because the interesting thing about this one is that supplemental antioxidants may actively be hindering your progress while antioxidants from real food, Let me explain. It's been observed that exercise is accompanied by an increased generation of free radicals and oxidative stress. Protecting you from free radicals is exactly what antioxidants do. With this in mind, could antioxidants help mitigate this? Or are free radicals necessary for adaptation? And by taking antioxidants, we're hindering the adaptation to exercise and thereby getting less bang for our training buck. On this review on vitamin C supplements and physical performance, antioxidant supplements are widely used by athletes to avoid elevated oxidative stress, the consequences of which include muscle damage, immune dysfunction and fatigue. However, large dose vitamin C supplements appear to reduce training induced adaptations by reducing mitochondrial biogenesis or by possibly altering vascular function. This review on antioxidant supplementation during exercise confirms this, stating that a growing body of evidence indicates detrimental effects of antioxidant supplementation on the health and performance benefits of exercise training and that loading the cell with high doses of antioxidants leads to a blunting of the positive effects of exercise training. So you could actually be making less fitness gains as a result of taking antioxidant supplements. Certainly not what we want. But wait a minute, as we've already discussed, healthy natural food contains antioxidants. Should we be worried about cons This study on lemon verbena and oxidative stress in exercise tested just that. Subjects followed a 90 minute running protocol for 21 days while supplementing with lemon verbena or a placebo. What they found was that supplementation did not block the cellular adaptive response and also reduced exercise-induced oxidative damage. They conclude that lemon verbena decreases the signs of muscular damage in chronic running exercise without blocking the cellular adaptation to exercise. This is essentially the best of both worlds right here. Decreased recovery time without losing those adaptations to exercise. And it's not just lemon verbena. Pretty much any high antioxidant whole food that has been tested has been shown to improve recovery without hindering adaptation. To s Perhaps it's a bit ironic that I'm ending my supplement video by telling you not to take a supplement. However, I think it's a good reminder that if you're hunting for performance gains by taking supplements, perhaps you should focus on cleaning up your diet first. No matter how healthy your diet is, we could all do better and your performance on the bike will Here he goes again talking about diet. I thought this video was supposed to be about supplements. If there are any supplements that I didn'talk about that you'd If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a I'll see you in the next one.