Have I Used This Plan
I supplemented similarly to this a few years back. My stack included creatine and HMB. I also took whey protein with my lunch and immediately after working out. I didn’t take any casein or glutamine which I would obviously add this time around. I believe that the glutamine and creatine in conjunction would really give the muscles a very full look.
I feel the HMB may have been the vital piece as I said before, I just could not get the same level of soreness while taking it. Staying anabolic is the key to recovery and all of these supplements work well. It has gotten cheaper because its so old now, but I feel the newer generations offer little more for a lot more money.
What Are Muscle Cramps
Cramping of a muscle occurs when the muscles are forced to contract and do not rest. When we move our extremities, the muscles in our arms and legs that can be manipulated freely contract and relax alternatively.
When we stand or sit, the muscles that stabilize our heads, necks, and trunks all contract at the same time. It is referred to as a spasm when an entire muscle contracts without your conscious consent.
A cramp develops if the spasm lasts for an extended period of time. When you get a muscle cramp, you may see or feel a stiffening of the affected muscle.
Ultimate Muscle Soreness Remedies
by Ben Brown | Jun 21, 2017
If youve ever tried a new workout, hit the gym for the first time in a while, or done a really intense workout , youve likely experience delayed onset muscle soreness . DOMS is another name for the achiness and stiffness that you feel in your muscles anywhere from hours to days after you exercise.
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Can Tart Cherry Juice Help You Sleep
Probably not much, if at all. Supposedly the stuff contains melatonin, or melatonin precursors . For context, you should know that your guide is a hard-core insomniac: I have a bonified life-altering sleep disorder, narcolepsy, and narcoleptics have as much trouble staying asleep as we do staying awake. My wife, struggling with her own sleep issues, brought home some tart cherry juice hard to find and not cheap because a friend told her it was good for insomnia. Millions have heard the same, because the mere existence of what looks like a positive study is all the internet needs to justify a kajillion blog posts declaring that cherries can slay our insomnia demons.
The reality is that there are just a handful of pilot studies with technically positive but pathetically underwhelming results.707172 There is effectively no actual science here. The onlys tory here is yet another supplement hype case study.
Warning: Contaminated Supplements Are Common
Contaminated supplements are a thing.6 The problem is so serious that its responsible for a huge rise in supplement-related calls to poison centers.7 In 2018 the Clean Label Project found 64 percent of a popular supplement category had detectable levels of arsenic, a third tested positive for lead, 17% had cadmium, and more and worse.
One major pharmacy is now testing products themselves to protect their customers . A huge and totally unregulated industry is selling to legions of credulous people who are knee-jerk cynical about Big Pharma but never question the scruples of supplement sellers. What could possibly go wrong? Poisoning thats what!
Adulteration is another major concern: shady supplement makers spike their products with actual drugs to win fans in shocking numbers.8910 Who needs placebo when your customers can swear by your product because it has actual pharmaceutical effects?
Dr William Osler once said, One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine. This sage advice coupled with the adage first, do no harm seems appropriate when discussing the use of dietary supplements with our patients and athletes due to their limited efficacy and known safety risks.
Unicorn horn velvet! Made with red unicorn meat
So anabolic its illegal in 9 countries. From a parody of the hyperbolic claims that are all-too common in the supplement industry, by NutraPlanet.com .
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Why Bcaas Help With Muscle Soreness
I mentioned that exercising creates tiny tears in our muscle fibers. These tears are the result of muscle protein breakdown . In order to prevent muscle catabolism , we need to provide our muscles with protein to stimulate muscle protein synthesis . BCAAs are particularly good at stimulating MPS, which means that they can help speed up repair and recovery, resulting in less post-workout pain.
When you drink a protein shake, your body breaks apart that protein into individual amino acids. These amino acids then get reorganized into new proteins. BCAAs are free amino acids, which means that your body doesnt have to break them down. They are immediately absorbed and made available to refuel our muscles.
These are some of the reasons why we included BCAAs in our all-in-one training formula, Complete Essentials.
Why Do Muscles Get Sore After A Workout
Aching muscles after a workout, also known as delayed onset muscle soreness , are due to micro-tears in your muscles that occur when you put stress on them. Usually, youll begin to feel this soreness 24 to 48 hours after a workout. This is typically how long it takes for your body to produce inflammation as a result of that injury and cause discomfort and pain in the muscle.
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Cramping Your Recovery Style
I can’t think of any supplements that really hamper your recovery – just huge wastes of money. Some good examples of glutamine , HMB , and expensive super-formulas
Honestly, I don’t believe or have reason to believe that any supplements really inhibit recovery. Sure, Arachidonic Acid will increase DOMS, and stimulants will maybe make you strung out, but these are not negatives I think outweigh the products’ benefits. For instance, consider the recent study that cites caffeine’s ability to actually CUT Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness.
Factors That Affect Muscle Contraction And Fatigue
The production of skeletal muscle force depends on contractile mechanisms, and failure at any of the sites upstream of the cross-bridges can contribute to the development of muscle fatigue, including nervous, ion, vascular and energy systems. Specifically, metabolic factors and fatigue reactants during the process of contraction, such as hydrogen ions, lactate, inorganic phosphate , reactive oxygen species , heat shock protein and orosomucoid , also affect muscle fatigue.
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Energy Drinks Everymans Ergogenic Aid
Red Bullshit?
The most ubiquitous of the ergogenic aids are the energy drinks, like Red Bull, Full Throttle, or Rockstar. Virtually every imaginable and claimed ergogenic aid has been put into drink form for you Red Bull Vitalizes Body and Mind and their website is festooned with athletic imagery. But almost all of them mainly rely on caffeine for the real effect. Pharmacist and writer Scott Gavura cuts energy drinks down to size:
Despite the impressive lists of ingredients and slick marketing, these products are essentially caffeine delivery vehicles, most of which come loaded with sugar.
Although caffeine can actually boost performance in some ways, technically its just a stimulant, not a true ergogenic aid: that is, it makes us feel like we have more energy rather than actually having it. Cocaine and other narcotic amphetamines do the same thing, only more so, infamously making people overconfident about abilities that have not actually changed.
Arthritis And Exercise Soreness Are The Focus Of A Great Deal Of Supplement Research
The more you read on this page, the more you might notice a pattern: again and again, the research is about arthritis or exercise soreness. They are good proxies for lots of other kinds of pain. They are very common, and anything good for those things might be useful for other kinds of pain, too.
You can only take that so far, though. There are many causes of pain, more than most people realize, and pain is weird volatile, complex, and deeply baked into our biology. A broad spectrum pain-killer is impossible in principle: anything that works for one kind of pain is always likely to fail with a bunch of others. A basic truth about pain is that the only way to treat it is to take the person out of the equation anaesthesia. As long as you are still conscious, there are still ways that you can hurt, no matter what you eat .
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But It Worked For Me The Role Of Anecdotes And Testimonials
Good! But please curb your enthusiasm: even if something really did work for you, that doesnt mean its working for anyone else. To be considered safe and effective, a medicine or treatment has to have a solid cost-benefit profile for most people, most of the time. There are lots of treatments that are good for a handful of people, once in a blue moon. If you are one of those lucky ones, please dont assume it means that the product is the best thing since sliced bread.
Its more likely that you healed all by yourself, however.
Its pretty unlikely that any nutraceuticals should get the credit for healing. It was probably all you: lucky natural healing, and maybe some of your mind powers! Placebo, in other words. Placebo is a powerful, extensively studied, and very real and interesting phenomenon. See The Strange Powers of the Placebo Effect 2:57 for a terrific 3-minute video tour of the the many strange effects of placebos.
These products arent proven. Placebo is. Consider the startling way that placebo worked just as well as intravenous magnesium as a back pain treatment *at least two weeks* of a six month trial.84 No one could be blamed for misinterpreting that as a full-blown success.
Nowhere in health care do testimonials and anecdotes seem to play a bigger role than they do here: with things you put in your mouth. Unfortunately, they are pretty much worthless.
Turmeric & Black Pepper
Turmeric has many scientifically-proven health benefits. Curcumin, found in turmeric, has strong anti-inflammatory properties. In fact, its so powerful that it matches the effectiveness of some anti-inflammatory drugs, without the side effects.
It is best to take turmeric with black pepper. Black pepper contains the bioactive compound piperine. Piperine has been shown to help relieve nausea, headaches and poor digestion and also has anti-inflammatory properties, but its most significant benefit is its ability to boost the absorption of curcumin by up to 2000%
Therefore by taking black pepper along with your turmeric supplement you can boost absorption of the main active ingredient, and increase the benefits you receive.
Recommended Dose: For anti-inflammatory effects 1000-1500mg of turmeric extract a day.
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Data Extraction And Outcome Measures
The characteristics of the studies, such as types and number of participants, types of exercise tests performed, supplementation protocols for L-citrulline or CM, and primary or secondary outcomes were extracted manually for each article. The means and SD of the RPE, muscle soreness, and blood lactate levels for the citrulline supplementation group and the placebo group were determined from the original data included in the article. If the data were presented only graphically, they were read via WebPlotDigitizer., WebPlotDigitizer is a web-based program that allows conversion of graphical data to numerical data through manual plotting. Although WebPlotDigitizer relies on manual plotting, the intercoder reliability is high. WebPlotDigitizer has been used in previous systematic reviews and meta-analyses, including those pertaining to nutritional supplements., ,
Not All Of The Rumors Are True
As is usually the case with supplements, they dont always do what people claim. Im glad the scientific community is paying more attention to them though. It helps us weed out the useful from the waste of money.
And that what I found with some of the supplements that are supposed to help with DOMS. Some of them simply didnt seem to help with DOMS when you look at the weight of the data. Included in that category are protein supplements, taurine, tart cherry juice, and ginger. While these do seem to help with other aspects of recovery, they dont seem to relieve pain from DOMS.
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Which Vitamins Are Good For Muscle Health
You have probably heard a lot about vitamins and the role they play in many essential body functions. For example, vitamin A is necessary for eye health. Vitamin D contributes to your immune system and helps you fight disease. To the uninitiated, some vitamins also play a significant role in muscle growth and muscle recovery as well. Lets take a look at the most important vitamins for muscle health:
Search Strategy And Quality Assessment
A systematic literature search was performed using PubMed and Web of Science databases to identify articles published up to April 2019 that evaluated the effects of L-citrulline or CM on the post-exercise RPE, muscle soreness, and blood lactate levels. The literature search process followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. Various combinations of keywords such as citrulline, exercise, strength, power, performance, athlete, muscle, fatigue, recovery, exertion, soreness, lactate, and lactic acid were used with AND or OR commands. A manual search was also performed using reference lists of identified relevant articles to ensure that all appropriate studies were included in the analysis. After deleting duplicate articles, 2 researchers individually assessed each study based on predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria, as described in , to select the eligible articles. The quality of each article was assessed based on the Cochrane risk of bias tool for randomized controlled trials. Unpublished clinical trials were also searched using the term citrulline on ClinicalTrials.gov to identify any unpublished trials.
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Who Is Susceptible To Doms
Pretty much anyone who works out can fall prey to delayed onset muscle soreness. It is especially a part and parcel of workout routines aiming for hypertrophy.
High-intensity workouts such as eccentric exercises, that is when you tense up and lengthen a muscle at the same time, which is pretty common during any sort of resistance training, is a very common trigger for DOMS.
While pro athletes and bodybuilders often experience DOMS, workout enthusiasts like you and me or even complete novices embarking on their workout journey, are no strangers to it either.
Essentially, you take your workout intensity up a notch, and you can be saddled with DOMS.
Big Suppla: Large Supplement Corporations Are Not Only Just As Bad Or Worse Than The Pharmaceutical One Many Of Them Are The Same Corporations
Cranking about Big Pharma while giving the supplements industry a free pass really chaps my arse.
Its not that the pharmaceutical industry is innocent certainly not! Scandals galore! Seriously major issues, even! But paranoia about Big Pharma has reached a fever pitch that isnt even remotely proportionate to the problem, and the most shrill critics seem unable to comprehend that the supplements industry lets call them Big Suppla is both insanely profitable and much more unregulated and corrupt.
The double standard is maddening.
Its also critical to understand that Big Suppla is Big Pharma. Theres huge overlap. Pharmaceutical companies own most of the big supplement companies now, and use them to produce massively profitable products with near-zero regulation. A substantial percentage of the profits generated by supplements are going straight into Big Pharmas pockets.
A 2010 study in the British Medical Journal noted that studies funded by Big Suppla tend to produce results that were heres a shocker biased in favour of supplements!85
And the supplement companies that are not owned by Big Pharma? Many of the biggest are far worse than Big Pharma
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The 5 Best Muscle Repair Supplements After Injury
When you decide to use muscle repair supplements after injury for recovery or even for injury prevention, youre likely doing so for a few reasons:
- To prevent further damage to the injured area and tissues
- To optimize collagen synthesis and tissue formation
- To ensure that your body is receiving the micronutrients it needs to repair its connective tissues
For the most part, your body is seeking help to repair the injured tissue through additional antioxidants and amino acids. Other muscle repair supplements after injury can offer help to control things like inflammation or the absorption of necessary nutrients.
Here are our top five muscle repair supplements after injury to help you recover quickly and get back to the sport you love.
Cervicomedullary Region Electrical Stimulation
Electrical stimulation in the cervicomedullary region aims to activate the corticospinal tract at a subcortical level, thereby eliminating cortical contributions to the evoked muscle response. The muscular response recorded by EMG is known as the cervicomedullary motor-evoked potential . Comparison of MEP and CMEP is helpful for the localization of excitability at the cortical or subcortical level. During a sustained 30% MVC of the plantar flexors, a large increase in MEP and only a slight increase in CMEP have been reported, thus suggesting a small contribution of spinal factors to the increase in corticospinal excitability during submaximal fatiguing contractions. In contrast, during 50% MVC of the elbow flexors to task failure, similar MEP and CMEP kinetics has been found, thus indicating that central changes occur almost entirely at the spinal level., ,
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