These are the best things you can do Before your workout to maximize energy, muscle growth, and fat loss. Find out exactly what pre-workout foods to eat before the gym to improve your exercise performance. You'll also learn about two natural and effective pre-workout supplements. Finally, you'll discover the truth about stretching before a workout, how it can be harmful, and how to properly set up your warm-up.

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Doing certain things before a workout can help increase vascularity, improve energy, and boost your overall performance leading to a far better workout and more impressive results both in terms of muscle growth and fat loss. So today I want to go over 9 of the best things you can do before your workout to maximize your results. 

And first I want to start with something that most of you already have in your home, baking soda. Most people don't know that sodium bicarbonate or baking soda can be used to enhance gym performance. Baking soda is beneficial due to the fact that it's a mildly alkaline salt that can help regulate the ph levels in your muscles. To put it simply, In chemistry, pH is a scale that's used to indicate how acidic or alkaline a solution is. A pH of 7.0 is considered neutral, and a ph of 7 also happens to be the normal ph level within muscle cells. Your muscles function best when they're in this neutral pH state, but the exercise itself can have an effect that changes your muscular ph levels. You see during anaerobic exercise, which is basically any form of high-intensity exercise like heavy weight lifting or sprinting when you're working in that anaerobic state your body's demand for oxygen exceeds the available supply. So as a response the anaerobic energy pathway gets stimulated, and this pathway is primarily fueled by carbohydrates in the form of glucose, but aside from that it also causes an increase in the production of lactic acid. Excessive levels of lactic acid in your muscles causes pH levels to fall below 7, which disrupts energy production and your muscles' ability to contract, leading to a reduction in exercise performance.

Fortunately, baking soda, with its alkaline pH of 8.4, can offer a solution for these lactic acids. By taking baking soda you can raise blood ph levels slightly, which allows lactic acids to move from the muscle cells into the bloodstream. And that process results in a reduction of pH within your muscles. This improves your muscle's ability to continue to contract and produce energy and has been proven to do so by a number of scientific studies. (12) For example, we have a study that examined the effects of taking baking soda 60 minutes before performing squats and bench presses to failure. (13) As you can see in the graph from the study there was definitely an impressive increase in squat performance (14) After taking the baking soda, the participants could do around eight more squats over the course of three sets than they could when they were not taking it, which is a significant increase. With that said, the study only found a performance increase in the squat but it finds a boost in bench press performance. This could be because the squat uses larger muscles than the bench press, but more research would definitely help. The other thing to keep in mind is that not everyone reacts the same to baking soda. While some experienced positive effects, others experience adverse effects like stomach discomfort, nausea, and water retention. That's why you might want to try out a small dose first before trying the standard dose; for example, taking only one-fourth or one-third of the normal recommended amount on your first time is a good idea. And the usual recommended dose is 90 to 135 mg per pound of bodyweight about 60 to 90 minutes before exercise. 

Now if baking soda doesn't sit well with you, another proven single-ingredient supplement that you can take before your workout in place of baking soda to reduce lactic acid is beta-alanine. Even though beta-alanine is a nonessential amino acid and it works a little differently it still provides a similar effect that can help you squeeze out a few extra reps when you would normally fail. It does this by working with another amino acid known as histidine, to produce carnosine (14.1), and similar to baking soda carnosine has a pretty big impact on your muscle's ph levels helping you perform better with high-intensity activities. When you take around 2 to 5 grams of beta-alanine it might give you a feeling of pins and needles in your extremities like your hands and a tingling sensation on your lips but you should notice a reduction in lactic acid and an improvement in performance. Even though the tingling sensation may feel scary for a beginner you shouldn't worry because beta-alanine is a natural amino acid and it's considered a very safe supplement...