The Best Legal Supplement to Build Muscle Over 50 (It’s in Your Pantry)

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Then, just as I was thinking about it, Will Tennyson dropped a video where he tried every legal performance enhancer out there, including a combination of baking soda and beetroot juice. He gave it a perfect 5-star rating and said it helped him finally push past a training plateau he’d been stuck on for months.

As for the science behind it, there aren’t many studies on baking soda and beetroot juice together, especially for resistance training. But separately, they’ve got some solid research behind them.
• Beetroot juice is loaded with nitrates, which help improve blood flow and oxygen delivery to your muscles. That means better endurance and performance.
• Baking soda (or sodium bicarbonate) helps keep your muscles’ pH balanced during tough workouts, which delays fatigue so you can go harder, longer

I decided to run a 7-week experiment during my Sunday workouts to see if I would experience a tangible effect on my training and find out which supplement or combination worked the best.

I’m going to go over the 7 weeks pretty fast, so feel free to ask any questions in the comments to fill in the details.

• Week 1 was a baseline week. No supplements, just measuring my pre- and post-workout pump as it’s claimed, and even Will felt it gave him a better pump than usual. So I was going to test this out.

• Week 2: I tried the baking soda and beetroot juice combined. Some exercises saw pretty impressive gains—like I added 4 extra reps on cable rope curls, which is wild for such a small muscle. Other exercises didn’t budge much. And honestly, I didn’t get a better pump. But hey, I’m here for the gains, not the pump.

• In week 3, I didn’t supplement, and my performance did dip a bit, especially on the curls, where I lost 5 reps compared to the week before. But because I wasn’t supplementing, you would expect some regression.

• Week 4: I tried baking soda by itself. To give you a heads-up—it tastes terrible and can cause gastrointestinal distress. I always had it with a meal and waited about an hour to an hour and a half before training, and as a guy who’s almost 60, I didn’t have any issues taking it this way. For a dosage, I added .3 of a gram for every kilogram of bodyweight.

This week was actually my best workout in the whole experiment. I had exceptional progress on 5 out of 6 exercises! The cable curls bounced back, and even though I failed on the last rep of shoulder press, I still added 2 more overall.

• Week 5: Was another no supplement week, and I got mixed results—some of the exercises improved by a rep; others slipped back. I added 10 pounds to my chest press, as I was doing 16 reps on all 4 sets for that exercise.

• For week 6, it was time for beetroot juice only, and I wasn’t impressed. Only the chest press saw a big jump (3 extra reps), but my leg curls actually lost a rep. The rest were either no change or just a single rep improvement, which I felt was kind of average.

For a dosage, I went with the Will Tennyson-sized glass, although the recommended dosage is 70 to 140 ml, which you could almost take in one shot.

Now, something I realized after starting was the beetroot juice I bought had lemon juice in it. Lemon juice is acidic, and baking soda is alkaline, so they might cancel each other out when combined. That could explain why the combination of beetroot juice and baking soda didn’t do as well as baking soda alone.

The purpose of week 7 was to see how much I’d improved overall, and I didn’t take any supplements for this week. Over the 7 weeks, I’d say my Chest press, shoulder press, and cable rope curls all improved above average.
• Triceps extensions only progressed by 1 rep over 7 weeks, and dumbbell rows, which for me are always stubborn, increased by 4 reps, so I’m happy about that.
• The cable rope curls were the biggest surprise—12 more reps over 7 weeks! For such a small muscle, that’s huge. In the 7 weeks before this experiment, I only added 2 reps.

I didn’t have any exercises that regressed in my last workout, so I consider that a victory!

For me, baking soda was the clear winner. It helped me break through plateaus and get some serious gains. The beetroot juice? Not so much. But everyone’s different, and your response might be better or worse.

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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27834...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles...

https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ing...