Today's top post-workouts accelerate recovery, soothe aches, maximize growth and more.
The right post-workout supplements can max out your fitness program results. Especially when you choose today's top new post-workout innovations.
This guide discusses how the best post-workout supplements deliver greater performance-enhancing results than ever before.
Taking specific sport nutrients after exercise can help you to:
- Kick-start muscle recovery and stimulate muscle stem cells
- Feed muscles for bigger gains than with just exercise alone
- Recharge depleted muscles for growth and performance
- Recover from training faster, bigger and more comfortably
- Restore sport nutrients required for maximum athletic gains
To get these benefits, you need the best post-workout sport nutrients, in the most advanced and effective forms, combined for synergy to work better together.
The list of best post-workout sport nutrients includes:
- Creatine - Rapid recharger of muscle after exercise, powers growth, recovery and subsequent performance
- L-Glutamine - Protects muscle and fortifies immune system function against exercise-induced suppression
- Pomegranate - Fruit antioxidant complex soothes muscle post-workout and enhances muscle recovery
- Beta Alanine - Efficiently reloads muscle carnosine to buffer muscles and extend athletic intensity
- Water + Electrolytes - Rehydrates and restores depleted muscles to enhance next-session performance
- Protein + Carbohydrate - Non-negotiable post-workout stack for maximum muscle gains
Let's take a closer look at the best post-workout ingredients and their advanced forms that bring superior fitness gains.
Best Post-Workout Supplement Ingredients
Creatine (Creapure® pH10)
Creatine plays a key role in athletes' muscle energy. When it is consistently loaded into muscle, creatine helps athletes to train harder, for longer.1
As a post-workout, specifically, creatine helps with muscle growth and recovery.2
Exercise depletes creatine from muscles.3
In fact, the more energy you expend during your session (exercise intensity), the lower your muscle creatine levels will be when you finish your workout.
Suboptimal creatine makes it harder to bounce back stronger from your hard workout.
Essentially, it is much harder to repair and build muscle in a creatine-depleted state. It's also harder to return to peak athletic performance.
Creatine may help. A foundational sport nutrient, Creatine has demonstrated athletic performance benefits in many clinical trials and reviews.
Research suggests that when athletes take creatine consistently over time, it may help to:
- Replenish muscle creatine stores that are depleted by exercise, recharging muscle tissues with ATP energy for a powerful next session4
- Accelerate muscle growth, repair and recovery5
- Promote growth hormones that drive development in athletes6
- Regulate muscle-catabolizing factors that spike during exercise, including myostatin7
Ideally, creatine is taken every day, in split doses -- before your workout, after your workout and on rest day.
Getting creatine in a post-workout supplement helps establish a routine for consistent, daily creatine loading that brings the best muscle and athletic performance results.
In addition, researchers have suggested that taking creatine after working out may be optimal timing, associated with the greatest muscle strength and growth enhancements.8
Best Creatine for Post-Workout: Creapure® pH10
Creapure® pH10 is the preferred creatine monohydrate form. It is manufactured using nutrition technology that yields a 99.5% pure finished product.
Creapure® pH10's unique advantage is pH-balance, which makes it easy to absorb and easy to tolerate.
Creapure® pH10's digestive comfort is especially important because creatine is associated with bloating and indigestion.
Which is the last thing you want when you are getting on with your day after your workout.
Beta Alanine as CarnoSyn®
Beta Alanine is a sport nutrient that can be taken after training to prepare the body for a strong, energized next exercise session.
Beta Alanine works by raising concentrations of carnosine within muscle cells.9
Carnosine in turn promotes intracellular pH buffering, an effect that blunts the impact of muscle fatigue-inducing acids.10
As a result, Beta alanine is popularly used to extend an athlete's time to exhaustion and muscle failure.
Research has shown that Beta Alanine supplementation:
- Enhances endurance exercise performance and lean muscle mass11
- Elicits a significant performance-enhancing effect in high-intensity exercise, especially in bouts lasting 1-4 minutes12
Beta alanine is recommended to be taken consistently during training weeks and months when peak performance is desired.
Best Beta Alanine for Post-Workout Supplements: SR CarnoSyn®
CarnoSyn® is the best beta alanine on the market. It is bioengineered beta-alanine form that works to max-out muscle carnosine for superior athletic performance and growth.
The SR CarnoSyn® form is sustained-release. It gradually raises and maintains muscle carnosine over 12 hours (with 2X servings), helping to:
- Minimize unpleasant paresthesia (tingling, needles and pins) associated with high intake
- Extend absorption, resulting in rapid carnosine muscle-loading and higher carnosine muscle retention
- Enable higher daily dosing, which significantly shortens the loading time needed to enhance performance
For best results, beta alanine must be taken consistently for a minimum of 4 weeks.13
It is sensible to include beta alanine in post-workouts to top-off muscle carnosine after exertion. It also helps establish a regular routine for the best long-range beta alanine athletic benefits.
L-Glutamine
L-Glutamine is the one amino acid that is most present in the human body. It is especially concentrated in muscle tissues.
Within muscle, L-Glutamine plays a role muscle protein metabolism while functioning as the primary carrier of nitrogen needed for muscle energy, growth and repair.
L-Glutamine is a great ingredient for post-workout supplements due to its two pathways of support:
- Muscle Protection: Intense exercise depletes muscle L-glutamine levels.14 Insufficient glutamine is linked with post-workout soreness and muscle catabolism.15
- Immune Support: Intense training may compromise immune function, while the gym exposes you to pathogens. Glutamine helps increase immune system cells, initiates tissue repair, and supports healthy immune system function.16
Best L-Glutamine for Post Workout: Ajinomoto®
Ajinomoto® is a world leader in amino acid innovation. Its L-Glutamine is made with Ferment-A-Pure nutrition technology: A patented, eco-friendly process that turns non-GMO and gluten-free vegetable carbs into clean, bioavailable amino acids.
Ajinomoto® L-Glutamine is best because it is clean, pure and effective - also very easy on the stomach, for those who may be sensitive to post-workout bloats.
Pomegranate
Pomegranate fruit is a rich source of polyphenols: Potent antioxidants suggested to soothe overworked muscles, enhance muscle circulation, and neutralize the exercise-induced oxidative stress that damages muscle tissues.
Pomegranate's specific naturally-occurring polyphenol complex has been shown in clinical research to promote muscle comfort and recovery after exercise.
- Might help to accelerate muscle recovery17
- Reduces soreness and weakness after strength training18
- Raises blood antioxidant levels, helping to protect circulating nitric oxide and augment its biological activity19
Best Pomegranate for Post-Workout: P40p™
P40p™ is a premium pomegranate extract that is standardized to 40% punicosides and 50% total polyphenols, which together comprise 90% of the antioxidants in pomegranate fruit.
Supplying a full spectrum of the fruit's health-promoting compounds, P40p™ is an easy-to-absorb, water-soluble form without the calories of whole pomegranate.
100 mg P40p™ supplies the equivalent antioxidant activity of 1 whole pomegranate.
Water + Electrolytes
When you work out with intensity, you work up a sweat. The more you sweat, the more fluids and electrolytes you lose.
The dehydration that follows then:20,21
- Worsens muscle breakdown
- Reduces blood flow to muscles
- Impairs both physical and mental performance
- Leads to cramps, weakness, dizziness and nausea
It's hard to get on with your day post-workout if you are dehydrated and electrolyte-depleted.
For these reasons and more, it's critical to restore hydration and replenish electrolytes to your depleted body after working out.
Beyond maintaining hydration during workouts, salt and electrolytes helps to restore fluids after workouts.22 Especially if you have been training with intensity.
The best supplement for this is a complex of sodium and electrolytes, with additional dosage of the electrolyte potassium.
Taken with a sufficient fluid intake after exercise, this combination helps to promote efficient rehydration and electrolyte replenishment.
Best Forms for Post-Workout: Himalayan Pink Salt and NutriGenesis®
Potassium Himalayan Pink Salt is premium unprocessed salt comprised of sodium chloride plus electrolytes and trace minerals potassium, magnesium and calcium.
NutriGenesis® Potassium adds a little more of an important electrolyte for nerve signaling, muscle function, maintaining fluid balance and more to help replenish what training takes the way, as well as to protect muscles from cramping.
NutriGenesis® Potassium is the best form of this mineral. It is lab-grown on cultures using a patented process that plants the mineral in a natural matrix of absorption-boosting cofactors.
