Nutritive supplements and their influence on sports per-formance in contemporary world literature, part one: bicarbonate, beta-alanine
Keywords:
bicarbonate, ß-alanine, carnosine, sports performanceAbstract
Introduction: Supplementation with bicarbonate to improve sports performance is considered to be efficient either at present time. However, due to the need to apply bicarbonate at relati-vely high doses and also because of the occurrence of frequent undesirable side effects, athle-tes and sports-nutrition experts have been looking for other alternatives. The best alternative to bicarbonate is currently ß-alanine. ß-alanine becomes not only a common practice among elite athletes, but also got into the spotlight of nutrition experts worldwide. Adding of ß-alanine leads to increase of of carnosine concentration in muscle cells and following delay of muscle fatigue. The main mechanism of the effect is attributed to the intracellular buffering capabilities of ß alanine resp. carnosine which is independent off the bicarbonate buffering system. Objective: Our aim is to summarize and objectively evaluate the effect of bicarbonate and ß-alanine supplementation on athletic performance based on the latest knowledge of the world literature. Methods: We used two databases of scientific works Google Scholar and Web of Science. The articles were searched by the key words from the year 2000 to the pre-sent. We chose only double-blind studies with a control group and placebo. Results: We found 143 high-quality work and 8 review articles. Most consistent positive effects after ad-ministration of ß-alanine was found in decrease of neuromuscular fatigue in the short intensive performance from 30 s to 10 minutes due to delay of metabolic acidosis. The recommended daily allowance (RDA) of beta-alanine was assessed from 1.6 to 6.4 grams per day. The only undesirable effect of β-alanine is paresthesia. It is therefore recommended to divide the RDA into multiple doses per day. Conclusions: Bicarbonate and ß-alanine are able to enhance di-rectly the athletic performance by the delay of metabolic acidosis and thus reduce the muscle fatigue. The most probable cause of different individual effect of β-alanine supplementation is considerably different responsibility of individual human organism to this supplement.
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