Supplementation strategies to consider if you’re in triathlon training, Ironman training, or marathon training

Real food is definitely the foundation for good health and optimal athletic performance. Yet there are a few key supplements that may enhance performance in ways that food can’t:

• Consider antioxidants—when you want to increase endurance and reduce muscle damage. Studies have shown that certain antioxidant supplements—including n-acetyl cysteine, quercetin, and green tea catechins—effectively boost endurance performance.

• Consider beta-alanine—when you want to increase fatigue resistance in short, high-intensity efforts. This amino acid appears to reduce the rate at which the muscles become acidic during exercise, which leads to increased endurance.

• Consider caffeine—when you want to improve endurance performance and reduce perceived effort. Caffeine has been proven to enhance endurance performance by increasing the efficiency of muscle contractions and reducing how “hard” it feels to exercise at any given intensity.

• Consider creatine—when you want to increase fatigue resistance in short, high-intensity efforts. Even though creatine is typically thought of as a bodybuilder’s supplement, it appears to enhance performance in the shorter, high-intensity interval workouts that most endurance athletes do.

• Consider mushroom extracts, like the ones contained in the endurance and muscle recovery supplement ARX—when you want to increase endurance and accelerate muscle recovery. Sports scientists now know that the lactate produced by muscles during high-intensity exercise can be recycled by the body and used as an additional fuel source to increase endurance. So anything that enables you to use more lactate faster as fuel will help boost performance. That’s what ARX appears to do—it increases the body’s capacity to transport lactate and process it for energy. How does it do this? The functional ingredients in ARX are herbal and mushroom extracts that have been used in Chinese medicine for centuries. These ingredients are believed to increase muscle perfusion, or blood flow through the muscles, which could explain how ARX accelerates the shuttling and recycling of lactate.