One of your main goals if you partake in weightlifting, bodybuilding, martial arts, or athletic activities is to gain lean body mass. Luckily, using bodybuilding supplements helps you attain this goal, as well as speed up your recovery time and boost your overall strength. In truth, realising all this would be a far-fetched dream if you instead opted to only eat a healthy, well-balanced diet and stay hydrated.
With these insights, you need to search for the best SARMs for cutting if you’re committed to attaining your workout goals for the long term. But you shouldn’t just choose any other supplement to do the hard work for you. Instead, you should get one with the right ingredients to help strengthen your muscle and consistently maintain high-intensity workouts. The supplement should help enhance your efforts; not be the main driver towards your goals. With that said, here’s a list of ingredients you must look out for when deciding on the best bodybuilding supplement.
1. Branched-Chain Amino Acids (BCAAs)
The three essential types of amino acids that make up BCAAs are valine, isoleucine, and leucine. You should consider going for bodybuilding supplements that contain BCAAs because the human body doesn’t produce them naturally. Therefore, you can only get these amino acids from foods such as fish, eggs, chicken, dairy, and red meat.
But to get an optimal quantity of BCAA, you need to use bodybuilding supplements that have it as one of the main ingredients. This way, your body will get the required BCAAs to aid in building and repairing muscle repair. Other benefits of BCAAs include reducing fatigue and muscle soreness once you’re done with your workouts. In addition, BCAAs safeguard your body from catabolic environments that arise when exercising.
BCAA supplementation does not pose any health risk to your overall well-being. With that said, you should stick to the recommended dose of 10 to 20 grams before you start your workouts. You can also use this supplement after or when exercising.
2. Creatine
Another essential ingredient you should look for in a bodybuilding supplement is creatine, a nitrogenous organic acid that comprises three amino acids, L-methionine, glycine, and L-arginine. It’s among the best supplements that help in various ways, such as aiding recovery, building lean muscle, and boating your overall strength. Creatine is especially ideal if your workouts need explosive strength, for instance, weight lifting.
There’s no specific time when you should use creatine, meaning there’s no problem using it before or after your workouts. However, it’s best to use creatine before you exercise, ideally 30 minutes before, to give your body time to metabolise this ingredient. The ideal creatine dosage for a bodybuilder or athlete is five grams daily. If you remain consistent with its use, you’ll see its benefits in the long run, such as enhanced muscle strength and size.
3. Beta-Alanine
While you might be willing to go that extra mile when exercising, your body isn’t always in the right condition to do so because of lactic acid accumulating in the muscles. As a result, it becomes a lot harder to put in the additional high-intensity reps to push your body to the limit fully. But if you use Beta-alanine, a complex compound that helps lower the buildup of lactic acid in your muscles, this won’t be an issue anymore.
Beta-alanine works by lessening hydrogen ions to fight the accumulation of lactic acid in your body’s muscles when exercising. This gives you that added energy and pushes you to continue with your workouts as a bodybuilder. For optimal effectiveness, you should use 1.5 to 5 grams of beta-alanine each day. You shouldn’t exceed this dose; otherwise risk experiencing adverse side effects such as a tingling sensation or skin flushing due to increased blood flow.
4. Caffeine
Working out requires you to have that extra push to laziness, but consistently maintaining this is often a challenge for most people. And if you’re passionate about your bodybuilding goals, you need to get a caffeine supplement that will help boost your mental and physical energy. Other advantages of using caffeine include the following:
- Reducing the perception of effort.
- Increasing blood flow.
- Boosting your muscle’s power and endurance.
Knowing this, using caffeine should be one of your main goals to maximise your time working out and capably manage greater workloads without too much stress. With this motivation to train a lot harder, thanks to caffeine, you’ll be on track to achieve your set workout goals, such as gaining muscle mass and strength.
You should only use caffeine in the recommended doses of 400 mg each day or 1.8 to 2.7 mg per kilogram of body weight. Exceeding this dosage can have adverse side effects, such as insomnia, mainly if you use caffeine late during the day. In addition, using too much caffeine will increase your dependence on the quantity you need to get going during your workouts.