Caring for your muscles as they recover is important through all stages of life. Whether you live a fairly active lifestyle, you focus on lower-impact exercises, or you’re simply getting older, giving your muscles the nutrients they need is key to ensuring they stay healthy and recover well. Taking a muscle health supplement is a great way to support your muscles through both activity and recovery, giving them vitamins, minerals, and nutrients they need.
In this article, we’ll cover the key features to look for when choosing a muscle health supplement (all of which informed Previnex’s creation of our Muscle Health PLUS supplement, which you can learn about here).
Why is Recovery Important When Muscle Building?Â
Recovery is important when building muscle because it allows your body to repair the damage your muscles experience during exercise. When you exercise, microscopic tears are formed in the muscle fibers. This triggers a process that forms satellite cells, and those cells fuse with the damaged fibers, resulting in muscle repair and growth.Â
What is the Best Muscle Recovery Supplement?Â
The best muscle recovery supplements are those with creatine and BCAAs, and some protein powders. Muscle health supplements with BCAAs and creatine are a great option for muscle recovery and increasing lean muscle mass and strength.Â
What Creatine Monohydrate Does for Your Muscles
Creatine monohydrate is a naturally occurring compound found in the cells throughout your muscles. It works by providing energy to your muscles for workouts like high intensity interval training and weightlifting. It can increase the availability of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the molecule in cells responsible for carrying energy.Â
In your body, creatine forms in the liver from arginine, glycine, and methionine (amino acids). Outside your body, it can be gained from food sources like meat, and muscle health supplements (either those that include creatine or a creatine supplement itself).
Why Muscles Need Branched-Chain Amino Acids (BCAAs)
BCAAs are three of the nine essential amino acids. Your body cannot create essential amino acids on its own, so they must be consumed through food and supplementation. The three BCAAs are:Â
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Leucine: Supports muscle protein synthesis and muscle growth
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Isoleucine: Helps muscles with metabolism and energy production
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Valine: Reduces muscle fatigue, especially following exercise, and can help muscles with energy production
Branched-chain amino acids help reduce fatigue during and after physical activity, reduce soreness after workouts, and increase muscle mass.Â
Why Muscle Health Supplement Ingredients Matter
When you start taking a new muscle health supplement, be sure to consider the ingredients used. Finding one with clinically studied ingredients is key. Muscle Health PLUS, for example, uses myHMB®, creatine monohydrate, BCAAs, essential amino acids, and AstraGin®, all of which are clinically proven to support your muscle health. It’s also important to find supplements with ingredients that are easily absorbed and have high bioavailability—how much of the active ingredients can actually enter the bloodstream and become available at the intended site? If you’re taking a supplement with low bioavailability, you’re not actually getting all the benefits of that product.
Learn about pharmaceutical-grade sourcing, manufacturing, and testing here.
What Should You Look For in a High-Quality Muscle Recovery Supplement?
When you’re looking for a high-quality muscle recovery supplement, it’s key to find one that has pure ingredients, is pharmaceutical grade, has high-quality manufacturing standards, and has no additives, gums, or emulsifiers.Â
Pharmaceutical-grade means it has been rigorously tested to ensure quality, purity, and effectiveness. Where ingredients are sourced from plays a large role in their purity (or lack thereof). Clinically-tested ingredients indicate purity, and supplements made without additives, gums, or emulsifiers are higher in quality—these ingredients can reduce product purity. Additives like sugar or emulsifiers can increase the calorie intake, cause bloating and gas, disrupt your gut microbiome, and have no added nutritional benefits, so it’s best to avoid them.
Previnex is proud of our strict quality standards. Learn about the Previnex Difference here.
How Can NAD+ Support Muscle Recovery and Performance?Â
NAD+ supports muscle recovery and performance by enhancing energy production, facilitating muscle repair, and reducing inflammation. NAD+ stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. It’s essential for your skeletal muscle system, and plays a vital role in cellular aging. It has a direct and indirect influence on key cellular functions, including but not limited to metabolic pathways, DNA repair, chromatin remodeling, cellular senescence, and immune cell function.Â
NAD+ levels decrease naturally as you age, so finding supplements that help support NAD+ levels is crucial. Some supplements, such as Gut & Green Superfoods, contain ingredients like Apigenin, which helps increase NAD+ levels in the cells.Â
For muscle recovery in particular, NAD+ supports your body by producing energy, repairing DNA (due to exercise damage within your muscle cells), reducing inflammation and oxidative stress, enhancing the cellular processes involved in muscle repair and regeneration, and more.Â
Supporting your muscles as they recover from physical activity is a key component of regular exercise. A high-quality muscle health supplement like Muscle Health PLUS is a great way to support your muscles and overall health. Full of clinically studied ingredients like myHMB®, creatine monohydrate, BCAAs, essential amino acids, and AstraGin®, these ingredients are clinically proven to reduce muscle breakdown, increase lean muscle mass, boost protein synthesis, and enhance strength. Give your muscles the nutrients and support they need, and grab a bottle of Muscle Health PLUS here.