Hydration and pumps aren’t just for pre-workout situations – they can enhance recovery as well:
Taurine
A stack that’s stood the test of time!
Taurine is one of our favorite ingredients because it has so many different benefits, and Universal’s been including it since before it was the cool thing to do.
Taurine as an osmolyte and ergogenic aid
The main reason you see taurine in pre-workout and intra-workout supplements is because it’s an osmolyte.[27] Osmolytes are substances that increase cellular hydration above baseline by increasing the osmotic pressure around your body’s cells.
When your cells have more water, they also have access to additional nutrients and can more efficiently clear the waste produced by cellular metabolism. They’re also more resilient to heat stress, which is a concern during tough workouts. The upshot is that once cells are in a state of hyperhydration, they can work hard for you much longer than normal, which manifests at scale as increased athletic endurance.[28]
Unlike fellow osmolyte and ergogenic aid creatine, taurine doesn’t need to be “loaded”. A 2018 meta-analysis showed that a 1-gram dose taken immediately before exercise is enough to confer endurance-boosting effects.[28]
Taurine is also a strong antioxidant[29,30] and can help facilitate muscle contractions by supporting calcium signaling in muscle cells.[31]
Taurine’s cognitive effects
In the central nervous system, taurine acts as a GABAergic compound, meaning it mimics the action of the neurotransmitter gamma-Aminobutyric acid (GABA). As an inhibitory neurotransmitter, GABA calms neurons by downregulating certain types of activity.[32] This produces an anti-inflammatory effect. Taurine has also been shown to drive mitochondrial biogenesis in neurons.[32]
Anecdotally, users report that taurine helps take the edge off stimulants, which is one reason why supplement formulators are increasingly stacking it with caffeine.
Taurine’s neuroprotective effects are part of the reason it can help upregulate dopamine activity.[33] Since dopamine increases focus and motivation, this is yet another benefit that makes taurine a great ingredient for supporting intense workouts.
Taurine’s effects on body composition: brown adipose tissue (BAT)
Taurine’s effect on endurance, with success in doses anywhere from 1 gram to 6 grams.[28]
Finally, taurine might be able to help you achieve and maintain your ideal physique by increasing your body’s proportion of brown adipose tissue (BAT),[34] a metabolically active type of fat that’s packed with mitochondria and burns calories as heat.
Taurine actually converts white adipose tissue (WAT), which is comparatively devoid of mitochondria and thus metabolically inactive, into BAT. Ultimately, this conversion increases the number of calories your body burns in a day,[35] making it easier to lose unwanted body fat and keep it off.
Taurine has even been shown to selectively inhibit the proliferation of new WAT cells, while allowing BAT cells to grow.[36]
If you’d like to lose a little extra weight, you should know that taurine can help attenuate the negative effects of excess body fat by tamping down on inflammation and blood glucose levels.[37]
Athletes have an increased need for taurine
If you exercise on a regular basis, you probably could benefit from taurine supplementation because it’s conditionally essential and your metabolic requirements go up with activity, illness, and stress.[38]
L-Glutamine
Although it’s recently fallen somewhat out of favor, glutamine is historically one of the most supplemented amino acids. Glutamine is a conditionally essential amino, meaning that your body can make some on its own, but requirements increase under metabolic stress – the kind of stress caused by intense exercise.
Strenuous exercise is known to deplete glutamine stores. At that point, supplementation is advisable to bring them back up, both to prevent the onset of muscular fatigue and to maximize post-workout recovery.[39,40]
L-Phenylalanine
Phenylalanine is the precursor to tyrosine,[41] an amino acid that is, in turn, the precursor to catecholamine neurotransmitters, a category that includes dopamine, adrenaline, and noradrenaline.[42]
Again, dopamine can help increase focus and motivation, and adrenaline and noradrenaline can help activate the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the famous “fight or flight” response that helps us push ourselves in the gym.
Interestingly, phenylalanine can also increase your body’s uptake of leucine,[43] which makes this a great amino to stack with the anti-catabolic leucine complex we covered earlier.
Intense workouts tend to deplete phenylalanine,[44] so getting a little extra is probably not a bad thing when you’re hitting the gym.
Citrulline malate
Citrulline is another sports supplement mainstay due to its ability to increase nitric oxide (NO) production.[45]
Citrulline is another conditionally essential amino acid. So again, although your body can make a little on its own, stressing your metabolism with intense workouts will increase your requirement for citrulline. Supplementation can fill any gaps between the amount of citrulline your body needs and how much it has available f.
The conversion pathway of citrulline-to-NO looks like this:
Citrulline → Arginine → NO
Seeing this, you might think it makes more sense to supplement with arginine instead – after all, it’s a more direct precursor to NO. Using arginine as a NO booster was standard practice in the supplement industry for a long time, until it was discovered that citrulline is significantly more bioavailable [46,47] and better at raising arginine blood levels than oral arginine.[45] Since then, citrulline has largely replaced arginine in the NO-boosting role.
Why nitric oxide (NO) matters
The reason we want NO upregulation in a sports supplement is that NO is what primarily gives you the pump you’re looking for in your workouts. This is because NO causes vasodilation, a mechanism that causes the expansion of blood vessels and improves whole-body circulation.
The Citrulline Pathway – This is how you get more arginine and then more nitric oxide
NO-induced vasodilation is associated with significant decreases in blood pressure and resting heart rate.[48-50] This effectively increases your capacity for physical work because you can push your body harder with your cardiovascular system being less of a limiting factor on performance.
Increased circulation brings key metabolic benefits. These include more efficient delivery of oxygen and nutrients to your cells, and more efficient removal of cellular-metabolic waste.
These benefits can help you perform better and recover faster.
The research on citrulline says that it can:
- Increase power by increasing oxygen use[51]
- Increase athletic endurance – by as much as 50% for at least one type of barbell lift[52]
- Reduce post-workout muscular soreness[52]
- Upregulate exercise-induced growth hormone (GH) production[53]
- Inhibit muscle breakdown (catabolism)[54]
- Amplify the anabolic response to workouts[55,56]
Citrulline → ornithine, ammonia clearance and DHEA production
Citrulline can also increase blood levels of ornithine,[57] an amino acid that helps clear ammonia from your body.[58]
Another “OG” supplement: Before organ meat consumption started trending back, one company has been telling you to eat liver all along: Universal Nutrition with their Uni-Liver tablets.
Since ammonia buildup can lead to physical and mental fatigue,[59,60] clearing it faster, which keeps concentrations low, may, theoretically, improve mental and physical endurance.
Ornithine also helps increase the body’s ratio of cortisol to DHEA, which can promote better sleep and lower levels of perceived stress.[58] This can be a boon for recovery from exercise.
Malate’s effect on cellular respiration
We are happy to see citrulline malate used in supplements because malate (malic acid) has some intriguing benefits of its own.
For example, it plays a crucial role in the Krebs cycle, your cells’ main energy production pathway.[61]
One study found that because of this, citrulline malate can improve cellular aerobic respiration, helping your cells power through tough workouts.[62]
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