Does The Timing Of Beta Alanine Matter?!
Beta-Alanine. What a supplement! One of my personal favourites and now has reached the mainstream!
Now this is a pretty good thing in my eyes as beta alanine is a relatively well researched supplement who’s benefits have been shown in high intensity exercise and delaying fatigue. Pretty useful for a sport or training methodology that involves performing high intensity exercise until we fatigue right?!
Today we’re going to be giving a little overview of beta alanine before answering that age old question (that popped up very recently)....
Does the timing of beta alanine matter?!
What Does Beta Alanine Actually Do?
In the Joe Rogan Podcast, Mat Fraser described it as making him feel like he had a third lung. Turns out BA (as we’ll now call it) does not directly affect your lungs.
Instead, the way BA actually works is by enhancing the carnosine concentration of the muscle! Carnosine itself is a naturally occurring short protein, consisting of the two amino acids, L-histidine and you guessed it, Beta Alanine.
Carnosine is what we call a buffer, in chemistry a buffer is something that resists a change in pH. Carnosine works in a similar way, it latches on to positive hydrogen ions that are produced as a waste product of the lactate energy system. Normally these hydrogen ions would increase the acidity of the muscle which would then result in fatigue, carnosine latching on to them slows acidosis and thus delays fatigue!
More BA=More Carnosine=Longer to fatigue!
And this is something that has been seen on the macro level within the literature. The benefits are seen in events lasting between 60 to 240 seconds, which makes sense from a logical point of view as it’s thought this time domain of exercise will be predominantly fuelled via the lactate energy system.
It’s worth noting here that the benefits are seen from CHRONIC consumption of BA in doses of around 4-6g/day for 4 weeks. An acute, one off dose is likely to not bring any physiological effects (maybe some placebo though). And it has one pretty niche side effect, paraesthesia, which is essentially an intense tingling sensation, some people actually quite like this, but to mitigate it multiple lower doses across the day can help!
So does the timing of it matter?
It’s very commonly found in pre workouts, one of my favourite pre workouts (all black everything, not sponsored, would just like to be) contains it as do many others on the market!
But is there any reason for having it pre workout instead of another point of the day?!
Well there isn’t a huge amount of research out there into the timing of beta alanine, but of the research we do have, it seems that it could be beneficial to take it with a high carb meal [REF].
This is because of the release of insulin that occurs upon ingesting carbohydrates. Insulin as we know is responsible for maintaining blood glucose levels, as a part of this it increases the activity of several nutrient transport pathways! It’s thought that this upregulation can also improve absorption of beta alanine. It’s still thought that, but the evidence isn’t the strongest in the world…. So let’s file it in the “It might help and won’t cause harm” column! [REF].
Caffeine is also thought to improve absorption of BA, again by a similar pathway to that of a carb meal. By increasing activity of nutrient transporters. This slots in nicely with the fact it’s in a tonne of pre workouts but i’m not convinced the makers of the preworkout even considered this.
I actually believe that preworkout purveyors everywhere thought the tingles would provide that placebo effect of feeling like you’re ready to smash a workout! And you can’t really blame them here.
So to answer the age old question of “Does the timing of beta alanine matter?”
Maybe! But probably not.
The key takeaway here should be to just focus on a consistent dose of 4-6g/day for 4 weeks to really see the effects!
And remember, it’s ok to feel a certain way about the tingles….
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I'm a performance nutritionist with a Masters in Human Nutrition. My passions in life revolve around optimising human performance and I currently work with athletes across many levels including several Crossfit Games and Semi Final level athletes.
The advanced physiological testing support that I offer allows me to produce more efficient and individualised plans for athletes allowing us to work smarter and harder.
