Abstract
Concentration of carnosine (ß-alanine-L-histidine) in the muscles of sportsmen is increased only by ß-alanine supplementation. This supplementation has become common practice among the competitive sportsmen of different sports.
The physiologists, sports medicine physicians and other specialists have focused on this considerable nutritive supplement in the world literature. Eight review articles were published within last 5 years.
This fact is a strong proof of increasing interest about carnosine. OBJECTIVE: The distributors of dietary supplements tend to heavily overestimate the effects of their products.
The aim of this work is to evaluate objectively the effect of ß-alanine supplementation on the sports performance, based on the latest knowledge of the world scientific literature. METHODS: We used the databases of scientific articles Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus and Sport Discus.
Based on the key words we looked up works from the year 2000 to the present. We choose only the double-blind studies with a control group and a placebo.
RESULTS: We found 112 studies of the required quality of the work and the 8 review articles (Artioli, 2010; Derave, 2010; Wilson, 2010; Sale, 2010; Hobson, 2012; Hoffmann, 2012; Bellinger, 2015; Trexler, 2015). Carnosine in the muscle cells increases muscular buffering capacity, reduces muscle fatigue and leads to easier regeneration of repeated bouts of high-intensity exercise.
CONCLUSIONS: ß-alanine or carnosine improvement of sports performance remains equivocal. Recent data indicate that β-alanine supplementation may not only improve the sports performance.
Betaalanine operates also as a training aid to augment bouts of highintensity training. We can regard the effect of carnosine on the increase of training volume a wellness effect because the sportsmen are able to perform the same training volume with less effort.