 There are seemingly endless number of supplements that claim to in one way or another improve performance or speed recovery. 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. You know, just in case it actually works. We even include some substances that are probably illegal to sell to consumers. Um, hey actually let's cut that last part out of the video, okay? Um, sure. 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. Even 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. All right, without further ado, let's get into the list and all the nitty gritty details on supplements that actually work. Let's 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 consume it because our bodies produce it naturally. Beta alanine helps with the production of carnazine, which plays a role in muscular endurance at high intensities. The International Society of Sports and 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 consume beta alanine kind of feels like the tingling that you experience when you lose circulation to your hand, although to a lesser degree. 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% likely to increase average power during the four-minute cycling time trial when compared with the placebo. 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 to 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 kilometer time trial and only found improvements after supplementation in the 4 kilometer 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 that's a bad thing? This doesn't appear to be the case with beta alanine though, at least in combination with sodium bicarbonate, otherwise known as baking soda, which is used as an ergogenic aid by buffering muscle acid production. This study on taking beta alanine and sodium bicarbonate together assigns subjects to one of four groups, placebo plus placebo, beta alanine plus placebo, sodium bicarbonate plus placebo, or beta alanine plus sodium bicarbonate. What they found was a 7 and 8% increase in total work done with beta alanine and sodium bicarbonate respectively, but an additive 14% increase when subjects consumed both together. This review on the effects of beta alanine confirmed these findings. This brings us to sodium bicarbonate. Sodium bicarbonate is another supplement that has promising results in the literature. For example, this study done on competitive cyclists that tested one hour time trial performance. They found that when subjects consumed sodium bicarbonate, they performed significantly better than in the placebo or control condition, and this is likely due to the maintenance of a pH level that is closer to normal resting levels. Seems easy, just dump a scoop of baking soda into your bottle and you'll be good to go. Unfortunately, there's one major drawback with sodium bicarbonate and that is digestive issues. For example, this study in which a number of participants experienced GI discomfort during testing. This study concluded that sodium bicarbonate improved high intensity cycling capacity with the exclusion of participants experiencing GI discomfort. Differences in blood responses suggest that sodium bicarbonate may not be beneficial to all individuals. However, the GI issues could potentially be mitigated by taking it three to four hours before exercise or by consuming it with a meal. So in theory, sodium bicarbonate may work great as a performance aid, but in practice, well, I wouldn't try it for the first time before a race. The GI distress associated with ingesting sodium bicarbonate has led to products like amp-human, which is a topical sodium bicarbonate cream that you apply to your skin around the working muscle. Unfortunately, the research on these topical sodium bicarbonate products is all funded by amp-human, is fairly limited, and to be honest, is really not all that convincing, but if you want to see the science laid out, I made a whole video on amp-human, which I'll link down in the description. And while the effects of sodium bicarbonate do appear to be additive with beta alanine, they don't appear to be additive with other common supplements like caffeine. This study testing the ingestion of sodium bicarbonate and caffeine together found that both caffeine and sodium bicarbonate increased performance. 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's 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 pee that we're after. Fun fact, Hypergain Beast Mode Mask Gainer Raw Edition also turns your pee 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, and 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 consume beet juice or a placebo for six days prior to performing a 10 kilometer time trial. Sure enough, power output and time trial performance improved after subjects consumed beet juice. 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, like this one on well-trained cyclists that found that beet juice had no effect on one-hour time trial performance. If we take a step back, though, and try to find where the balance of evidence regarding beetroot 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 likely some benefit to drinking beet juice. 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 like caffeine. And given the fact that the evidence for the benefits of caffeine are very strong, stronger than the evidence for the benefits of beetroot 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 beetroot juice than just performance benefits. For example, beetroot 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, you know, like fruits and vegetables and not a pill, may be beneficial. 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. From 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, definitely not what we want. But wait a minute, as we've already discussed, healthy natural food contains antioxidants. Should we be worried about consuming these foods if we want to maximize our training? 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 sum it all up, going back to this review, they state that an adequate intake of vitamins and minerals through a varied and balanced diet remains the best approach to maintain the optimal antioxidant status in exercising individuals. 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 likely improve because of it. Ugh. Here he goes again talking about diet. I thought this video was supposed to be about supplements. You know, the thing that I'm supposed to be able to take to make up for my crappy diet. Thanks for watching. If there are any supplements that I didn't talk about that you'd like to see me cover in a future video, let me know down in the comment section below. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like, subscribe for weekly science-based cycling videos just like this one, and share this video with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.