Everybody loves the feeling of a good pump, not only does it look good, that pump is also a healthy sign of high volumes of blood reaching your muscle tissues with nutrients to fuel growth. To perform well under high-intensity resistance training, and have the endurance to power through demanding exercise routines, blood flow is crucial.
Nitric oxide is what is responsible for much of the increase in blood flow when achieving a great pump. It widens your blood vessels allowing for a greater flow of blood throughout your body. Let us take a look at what you can do regarding nutrition to maximize blood flow and circulation.
Beetroot
One of the best type of foods to focus on for increasing nitric oxide levels is any food containing nitrates, since they are a direct precursor of nitric oxide. Beetroot happens to be one of the foods containing the most nitrates. Beetroot juice has been a popular staple among many professional athletes as a pre-workout drink to increase endurance by improving blood flow. There are now also powdered supplements readily available which mix perfectly with your protein shake and can provide an extra element of flavor, being quite sweet and palatable.
Ginseng
Ginseng has been one of the most highly priced medicinal herbs of traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years. It is one of those supplements that when you find it in good quality, you can very much feel its effects after you consume it. Listing all of the benefits of ginseng would require a whole article of its own. To summarize it short; ginseng has been shown to reduce the chance of developing many types of cancer, is highly effective at reducing stress and has shown some very promising studies on improving blood flow and even curing erectile dysfunction in some men. Supplement wise for men, Ginseng is about as good as it gets.
Chili Peppers:
Chili peppers and cayenne pepper contain a chemical called capsaicin which is what is responsible for the painful burning sensation that some of us love, and others not so much. What is amazing about chili peppers, however, is that capsaicin is one of nature’s most effective blood thinners. It is so effective in fact that before the era of modern medicine it was used to stop and prevent heart attacks. When consumed in tincture form, it is very quick acting and thins the blood, improving overall circulation.
Citrulline Malate
Citrulline is a nonessential amino acid found in watermelons. Research has shown it to have potent anabolic properties, improving performance and endurance during both resistance and cardio exercise. You might have heard about L-Arginine before which is similar, but Citrulline is arginine’s big brother. Citrulline exerts most of its effects by increasing nitric oxide levels in the blood which helps dilate blood vessels providing you more oxygen. This means less fatigue, more nutrients for your muscles as well as an incredible pump!
Red Wine and Grapes
Alcohol is something that is pretty difficult to incorporate into any serious athletes or bodybuilders diet, it is not good for gains, period. However, if you can control your alcohol intake (many cannot), alcohol in small amounts can actually remain beneficial. Alcohol naturally relaxes the arteries, increasing blood flow and circulation, thereby providing cardiovascular benefits. If you are going to be drinking alcohol on a regular basis, we suggest you focus on red wine that also offers many other additional health benefits. 1-2 glasses of red wine per day or every other day is considered a healthy amount that won’t affect your athletic performance negatively. Red wine and grapes specifically contain a compound called resveratrol which has shown to be beneficial for both longevity, as well as your testosterone levels.
Agmatine Sulfate
Agmatine has grown to become a very popular supplement the last few years because of it’s potent effects at promoting vasodilation, pumps and better muscle recovery (decreasing muscle soreness post-exercise). It works in a different way compared to most other supplements that increase nitric oxide. Agmatine inhibits the enzyme that breaks down nitric oxide, enabling you to keep the nitric oxide you already have, circulating longer. As you might have figured out now, combining Agmatine with other direct nitric oxide boosters is where it really shines.
Pomegranate
Pomegranate is one of the best fruits for men to consume. It contains high levels of polyphenols which have been shown to be beneficial for preventing heart disease, cancer, and osteoarthritis. The antioxidants in Pomegranate are effective at increasing blood flow to such a degree that the fruit can be used as a treatment for mild erectile dysfunction. There is also research suggesting that the ellagic acid inside pomegranates work as a natural SERM and can regulate estrogen levels in men, allowing for higher levels of circulating testosterone.
Glycerol Monostearate
This is a lesser known supplement but oh so effective for prolonging your pump. Glycerol works very well for hydrating the body and making sure you have enough blood volume. It absorbs into muscle tissues along with water and stays there providing optimal and prolonged hydration. By this mechanism it improves absorption of nutrients and amino acids into the muscles by providing faster delivery, increasing vascularity and intramuscular volume.
Chocolate (Theobroma Cacao)
Dark chocolate (minimum 70%), raw cacao or cacao extracts are one of the best nitric oxide boosters available. Chocolate is easy to incorporate into the diet (since it tastes awesome) and many bodybuilders swear by the pump they get from melting 50 grams or more, of dark chocolate into their pre-workout drinks. Chocolate has this effects because of its high flavonoid content which increases blood flow by improving endothelial function. You know what more works by a similar mechanism? Viagra! (hint)
Tea
There is a lot of controversy surrounding tea and if it is a ‘manly’ beverage or not. One side argues that high tea consumption can lower testosterone, while the other side argues for the huge amount of research that has proven many other healthy aspects of tea. One being the widening of blood vessels and increasing coronary blood flow. One thing is for certain, even if tea is not good for everything, it is one of the most healthy things you can incorporate into your diet. The reason green tea was shown to lower testosterone in some studies is because of one of its flavonoids called EGCG. It seems like high amounts of this flavonoid can have this effect, even though it is healthy in many other aspects. Consuming 2-3 cups per day won’t have any major effects on testosterone but still provide many of the benefits, however, if this still makes you feel uncomfortable, black tea and especially fermented teas such as Pu-erh tea does not contain EGCG. They rather contain another group of flavonoids that are unique to them, created from the oxidation and fermentation process. Black tea and Pu-erh tea should provide minimal effects on testosterone and has even been shown in studies to increase sex drive compared to green tea, while also providing most of the benefits from regular green tea.
Conclusion
Boosting your blood flow can be an effective way to increase pump and muscle endurance. That’s why we developed our BIG NOISE pump formula specially formulated to increase nitric oxide. In contains many of the discussed ingredients in this article such as Citrulline Malate, Agmatine Sulfate, Glycerol Monostearate and Theobroma Cacao Extract (raw chocolate extract). We recommend you combine it with a diet rich in the nitric oxide boosting foods as outlined in this article and you will experience incredible effects not only in the gym but also in the bedroom (hint #2).
]]>Often considered an impossible feat in bodybuilding and fitness circles; how can you both gain muscle and lose fat at the same time? For most people this is the main goals of their exercise routine, we always want more of the good stuff and less of the bad. Traditionally, this is were cutting and bulking protocols comes in, but what often ends up happening is that you gain to much fat during bulking, and lose to much muscle during your cut.
With age, we also lose much of our ability to keep on muscle, as well as burn excess fat. This is a side effect of the ageing process resulting in declining levels of testosterone and growth hormones.
So considering this, you might feel like there is a whole lot of barriers keeping you from your ideal physique. However, what if there was a tool that could help you pull off the impossible?
Today we will look into an nonessential amino acid called Citrulline Malate, a lesser know but much more powerful, big brother of L-Arginine. Most people have heard of Arginine for it’s effects on pumps as well as erections, something citrulline can do as well but even better! However, that’s not all. After you understand everything that citrulline can do, this nonessential amino acid will quickly become an essential part of your regimen.
Ageing and Body Composition
Few people manage to keep a muscular physique up until an old age, it requires plenty of hard work (or being the one and only, The Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger). Declining hormone levels from ageing creates a difficult environment for muscles to grow. What will grow easy however is that body fat.
Researchers at the Sorbonne in France suspected the amino acid citrulline would have a powerful effect on body composition, and a animal study confirmed it and showed that citrulline blocks many ageing processes.
The animals given citrulline had 13% less fat and gained 14-48% more muscle then the ones that was not fed it.
Because of these amazing results, there was another study made by Molecular researchers at the Universite Paris Descartes. It also proved positive results on body composition and was able to reduce the amounts of abdominal fat. Citrulline reduced the speed of absorption of visceral fat cells as well as increased their release so the body could burn them as energy. Citrulline’s ability to help reduce fat deposits in the body like this, is not only beneficial for body composition but can also help reduce many risks associated with ageing such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Citrulline : A Natural Anabolic and Big Brother of L-Arginine
Few guys know that one of nature’s most potent anabolic compounds is found in the simple watermelon you can buy at your local supermarket. No, this is not bro science, let us show you the REAL science of the amino acid citrulline.
Citrulline is a precursor to L-arginine, it increases plasma L-arginine levels better than L-arginine itself because the liver does not break it down as quickly. That means that not only do we get the benefits of citrulline, it also shares the benefits of L-arginine, widening blood vessels and increasing nitric oxide.
Arginine is a proven anabolic compound that increases growth hormone after heavy resistance exercise, enabling you to build more muscle. Not only that, citrulline have in a study also been shown to be more potent as a muscle growth enhancer than the common BCAA amino acid L-leucine.
The growth enhancement can be explained by the discovery made at Maastricht University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, which showed that citrulline enhances the body’s nutrient uptake during exercise. In other words citrulline pushes more nutrients into your muscles when they need it to enhance anabolic growth.
The mechanism behind this has to do with your gut. During intense exercise such as resistance training with weights, the body prioritize supplying muscles with oxygen. This causes narrower capillaries in the intestines reducing your gut function. Similar to what happens under intense periods of stress that often gives people stomach problems.
Since citrulline converts into L-arginine primarily in the gut, the blood vessels in the gut can use the L-arginine to create nitric oxide causing them to widen. This increases the amount of nutrients that can reach the gut and be absorbed, bringing the body more nutrients for muscle growth.
In other words, combine citrulline with a protein shake before your workout and you will acclimate more muscle mass and recover faster.
What we know more is that citrulline also has a whole host of other proven benefits. The major ones being increased muscle endurance and improving muscle protein synthesis.
Introducing Total War: An All-in-One Pre Workout Supplement Featuring Citrulline Malate
One of our premiere workout supplements is Total War, which contains the most effective stimulants, nootropics as well as nitric oxide enhancers on the market today. Total War’s main ingredient is Citrulline Malate, which we have discussed in great depth in this article.
Pre workout supplements often aim at maximizing pumps and energy, and even though citrulline does definitely help with that, it also has the unique ability to minimize muscle soreness after workouts. Similar to what popular BCAA supplements aim to do. This makes Total War (containing citrulline), an all in one workout supplement ideal to take before your lifting session, maybe you can even save some money on not having to buy those BCAAs as well.
Total War also features even more nitric oxide increasing power in the form of Agmatine Sulfate. In comparison, citrulline actually gets converted into nitric oxide in the body, but Agmatine works in a different way. Agmatine inhibits the enzyme that is responsible for the breakdown of nitric oxide, making it the perfect complement to keep all of that extra nitric oxide from citrulline circulating longer.
For all the reasons we have previous outlined in this article, the citrulline malate in Total War is indeed one of the most perfect ingredients for a pre workout supplement that not only will give you crazy pumps, but help you make those gains too.
]]>Are you looking for an extra boost in the gym? Pre-workout supplements can give you added edge but with thousands of brands flooding the market, finding the best product can be overwhelming. Fear not, friends! We have tried (almost) all of them and have compiled a list of the top five pre-workout supplements on the market below!
For Pump: #5 BSN N.O. Xplode
BSN is one of the oldest supplement companies in the industry and knows a thing or two about formulating pre-workouts. One it’s most popular foray’s into pre-workout supplementation comes in the form of N.O. Xplode. “N.O.” is not just a catchy name, but holds a great deal of importance as it pertains to the formulation. N.O. stands for nitric oxide, a gaseous chemical compound utilized for cellular communication.
Contrary to popular belief, the main ingredient in such pump products is not nitric oxide, but a powerful vasodilating amino acid called L-Arginine. When body enzymes break down arginine, nitric oxide is naturally synthesized within the body.
You might ask yourself, “if my body produces arginine, and by default nitric oxide, why should I add a supplement to my diet?” Well, that is because our bodies do not get enough nitric oxide to perform desired effects, namely a “sick pump” in the gym!
N.O. Xplode contains 1g of the mysterious proprietary blend “N.O. Alpha Fusion” which is made up of other nitric oxide boosters; L-Citrulline Malate, Danshen Extract, Grape Skin Extract, Phyllanthus emblica Extrac, Hawthorn Extract, and Folate. Each of these ingredients is known separately for its ability to induce high levels of blood circulation throughout the body. This allows for the speedy and efficient transfer of nutrients to the muscles experiencing stress inside the gym.
For example; your quadriceps are taking the brunt of stress during a squat workout. Introduce the potent pump effects of N.O. Xplode and your quads will swell with blood!
BSN’s popular pump-focused pre-workout is a proprietary blend, however, which results in it sliding down to number 5 on our list.
For Focus: #4 MTS Nutrition Clash
Moving onto our number 4 pre-workout is Clash by MTS Nutrition. There are many stimulating ingredients “clashing” with each other in this effective pre-workout, but N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine is one that caught my eye.
L-Tyrosine is an amino acid derived from phenylalanine, another amino acids used to treat depression, ADD, ADHD, narcolepsy, and fatigue. Pre-workout supplementation is crucial to anyone experiencing a lack of focus or energy inside or out of the gym.
L-Tyrosine supplementation specifically can combat that inability to focus by tapping into the noradrenaline (norepinephrine) and other anti-stress hormones. Furthermore, adding an L-Tyrosine supplement to your diet has been found to increase catecholamine synthesis, which in turn acts as an anti-neural aging agent.
Furthermore, adding N-Acetylcysteine to the compound enhances its overall absorption!
Two scoops of MTS Nutrition’s forceful formula yields a heaping 500mg of L-Tyrosine, securing it’s spot as the fourth best pre-workout on shelves today!
The next pre-workout on our list is one that has gained quite a bit of steam of late due to a rather controversial ingredient. Once the FDA lifted it’s ban on the ingredient, Mesomorph by APS Nutrition was one of the first pre-workout powders to contain DMAA. 1,3-Dimethylamylamine is an extremely strong stimulant with a molecular structure akin to that of amphetamine. Like amphetamine, DMAA increases the release of catecholamines norepinephrine and dopamine. Elevated NE levels lead to an increase in focus while increased levels of dopamine elicit a positive response in regard to one’s demeanor. Providing Spider-Man-esque alertness and Captain America’s euphoric personality, 1,3DMAA supplementation has been proven to make a superhero out of you.
Thanks to its ability to easily cross the blood/brain barrier, this ingredient is quickly made bioavailable, but that’s not all. With a half-life as long as it’s name, 1, 3-Dimethylamylamine remains in the body for up to 9 hours providing an entire day’s worth of energy.
DMAA is a neurological stimulant, which elicits a speedy spike of energy similar to that of caffeine, ephedrine, and adrenaline. Due to it’s extreme potency, this ingredient is NOT recommended for beginner lifters.
Dimethylamylamine is included in the 1,870mg proprietary Neuromorph-Neuro Energized Stimulant Matrix, but we are not sure exactly in what amount. For that reason, however, it is eliminated for contention for the number 1 spot
For Endurance: #2 Precision Engineered Elite Performance Haymaker
We all love a good underdog story, don’t we?! Consider Haymaker by PEEP our underdog. Haymaker offers a severe kick with 400mg of caffeine per serving and a full gram of Agmatine Sulfate, but the real meat and potatoes of this pre-workout is the whopping 4.8g of Beta-Alanine in every scoop!
Imagine a supplement that allows you to get an extra rep or two or five on the bench or under the squat bar! Studies have shown clinical doses of Beta-Alanine provide much more than the pre-workout tingles, but offer marathon-esque endurance!
Once ingested, Beta-Alanine forms into carnosine. Stored within cells and released in response to drops in pH, carnosine is an acid-buffering molecule. Increased carnosine levels have been shown to protect against diet-induced pH drops (commonly found in ketone production as a direct result of a ketogenic diet) as well as combat exercise-induced lactic acid production.
#1 Overall Best Pre-Workout: RedCon1 Total War
What did you expect? Were we going to promote another brand’s pre-workout on our own site? Of course not! But that’s because Total War IS the supplement industry’s leading pre-workout supplement, and that’s a fact!
Our brand new stim-based product contains no proprietary blends, is totally transparent, and consists of a myriad of standard issue ingredients to compliment a handful of compounds not found in your everyday pre-workout.
We included a whopping 6g of Citrulline Malate into our product for some of the most severe skin-splitting pumps you will ever experience inside the walls of a fitness facility. Aside from providing the “pump” that so many gym-goers chase, this conditional amino acids yields a litany of positive effects such as delaying muscle fatigue, allowing for longer bouts of training.
Up next in the Total War concoction is quite possibly the most underrated supplement on the market. As we discussed earlier Beta-Alanine does much more than just provide the pre-workout Parasthesia, or the “tingling” sensation. At clinical dosages, Beta-Alanine has been found to significantly improve endurance from elevated Carnosine levels. RedCon1 has included 3.2g/serving, one of the highest doses you will see in a pre-workout.
Pre-workout powders are known for their energy boosting effects, and have been popularized by their nitric oxide increasing properties. Agmatine Sulfate is one of these properties. In every scoop of Total War is standard amount (1g) of Agmatine to help engorge the trained muscle with nutrients and deliver skin-splitting pumps.
Taurine is another commonplace amino acid found in pre-workouts. Aside from its anti-oxidant effects, the 1g of Taurine included in Total War may assist in the post-workout window of recovery.
There are many different ways to create a pre-workout. Some manufacturers decide to remove all stimulants from the formulation while others choose to go all in with their stimulants. We offer a little bit for everyone here at RedCon1, so meet us somewhere in the middle. Caffeine Anhydrous is a part of the Total War cocktail in a manageable 250mg per serving. To put that into perspective, the caffeine content in 8 oz. of black coffee is 150mg, so this is not far off.
Total War truly sets itself apart with the next series of ingredients; N-Phenethyl Dimethylamine Citrate (DIM) and 2-Aminoisoheptaine (DMHA). When paired with caffeine, these two compounds pack a punch that rivals even DMAA!
The next, rather interesting, stimulant on our list is Theobroma Cocao Extract, at 50mg. Although it is the chemical cousin of caffeine, it has little semblance to the ingredient. Unlike caffeine, Theobromine has no effect on energy or focus, rather its lone physical effect is the ability to induce higher amounts of perspiration. Personally, I love to sweat and don’t consider my training sessions a success unless I am left in a puddle of it. If you are anything like me, you will enjoy supplementing with this ingredient.
Two similar ingredients that bring Total War into the “stimulant” category are Higenamine HCL (25mg) and Rauwolscine Alpha-Yohimbine (2mg). Both compounds may increase levels of fat burning during training sessions.
Last, but certainly not least, is 10mg of Bioperine. A form of Black Pepper Fruit Extract, Bioperine has been shown to increase the absorption of other nutrients. This is huge because it essentially increases the potency of each of the ingredients in Total War!
The perfect combination of pump, focus, energy, and endurance, Total War is the ultimate pre-workout. Don’t believe us? Scroll up to the RedCon1 supplement store and try a bottle for yourself. We are confident you will not be disappointed!