Branched Chain Amino Acids (BCAAs) may be the essential ingredient missing from your fitness routine. They benefit muscle health in numerous ways, so they’re a great way to enhance your weight training routine.
These essential amino acids are the most abundant amino acids on earth and all life forms including animals, plants, and fungi synthesize BCAAs to live. If all living things need them, it shows just how important they are!
What exactly are BCAAs? In the simplest terms, they’re three of the nine essential amino acids. Essential amino acids aren’t produced naturally in our bodies, so we need to replace them regularly through our diet or supplements.
BCAAs have a unique branched molecular structure which supports our tissues. They are made of a chain of three hydrogen atoms linked to the side of a carbon atom. We usually consume these three amino acids together, so they’re not often studied separately:
They’re most known for muscle tissue health, because athletes use them as part of their nutritional regimens. However, they also have important benefits for preventing diseases such as diabetes, cancer and heart failure. They also help with our wellbeing by improving our metabolism, gut health, and immunity, and several studies have found they support focus and cognition.
BCAAs are found in a variety of protein-rich foods like poultry, eggs, fish, and cottage cheese. For vegans, lab-made supplements are available.
Supplements like our Healthy Human Sports Recovery hydration tablet, which contains the three BCAAs, is the most convenient way to add BCAAs to your workout. In a supplement form, the precise blend of vitamins, minerals, and electrolytes helps your body absorb the amino acids faster.
There’s no wonder why athletes love BCAAs, with their important role in contributing to muscle resilience and key performance-linked benefits. Here are the key benefits of BCAAs for athletes, fitness fanatics, and anyone else interested in improving their wellness.
Our sense of fatigue arises when serotonin is released in our brains. During prolonged physically challenging activities, BCAAs delay the synthesis of serotonin by keeping a balance of the ratio between BCAAs and free tryptophans, another essential amino acid.
Delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) shows up 12 hours to a day after a workout, and it is likely caused by small tears in muscle tissue that form during a workout. A study of the impact of BCAAs on DOMs after a squat workout showed reductions in soreness compared to a control group.
Muscle synthesis, the process of growing muscle tissue, depends on essential amino acids. You can likely achieve over 20% higher muscle protein synthesis by drinking a sports drink with BCAAs after your workout, according to the findings of one study.
You can use BCAAs along with your workouts to defend your muscular health. When our bodies lack the necessary fat or nutrition to support our physical activity, our body turns to muscle tissue to release amino acids. This causes our muscles to atrophy and waste away. Taking BCAAs helps preserve the existing muscle mass you have.
You can use BCAAs along with your workouts to defend your muscular health. When our bodies lack the necessary fat or nutrition to support our physical activity, our body turns to muscle tissue to release amino acids. This causes our muscles to atrophy and waste away. Taking BCAAs helps preserve the existing muscle mass you have.
Because of the regulatory function BCAAs play for glucose in our bodies, they also may lower blood sugar levels. This function is known as glucose homeostasis, which means keeping our blood sugar levels constant.
Daily intake recommendations for BCAAs range from 0.9 g/kg/day to 2.2 g/kg/day for adult males. The average of 1.7 g/kg/day would amount to about 122 g of BCAAs for a 160 lb male.
Most of the BCAAs you need each day come from your food, so it’s safe to supplement roughly 10-35 grams of BCAAs for exercise.
You can easily drink BCAAs before and after workouts by dissolving our Sports Recovery tabs into your Healthy Human water bottle.
Unsure of whether to take your BCAAs before or after a workout? The good thing is that our bodies absorb them quickly, causing our BCAA levels to double or triple in the 3 hours after we take them.
Taking them roughly 10-20 minutes before a vigorous workout will help supplement the BCAAs that are synthesized during exercise. However, you can also take them immediately after a workout if you’re concerned about delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS).
With so many supplements available for improving your muscle tone and condition, it’s important to understand the differences between the different types of supplements available. Here are some key differences between BCAAs and other supplements.
BCAAs are a subset of the nine essential amino acids (EAAs). If you take EAAs, you’ll get all nine of the essential amino acids, which we usually get from food.
Whey is an optimal muscle building nutritional tool. It not only contains all of the EAAs, it includes additional anabolic (muscle building) and anti-catabolic (muscle wasting) nutrients.
However, it is easier to consume whey in a protein shake, whereas you can easily drink BCAAs dissolved in water. So, the difference boils down to whether you want to boost your hydration with added muscle support (BCAAs) or you want to boost your muscles with a more well-rounded nutritional support shake (whey).
Creatine is not an essential amino acid. It’s already produced in our bodies naturally. Similar to BCAAs, creatine helps muscle soreness, but it otherwise has different benefits. Creatine improves energy, focus, and lean muscle building through a different molecular process than BCAAs.
Consider taking BCAAs and creatine together for compounded benefits.
BCAAs are important for our muscles to grow, heal, and rest. They improve our physical performance and aid a variety of important physical defenses like immunity and metabolic regulation.
Taking BCAA supplements as part of your hydration routine can amplify the benefits of your beverage, especially for challenging activities like weight training, which cause you to lose a lot of fluid in the form of sweat. Try our convenient, easy-to-drink BCAA supplement Sports Recovery tablets, which dissolve in water before your next workout.
