 Welcome back to another video. As you guys can tell from the title, this video is about supplements. In this video, I'm only gonna talk about supplements that I'm actively using, and I think are important for you guys if you wanna enhance your performance. Obviously, there are way more supplements out there that you can use for certain goals, you know, to achieve your goals faster, but like I said, these are the supplements that I use. Let's start with creatine monohydrate. A lot of people ask me that all the time. Is it like, is that legal? What is it? What does it do? Is it safe? This is a muscle building, performant enhancing supplement, and it's probably one of the safest supplements out there. Mind you, I said creatine monohydrate. I'm not talking about anything, you know, any kind of mixtures. I'm not even gonna talk about that. I really wanna focus on creatine monohydrate. What is creatine? What does it do in your body? The main reason why you should take it is because creatine will help you maintain energy throughout a high intensity workout. Another thing that I wanna mention is that I'm talking about workouts at the gym. I'm not talking about, you know, marathon runners or like any endurance training. I'm talking about resistance training. So we got number one, it helps maintain energy levels throughout the workout. So number two, how much should I take? When should I take it? What's the deal with it? I recommend taking five grams per day and you do not have to cycle it. So it's not like, okay, I'll take it for two weeks and then I have to like take a week off. Because you have creatine in meats. And if you eat a lot of meat, you already have a lot of creatine in your diet, which is great. And you probably don't even have to supplement creatine. I would still do it, but the benefits won't show as much as, for example, for me, because I'm on a plant-based diet, so I don't eat any meat. So I need to supplement creatine through creatine monohydrate. Some people recommend a loading week when you're very new to creatine and you've never used it to have 20 grams per day for one week and then reduce it to five grams per day. I personally like that approach. I've done it several times. And every time when I have a very stressful, just phase in my life and I work out a lot and I feel like, hey, I'm getting really tired throughout my workouts and my recovery time is my recovery period is way longer than it used to be. So that's when I throw in a loading week where I just do 20 grams per day. And it helps me a lot. And on top of that, I feel way stronger because I have more energy and yeah, I just feel great. Next supplement I wanna talk about are branched chain amino acids. In short, BCAAs. I'm gonna make this very simple because I've always been a good learner when it makes sense and it's not too complicated. So I wanna break this down so you just get the idea of what each supplement does. So BCAAs give you energy throughout your workout. Therefore, it's good to take BCAAs before or during your workout. BCAAs, essential amino acids, leucine, isoleucine, and valine. These three, you cannot produce. So your body cannot produce those amino acids, which means you have to take them through diet or supplementation. So make it very simple. If you take BCAAs before or during your workout, you will increase the energy level within your body. And on top of that BCAAs help regulate protein metabolism, which means it doesn't break down protein because you have more energy. So now with more glycogen in your muscles, you won't lose any muscle mass because your body has enough energy to sustain the workout routine. One question that I frequently see is, are you natural or do you take protein powder? So these two have nothing to do with each other because you can be natural and take protein powder and you eat protein. Like it's just protein in powder form. Let's swing back to protein powder. When should I take it? Why is it good for you? How many grams of protein should you take? Especially after a workout, I immediately have a protein shake because I wanna make sure that I feed my body with protein to recover faster and make sure that my body can use that protein to build up the muscle again. If you wanna know how many grams of protein you should take, check out this video up here. I made a video about how to calculate your macros. This video will help you out a lot. Basically, you can use protein powder throughout your day to just increase your protein intake. For example, if it's like 4 p.m. and you realize, oh, I only had like two meals. And I had like 30 grams of protein, it's not a lot. Like I usually have 30 grams in one meal. I use protein powder in between meals just to increase my protein intake without having to sit down and cook something and eat and like just, it's a lot of time. Like with a shake, you just drink it and you're done and you know, check, check, check. I got my protein and I'm good to go. One main reason why you should take protein powder after workout or use it in between is because you wanna build muscle, right? I mean, that's the goal. There are different kind of protein powders out there. There's whey protein, KC, there's soy products, there's like organic pea protein, rice protein, like so many different things. I am on a plant-based diet so I personally use organic pea protein. I just feel better with it. I used to take whey protein before I went on that plant-based diet which was about five years ago. So yeah, it works perfectly for me. I love the vegan protein powders. They're very smooth and make me feel good. Don't make me gassy whatsoever. I know a lot of people think that plant-based protein powder makes you gassy but for me, what's the other way around? Like the whey protein, yep. And now I just feel like, you know, I feel healthy. Let's talk about glutamine. Glutamine is a very important supplement and I like it a lot. It is not something, it's a non-essential amino acid but it won't help you with like an insane pump or muscle growth or endurance or like, you know, like caffeine, it won't make you hype. This is our recovery supplement. Glutamine helps you remove ammonia out of your muscles which, you know, can occur throughout heavy high-intensity workout routines. So we work out, we build up, I just call it trash in there, you know, all that lactic acid, like all that acidity in our muscles and then with glutamine, glutamine helps you regulate your acid-base levels which is great because this will help you recover faster and if you recover faster, you can go to the gym sooner and you can get more gains. Personally, like taking 10 to 15 grams post workout in a shake, so I just, you know, throw it to the protein powder and have some almond milk and maybe a banana with it. A lot of people swear by it, some people say they don't need it. I personally like it because it makes, because I don't drink coffee at all so whenever I have pre-workout that includes caffeine, I just feel like I'm like, you know, that little, what is it, the squirrel in that one movie? Well, I just have a lot of energy and I feel like I'm very focused and yeah, just tons of energy. I would recommend switching it up a little bit, you know, maybe test it, like when you know you have like a very intense workout ahead of you, take a pre-workout that includes caffeine. If it's just like an arm routine, I personally don't take caffeine for like an arm workout because it's just like a small muscle group, I'm not gonna be super exhausted. Obviously my arms are gonna be tired but you know what I mean, like after a leg day, your entire body, you're just exhausted because it's like, you know, compound movements rather than just doing a curl. My suggestion is that you look at your workout and whenever you feel like, oh, this is a hard workout for me, I'm always, you know, extremely tired or I need to be focused for this one, take caffeine and if it's like a smaller workout, then don't. So you switch it up and your body gets not used to like every single day, like 200 milligrams of caffeine. It's a good range, what's like really good. I would say between 100 to 300 milligrams of caffeine is okay but I would start at the lower milligram first because if you try like 300, like when I first started taking pre-workout and I wasn't used to caffeine and I took like a 200 milligram, you know, pre-workout, I was shaking because my body was not used to that. So if you're completely new to this, please make sure that you start very low to not stress your body too much in the beginning, like slowly build it up. Okay, so these were the supplements that I personally use or have used in the past and I've seen great results. As I mentioned earlier, this entire video was for resistance training only. Like I'm not talking about endurance training. So if you wanna run a marathon, some of the supplements that I talked about today won't help you to achieve your goal faster. All right guys, that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, I would appreciate it if you leave a like, subscribe to my channel and I hit the notification button. That's always so hard to say for whatever reason. And yeah, leave a comment below. Let me know what you guys wanna see. I have one special video planned within the next three days. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you next time.