Endurance vs Strength Athletes: Which Supplements Should You Take?

When it comes to fitness, most of the nutrient advice offered to athletes is straightforward. This  starts with the encouragement to be on the lookout for food that is generally healthy, that is packed with protein, fat, and carbohydrates in their prescribed ratios, and that is also teeming with useful macronutrients like vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. 

In the overwhelming majority of cases, this is indeed a solid starting point. However, once you dive into the training demands that exist on opposite ends of the performance spectrum, you see just how valuable supplementation can be when it comes to satisfying the needs of each pool of athletes. 

Moreover, when you delve into the nuances of performance specialization, and you separate the dedicated strength athletes from pure endurance athletes, it becomes crystal clear how the supplement needs of each group overlap, and where they diverge. In fact, this can be a thoroughly valuable process if your aim is to familiarize yourself with just how diverse the range of benefits conferred by many nutritional supplements can truly be.

The performance needs of endurance athletes

If you’re not sure what the priorities of endurance athletes are, and you happen to be an untrained runner, you’ll discover exactly what those needs are in 30 minutes or less if you venture out onto the street and attempt to run more than three consecutive miles without stopping.

A few things will probably stand out to you immediately. First, you’ll find yourself completely out of breath. Second, several of your muscles — including many in your upper body that didn’t seem to be directly involved in the running process at all — will feel like they’re cramping and burning uncomfortably. Finally, your feet, knees, and ankles are all going to feel extremely sore.

Extrapolating from this, it’s clear that endurance athletes need to upgrade their aerobic capacity — also known as VO2 max — to increase their capacity to sustain movement. Second, they need to boost their ability to tolerate and eliminate lactic acid from their blood in order to reduce the sensation of burning and the fatigue that comes with it. 

Along the way, these same athletes need to upgrade the resilience of their joints and muscles, not only for the sake of maximizing performance, but primarily to fortify their bodies to endure the wear and tear they will experience as they work to improve the first two markers of physical endurance.

The performance needs of strength athletes

When you scrutinize the priorities of athletes for whom explosive power and precision are essential to what they do, you’ll find that their needs are fairly straightforward. Certainly, there is a timing element linked to combining brute power with the precision and coordination required to complete the Olympic lifts, which have multiple phases that athletes must account for in their training. 

Setting this technical element aside, the athletes of this domain are solely concerned with absolutely maximizing their strength and applying it to their competitive lifts. This results in training sessions that are devoted to the development of explosive power and force, the growth of muscle mass to support the maximization of strength and power, and enhancing the capacity of joints and tendons to support heavy loads. 

While this obviously means that much focus is devoted to maximizing force production on training days, even more attention is dedicated to physical recovery so that the body can readily adapt to physiological changes that are being prompted by frequent all-out efforts inside of the weight room.

Supplements encouraged for both groups

As distinct as their training disciplines and styles may be, there is evident overlap in the supplemental needs and preferences of strength athletes and endurance athletes. This fact should be interpreted as evidence that there are some nutrients and supplements that can set the stage for efficient training regardless of its type. 

Furthermore, there are also supplements that contribute dynamically to the recovery process regardless of whether the muscle damage was accumulated through short strenuous bursts of activity, or through the gradual degradation of muscle tissue over time.

Caffeine 

Perhaps the most abundant and easily available supplement in the world, caffeine just happens to boost the performance quality of both endurance athletes and strength athletes. Caffeine’s energy-granting properties have been conclusively proven across countless studies, and the benefits are essentially universal when caffeine is taken in large enough doses.

In endurance athletes, creatine reduces perceived exertion, improves workout capacity, and extends an athlete’s ability to sustain performance during long workouts and races. (1) Similarly, strength athletes receive direct boosts to muscle strength and power output that are reflected in increased one-rep max strength, and prolonged endurance throughout lifting sessions. (2)

Creatine

Anyone familiar with the history of creatine and the athletes who first gravitated toward it will be unsurprised by the fact that creatine supplementation translates directly to an increase in ATP, which supports high-intensity efforts that are short in duration. There are few better examples of this than the explosive bursts of power required of strength athletes, who are usually attempting to maximize the amount of weight that can hoist in a single effort.

On the back end, creatine is also proven to aid physical recovery, accentuate muscle-protein synthesis, and accelerate the acquisition of muscle mass. (3) All of this is music to the ears of strength athletes, who need to return to the gym day after day while being physically and mentally prepared to put their muscles through the ringer yet again.

The usefulness of creatine for endurance athletes is more complex, because it doesn’t directly support aerobic capacity or other vital areas linked with improving the performance of athletes for whom muscle wear and tear are more gradual, and whose competitive performance is less ATP-phosphocreatine dependent. However, creatine does assist with muscle glycogen storage, and also elevates the potential for short energy bursts within longer endurance efforts. (4)

Protein

Another area in which the needs of strength athletes and endurance athletes intersect is in their need for supplemental protein. In the case of strength athletes, protein supplementation has long been mandated to support their needs for muscle repair and recovery following the intense wear and tear they undergo during regular strength training.

While protein is often deemed a less essential supplement for endurance athletes, the recommendations of major nutrition-focused organizations would suggest otherwise. The ISSN daily protein guidance for endurance athletes is just a shade beneath what it recommends for strength athletes, with an explicit instruction to consume protein during endurance workouts. Specifically, endurance athletes are advised to consume 0.25 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight every hour during extended workouts to reduce muscle soreness and minimize damage markers. (5)

Beta-Alanine 

The primary benefit of beta-alanine is that it helps your body produce higher quantities of carnosine, which buffers against the production of lactic acid. Whether you’re a strength athlete or an endurance athlete, this works to your clear advantage. 

Studies of the physiology of strength athletes indicate that beta-alanine is able to increase your peak power, enable you to sustain the power of your upper body for longer periods of time throughout sets, and boost recovery during short rests in between sets. (6)

While this may sound particularly advantageous to strength athletes, studies also show that continuous supplementation with beta-alanine also reduces the total accumulation of lactic acid during endurance training. (7) This would confer a huge advantage to an endurance athlete on its own, but in a manner similar to creatine, beta-alanine also seems to preserve the ability of endurance athletes to push the pace or strategically sprint during events, helping them to dramatically improve their placements in races while dropping several seconds in the process.

Omega-3 Fatty Acids

Primarily known for their ability to reduce inflammation and muscle damage, omega-3 fatty acids also confer unique benefits to both strength athletes and endurance athletes in ways that can dramatically improve the performance quality of each group.

Along with reduced soreness and muscle damage, strength athletes have been shown to achieve direct strength gains from omega-3 fatty acids, with studies showing that 10 weeks of supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids was able to improve athletes’ one-rep-max on both the squat and bench press, while also reducing total fat mass. (8)

Likewise, endurance athletes who are benefitting from the alleviation of muscle soreness will also appreciate the uptick that omega-3s will offer their endurance, along with a higher VO2max, and a longer time-to-exhaustion period. (9)

Magnesium

Outside of its function within the broader category of electrolytes, which we’ll get to later, magnesium is famous for its ability to relax muscles and contribute to healthy sleep. This latter point is one of the most overlooked elements of recovery, as sleep is the state in which the greatest amount of physical recovery occurs.

In strength athletes, supplemental magnesium has also been proven to upgrade muscle performance. This is especially true in the realm of peak muscle output. In one study in particular, magnesium supplementation was deemed the sole contributor to an average one-rep bench press max improvement of nearly 8 percent. (10)

Magnesium also assists with the elimination of cramps in all athletes, but this benefit is accentuated amongst endurance athletes, who are more likely to suffer from cramps in the middle of long training sessions. This benefit is achieved alongside increased endurance and a general reduction of post-workout soreness. (11)

Collagen Peptides 

For both strength and endurance athletes, collagen peptides contribute to the stability and recovery of joints, which are inevitably going to be stressed from either intense force production, or high repetition and pounding. 

Studies of strength athletes found that long-term supplementation with collagen peptides led to an increase in fat-free mass and maximum strength with accelerated muscle recovery, all in a fashion similar to that of the more complete proteins found in many protein supplements. (12)

Other studies have shown that collagen supplementation is most promising for endurance athletes when paired with vitamin C. In these instances, the combination of collagen and vitamin C was especially useful for hastening the lower body tendon recovery of runners, and also boosting the amount of force the tendons could apply to the ground in support of running performance. (13)

Supplements for strength athletes

While many of the supplements that elevate endurance potential can also boost strength, there are a few supplements whose benefits are generally isolated to the areas of force production and muscle growth in ways that seem uniquely beneficial to strength-focused trainees.

HMB

The primary purpose of β-Hydroxy β-Methylbutyrate — popularly known as HMB — is to preserve muscle mass, enabling you to keep more of your hard-won gains. (14) While this is frankly beneficial to anyone, the fact that success or failure for competitive strength athletes is often determined purely by how much muscle mass they were able to retain makes HMB a far more vital supplement for strength athletes than endurance athletes.

Citrulline Malate

As one of the purest prompts of a satisfactory “pump,” citrulline malate directly increases your body’s production of nitric oxide, thereby improving the delivery of blood throughout your body, and aiding nutrient delivery. In studies, this has conclusively increased the number of high-intensity reps that test subjects were able to complete, with less fatigue and soreness in the aftermath. (15)

Supplements for endurance athletes

The key feature of the endurance-focused supplements is that they are of little to no value for workouts that are of short duration, but may become absolutely crucial in situations when you need to consistently extend training sessions and continue to extract value from them.

Electrolytes

As hyped as electrolytes are, and particularly when advertised by companies promoting sports drinks, the reality is that electrolyte supplementation only truly becomes a necessity after workouts approach the one-hour mark, and potentially extend well beyond it. 

The underlying factor involved in the process is that your body’s current stock of electrolytes is eliminated by the loss of sweat that accompanies virtually all training that taxes the aerobic system for long periods of time, making electrolyte replenishment a necessity to preserve muscle function. 

Cyclic Dextrin

It’s true that carbohydrate intake is essential to muscle function and restoration under all circumstances. However, the bodies of endurance athletes demand carbohydrates while they’re in the midst of long training sessions and competitions. 

This can pose a problem even when  carbohydrates are available, because many of the most convenient carbs will cause the sort of digestive distress that can make continuing an hour-long run or bike ride an impossibility.

Cyclic dextrin presents a solution to this problem; it is a carbohydrate source that is absorbed quickly by the body without spiking blood-insulin levels. In the process, it provides your body with a source of steady energy that can conveniently lengthen your workouts without forcing you to undergo any unnecessary cramping or discomfort. (16)

Supplemental Sufficiency

If you’re a health-conscious individual who is hoping to amplify your workouts and their aftereffects, there’s a strong possibility that the supplements you’re taking are benefitting you whether you’re training for increased strength, or seeking to improve your aerobic conditioning.

Realistically, if you’re like the many fitness-minded people who alternate resistance workouts without cardiovascular training, or who like to blend the two training methodologies to some degree, you should feel reassured and encouraged by the fact that the many of the same supplements that will boost your muscle strength and power will also have you lasting longer when you transition to running for miles on end.

Sources

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