If you can't find a sports drink that contains the right combination of carbs, caffeine, and BCAAs, you can blend your own drink with individual products.
Research on the benefits of carbohydrate supplementation during endurance exercise is comprehensive, and it’s clear that ingesting carbohydrates during prolonged exercise can greatly improve performance. Endurance athletes sustain a faster pace for a longer period of time in events lasting more than 45 minutes when they take in carbohydrates. There is also some evidence that carbohydrate intake during exercise improves recovery.
Experimentation on caffeine use during endurance exercise is also extensive. Caffeine is thoroughly proven to enhance endurance performance when consumed on its own or in combination with carbohydrates. Despite considerable research, it’s not known definitively how caffeine improves performance. Researchers posit that caffeine has multiple benefits, including but not limited to enhancing force of muscle contractions, reducing perceived exertion, and increasing fat utilization.
Though not as thoroughly scrutinized as carbohydrates and caffeine, there is some research suggesting that branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs), when consumed during exercise, reduce muscle damage, improve muscle recovery, and have a positive effect on the immune system. BCAAs include the essential amino acids leucine, isoleucine, and valine.
Evidence showing that BCAAs directly improve athletic performance is more limited. However, the support is not void and this is what a few studies have found: BCAAs consumed during exercise may spare muscle glycogen stores, enhance lipid oxidation, reduce central fatigue, lower perceived exertion, and increase lactate threshold.
So what happens when you put carbs, caffeine, and BCAAs together in a sports drink? That’s what French researchers wanted to know.
The study looked at how consuming a sports drink containing the above three ingredients can improve performance during a two-hour treadmill run at race pace.
Fifteen minutes before the test, trained runners consumed a 250-mL (1 cup) drink containing 17 grams of carbohydrate, 1 gram of BCAAs, and 19 mg of caffeine. The subjects were provided more of the sports drink during the test so that they drank a total of two liters by the end.
Results showed that ingestion of the carb-caffeine-BCAA sports drink immediately before and during the two-hour run increased treadmill running performance by about 2%. The drink also maintained blood sugar better and decreased feelings of exertion and mental fatigue.
Two percent doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you apply these results to a 2:10 marathoner, they would go two minutes and 24 seconds faster.
The researchers speculate that a drink combination like this may be even more beneficial if consumed during longer events.
If you’d like to learn more, you can download a PDF of the full research article here.
Drink ingredients: maltodextrin, dextrose, fructose, BCAAs, sodium, curcumin, magnesium, caffeine, Vitamin C, Vitamin B3, zinc, Vitamin E, piperine, Vitamin B1, Vitamin B2.
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