Welcome to the Get Fit Guys quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

In the episode, do muscle building supplements work last week?

You learned about whether protein and creatine are safe and effective ways to build muscle.

In today's episode, you'll learn about two more slightly less well-known, but still very

popular additions to muscle-building supplements, nitric oxide and beta-alinin. If you need to know

how muscle-building supplements actually work, be sure to listen to Part 1 via the link that I'll

put in the show notes. So let's start with nitric oxide.

Nitric oxide is actually a gas made up of one molecule of nitrogen and one molecule of

oxygen.

A completely natural gas that can be synthesized by your body, nitric oxide acts as a signaling

molecule to promote blood vessel relaxation, which is why nitric oxide was termed when initially discovered

endothelium-derived relaxation factor.

Endothelium is part of the lining of your blood vessels, and when blood vessels in your body relax,

they dilate or get bigger and carry more blood.

We don't need to get into the nitty-gritty details, but Viagra actually operates via a mechanism

that keeps blood vessels in a specific part of a man's body nice and relaxed so that there's

lots of dilation and bigness.

The promise that nitric oxide could make your muscles bigger relies on a similar principle.

Specifically that nitric oxide causes blood vessel dilation, which causes more blood flow to a muscle,

which increases nutrient and oxygen delivery to the muscle, which causes greater muscle growth and strength,

hypothetically. However, as mentioned earlier, nitric oxide is a gas. So contrary to popular belief,

when you consume a muscle-building supplement that promises something like

...