You owe it to yourself to know what you are putting into your body. Provided here is information concerning performance carbohydrate and protein drinks, including the differences between American Body Building drinks and others.

Every day, millions of athletes participate in their respective sports. Many of them depend on Nutritional Supplementation to achieve their performance goals. One of the most popular supplements is the sports training drink. It comes in a tremendous variety of sizes, colors, flavors and promises. It can become a difficult task determining the drink that best serves your needs. Which ones will fulfill for you the promise of enhanced performance or growth? Which are not what they seem to be?

The first step in determining the right drink for you is to understand the background and makeup of sports training drinks. We will break them up into categories and explain them one at a time.

These were some of the first sports training drinks to gain popularity. Carbo Force by American Body Building Products was the first created as a prepared drink. Prior to that time, various powders were mixed with water by the athlete at their time of use. Stacks of independent research, done throughout the world, support the concept of preworkout carbohydrate loading, along with the ingestion of carbohydrates during exercise, to best maintain energy levels.

What you first need to understand is that the body uses glucose like an automobile uses gasoline for fuel. When starving a car of fuel, it runs slowly or poorly. As it is fed more fuel, it accelerates to the limit that it can burn gasoline. Your body works the same with glucose.

A major problem today for many informed athletes is that the outrageous claims and nutritional hype has turned them off to supplementation. It has at least made them disbelieving the claims of many manufacturers of those types of product make.

Performance drinks work and they work well. But they will never be claimed by us to be some nonsensical steroid replacement, with unbelievable claims of overnight growth.

It is a fact: Glucose and glucose polymers fed before and during exercise, significantly delay the onset of fatigue and increase performance. Hundreds of experiments and published independent studies too numerous to is the only real secret to spectacular results. That intensity can be enhanced by delaying fatigue through the maintenance of high blood glucose. levels. This is achieved most easily through the correct use of a quality training drink.

If you purchase a drink every day, you should have a basic understanding of how and why they work. During exercise, uptake of carbohydrates (blood glucose) by skeletal muscle has been shown to be as much as 20 times the rate of a muscle at rest. As this happens, the body begins to produce carbohydrate from storage (fats and other sources), to meet the demand created by exercise. As exercise intensifies, the body becomes unable to keep up with the demand for fuel. As the supply of carbs (glucose) produced by the body falls behind, consumption fatigue sets in. However, with the ingestion of staggered doses of glucose or glucose polymers, you can delay fatigue. The body uses the rapidly absorbed and utilize dextrose, glucose polymers and soluble starches (in the case of Carbo Force) as an outside energy source. The recommended method to achieve the greatest workout intensity is to ingest carbohydrates before and during your workout. American Body Building Products recommends 1/3 of a bottle 20 minutes before, 1/3 of a bottle sipped intermittently during your workout, and 1/3 of a bottle following your workout (speeds recuperation). Very large men or individuals with super intense workouts, should break up two bottles of Carbo Force during a workout as described above, or take try the Pro Carbo Force (a 24 oz size drink).

What about Crystalline Fructose? This is a question we hear frequently. In our opinion, only small amounts, if any fructose belong in this type of performance drink. These are a number of reasons. First, there are many people with fructose intolerance and others for whom fructose causes stomach upset. Some individuals even experience abdominal pain upon rapid ingestion of a fructose solution. On a performance level, fructose is metabolized very slowly primarily by the liver, but also in the kidneys, small intestine and fat tissue; it therefore doesn't supply energy very quickly. Fructose increases blood glucose levels only 20 to 30 percents, and it does that slowly.

Conversely, dextrose increases blood glucose levels 60 to 80 percent providing a much greater fuel level to support a high intensity workout. Some commercially available drinks are a combination of fructose and glucose polymers. The glucose polymers are from maltodextrin which has a bland flavor. The drinks depend solely upon the fructose for sweetness and to bring out the fruit flavors, which obviously translates into significant quantities of slowly metabolized crystalline fructose in a supposedly high performance drink.

In contrast, Carbo Force uses mostly dextrose as its source of sweetener and fuel for the body, which is the most rapidly utilized form of glucose. The fructose in Carbo Force is used to buffer the possible insulin effect, which many people think of as a sugar crash, due to the rapid blood glucose increases created by the glucose polymers, dextrose and soluble starches. It allows for a slower return to resting blood glucose levels. It is also a good source for muscle glycogen replacement during recovery. Vitamin and health food manufacturers probably made fructose based sports drinks so that they can sell them through health food stores, who historically as a group, have believed it better than other sweeteners. Rightfully so for jams, candy or other foods. But not for a high performance sports training drink.

We also believe that in the future all sports drinks will have to duplicate the Carbohydrate Stacking Principle, based on dextrose, glucose polymers and/or soluble starch, possibly with small amounts of fructose. The differences are just too positively dramatic to an athlete when using a stacked carbohydrate product as compared to a fructose based product. Basically, fructose does not belong as the primary sweetener in a performance drink.

We have previously mentioned soluble starch. It has been one of our ingredients for a number of years. As this time we feel the need to reveal it. It comes from corn and has been blended with our other corn products and is listed as corn on our label. It has been shown to considerably outperform glucose polymers, as far as blood glucose levels are concerned. The Carbohydrate Stack, which we created. truly has four levels, not three. It is one of the many reasons Carbo Force works so well and why many people call so often to tell us of their successes while on the product. Our products that include the Carbohydrate Stack include Carbo Force, Pro Carbo Force, Super Tea, Carbo Light, Bulk Force, Amino Force, and Critical Mass, our revolutionary post workout drink.

This category contains drinks that have been designed to supply protein or a combination of protein and carbohydrates.

Amino Acids are like building blocks that make up a wall. The wall is called protein. The Amino Acid makeup of any particular protein is what determines the protein's quality. Too much of one and not enough of another can reduce the body's ability to utilize the protein. This proportion of especially the 8 essential Amino Acids determines a protein's Protein Efficiency Ration (P.E.R.), the U.S. Government's method of measuring a protein's quality and its ability to be utilized by the body.

We use lactose free whey protein concentrate, not dairy whey, which is low protein and high lactose. The Amino Acid profile of this protein mimics the profile of human milk more closely than any other we are aware of, and is higher in most of the Amino Acids than human milk, except for two. It other words, it is the highest quality, highest utilization protein Amino Acid source we could locate. It has a P.E.R. of 3.2, and is extremely expensive to manufacture. American Body Building Products is one of the few manufacturers to list the PER on the label.

Unfortunately, not every manufacturer uses high quality protein. Some are perpetrating the 'big ripoff' to unknowing customers who are purchasing supposed protein / amino drinks that actually contain hydrolyzed gelatin protein (other names include hydrolyzed collagen protein, animal connective tissue protein, other animal proteins, etc.) Hydrolyzed gelatin is made mostly from frozen and fresh pork skins as well as cattle bones and hides. These inedible connective tissues and bones are then run through a series of caustic baths, intermittently with hot and cold soakings to separate out the collagen. This is what you are putting into your body when you drink a protein drink which has hydrolyzed gelatin on the label.

Hydrolyzed is the basis for gelatin dessert, and although it might be a fun food, it was not designed to build muscle mass and it won't. This protein has a PER of almost 0. It contains little or no tryptophane, one of the essential Amino Acids necessary for the formation and utilization of all the other Amino Acids. It is a lot cheaper for a manufacturer to purchase hydrolyzed gelatin than the special whey American Body Building uses, which is a natural milk protein naturally extracted during the processing of cheese, after which the lactose, a milk sugar, is removed.

When using hydrolyzed gelatin, the nutritional information panel on the label is supposed to make the statement "Not a significant source of Protein" next to the word protein. But they usually and conveniently forger to include it. Have you been using a product like this and not gained the mass you thought you should on a high protein supplement? Well, you're not getting any protein for it. Whenever you see hydrolyzed gelatin anywhere on the label, even if the label says the product contains whey, check your rear view mirror. Gelatin can cost 75% less than soluble whey, and whey is much more difficult to process. Given these facts, how much quality protein do you believe they are actually giving you in their products when gelatin is listed on the label.

THINK ABOUT IT! For these and other reasons of increased processing costs, some manufacturers opt to go the easy way, and put low quality, low biological utilization proteins in their products.

American Body Building has the knowledge and production facilities, and has developed the technology necessary to properly use and flavor high quality whey. Other manufacturers don't. We will never sacrifice our commitment to quality, for any reason.

Even more upsetting are an increasing number of copy cat products claiming whey on their label as the protein source, when actually the protein comes from 100% hydrolyzed gelatin. These unconscionable, deliberate and misleading practices have not gone unnoticed by legitimate manufacturers.

You can feel secure when purchasing American Body Building Products because of our guaranteed quality and performance. We are dedicated more than ever to the belief that the educated athlete is our best customer.

Many of the professionals in the industry are unaware of the practices of unscrupulous companies. The vast majority of the gym owners, once enlightened will only carry products that they know to be legitimate. Many gym owners are involved and believe in the sport. Most of them really want to do the right thing. When you, the customer, purchase a weight gain or amino drink containing gelatin everyday, all you're getting is a large sugary drink; you won't see any results. As a matter of fact, you might feel worse and/or retard your results because of all the sugar and no quality protein. Gym owners should demand the best from their suppliers and you should demand the best from the fitness professionals you depend on. By using a quality training drink, you both know you can achieve the results you expect.

Research has shown that athletes involved in intense workout regimens need 2 - 3 times the protein that a sedentary person requires. Try a Bulk Force, XXL, or an Amino Force once a day for a couple of weeks and see the difference a high quality protein Amino Acid source can make. Blue Thunder power activator, besides its many other ingredients, contain 32 grams of high quality whey protein. And High Voltage, our newest drink, contain 40 grams of the most technologically advanced protein; cross flow microfiltration.

We take pride in the fact that we are #1 today and we know what we have to do to stay there. We just completed a brand new high tech manufacturing facility designed specifically for the production of these products. Unlike most of our competitors, we manufacture our drinks. They are not made at some soda or juice factory. We understand that being #1 means that our products will always be copied. We want you to know that as long as you see the name American Body Building Products, you can be assured of getting the original highest quality products manufactured today. We spend the time and the money necessary to make the finest products anywhere in the world.

Take for example artificial colors. We have never been crazy about putting them in our products, but many people will not purchase a product that is not eye appealing. So, we colored our bottles. It is a bit more costly, but now we can manufacture most of our products without artificial color, which we're sure you rally don't want or need. Conversely, we have seen products in clear glass bottles that are bright green or some other artificial color without color even listed on the label! (Remember, always read your labels.) Some people have asked us about using glass. The problem is, glass bottles really don't belong out on a gym floor, or in the middle of other athletic events. Besides safety, which is#1, it creates a liability risk for ourselves, the gym owners, and you.

Many products have been designed to look like ours. Read the labels carefully and understand what you are purchasing. If you drink a performance beverage everyday, you owe it to yourself to know what you're putting in your body. Add up how much money you're spending every year and you'll be surprised. Make sure your investment in yourself is paying off. We want you as our customer. We hope to earn your business through the world of mouth success stories from amateur and professional athletes worldwide using American Body Building Products. Many from the first day they began training.

As you learn more about what you are buying, other companies will be under pressure to manufacture a better product. We think you should keep in mind, however, that we don't cut corners. We use only the highest quality ingredients, because it is who we are. We don't need to 'be caught' to change. Think about that in your future purchases.

We have earned the business of many athletes over the last decade and we intend to keep it by continuing to make every product the way it is supposed to be made. The right way. We will continue to set the standard, and manufacture the highest quality high tech sports training drinks in the world today. We thank all of you, our customers, for your continued support.

By American Body Building