Green Tea For Better Bodybuilding?
Green tea extract for better bodybuilding
If you are a serious bodybuilder, no doubt you always are looking for methods that will help you be even more effective with your workouts. Now, is it possible that you can include green tea or green tea extract as one of your bodybuilding strategies? Indeed, some say that it’s one of the natural supplements that can help you "bulk up" your workout.
In fact, it’s possible that green tea extract can boost your endurance as much as 24%, because it makes fat stores available as an energy source. One study found that these effects happened over 10 weeks’ time, by using a 0.5% green tea extract supplementation, or 0.2% as a "by weight" additive to food.
Some results indicate that green tea extract improves endurance capacity, because it stimulates fatty acid utilization, which may in turn improve endurance capacity. These results have been positively seen in mice and in some improvements in swimming, but as a translation to real-world workouts, an athlete weighing 165 pounds would have to drink about 16 ounces of green tea a day to positively affect both endurance and fat loss.
Of course, green tea has caffeine, too, and this can also help improve endurance. Nonetheless, when adjusted for caffeine content, studies showed no difference in lipid metabolism (fat burning) when caffeine was removed from the green tea extract versus when it wasn’t.
However, it should be noted that green tea benefits were not seen with single large doses of green tea ingestion. Rather, it was the ingestion of green tea or green tea extracts over the long term, moderately and daily, that affected endurance and fat burning properties positively. Therefore, to best effect your workout, you should plan on including about four servings of green tea a day, for a total about eight tenths of a liter. This translates out to about 34 ounces of green tea a day in total for a 165-pound athlete.
Besides the benefit to your workout, green tea itself has many health benefits. It’s rich in powerful antioxidants, which promote anti-aging, and can help promote wound healing among other health benefits. This, in turn, can help you recover from your workouts faster, because muscles have to break down and build back up as a result of your workout. This, in fact, is what helps build muscles.
Simply paying attention to a healthy diet, by including green tea among other things, is one way to not only improve your workout, but your life in general. Green tea also has possible benefits that can help thwart diabetes, lower cholesterol, fight some types of cancer and help with such diseases as inflammatory bowel disease. And despite its caffeine content, it actually helps fight stress, because of other substances in it, including the amino acid theanine.
In addition, green tea also contains other beneficial nutrients to your bodybuilding workout, including tannins, which can help aid in digestion. Therefore, after a meal, it’s good to have a cup or two of tea to help digest your meal and get the best nutritional value out of it.
Tea also contains substances called catechins. These have antioxidant properties sometimes as much as 25 to 100 times more powerful than antioxidant vitamins C and E, depending on strength and potency. It also contains something called polyphenols, which also have antioxidant activity greater than some you can get from even vegetables such as spinach or broccoli, or fruits such as strawberries.
What do antioxidants do for you after a workout? They help neutralize what is called "free radical damage." When you work out, you necessarily break down muscle tissue and burn fat, which, in turn, leads to something called oxidization and the release of free radicals. These happen as a matter of course as we digest, burn fat, burn muscle, and generally go through our day, but they can be detrimental because they also help promote aging and other less than favorable results. Therefore, one of the best ways to help retain your health and slow down the aging process is to ingest antioxidants. The antioxidants neutralize the resulting free radical damage that happens as a result and byproduct of simple living, as well as other things such as working out or otherwise putting your body under stress.
As one of your bodybuilding strategies, include about four cups of green tea a day, or a similar amount of green tea extract in your muscle supplement program. It is one of the natural supplements that can help you make the most of your workout and keep your health in tiptop condition, too.
Tags: natural bodybuilding supplements | natural bodybuilding supplements | bodybuilding supplements | bodybuilding supplements | sports supplements | sports supplements
July 9th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Working out keeps me looking much younger than I actually am. I don’t drink green tea much but if it will improve my gains, I’ll give it a try. Plus, the best eye cream keeps my face looking youthful and fresh.