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Sports nutrition
The sports nutrition market is saturated with products promising miraculous improvements in performance. Yet the specialist literature and scientific consensus statements place only a narrow group of substances among the genuinely functional, or ergogenic, food supplements. Alongside creatine, caffeine and nitrates, this elite company also includes beta-alanine, for which there is strong evidence of its ability to help delay muscle fatigue during intense exercise.
You will find beta-alanine in just about every commercial "pre-workout" (pre-training booster). Many athletes have taken a liking to it because of a specific sensation - shortly after drinking it they start to feel itching or tingling all over the body. They automatically associate this feeling with the supplement having started to work immediately, so that they are ready to deliver maximum performance. From the point of view of sports science and physiology, however, this is a mistake. So how should beta-alanine be used to get the most out of it?