Sports drink with BCAAs and arginine boosts post-training recovery

If you take BCAAs just before or during your training session, they reduce muscle damage and boost the anabolic stimulus of your training. Ok, we all knew this already. But researchers at the National Taiwan Sport University are soon to publish a study in the Chinese Journal of Physiology that suggests that endurance athletes recover faster if they take a mix of BCAAs, sugars and L-arginine after a training session.

The Taiwanese got 14 male students to run twice to the point of exhaustion on a treadmill. First they ran for 5 minutes at 55 percent of their maximal oxygen uptake, and then for 30 minutes at 75 percent, and after that the intensity increased by one percent every minute until the students couldn't take any more. The students had not had breakfast.

After the session the subjects were given 200 ml sports drink. On one occasion the drink contained nothing apart from flavourings. [PL] On the other occasion the students drank a product made by Otsuka Pharmaceutical, Amino Value. The composition of the drink is shown below.