Beta-Alanine for Fighters: Dose, Tingling and Proof

Beta-alanine is the supplement most likely to be sitting in a fighter's bag under a different name than the one on the science. It is the "tingle" people describe before a session, sold in pre-workout blends and standalone tubs alike, and it has one of the more specific evidence bases of anything in a combat athlete's cabinet: a dedicated position stand, a 2023 systematic review conducted specifically in combat-sport populations, and trial data in boxers, judoka and kickboxers rather than cyclists and swimmers.

It also has a shape of evidence that does not behave like the other two supplements fighters ask about most. Creatine and caffeine both work on a time scale close to a single session — load creatine over days, feel caffeine in an hour. Beta-alanine works on a time scale closer to a training block. The muscle has to build up a store of something over weeks, and that store comes down just as slowly. Getting the arithmetic of that timing wrong is the most common way a fighter wastes the supplement entirely.

This article sets out the published dose, the combat-sport-specific trial evidence by discipline, the one consistently reported side effect and how to avoid it, the anti-doping status checked against the current document, and the places the evidence does not yet reach — starting with who it has actually been studied in, and ending with what a fighter should do differently about timing it inside an actual training camp.

4–6 g/day

Daily beta-alanine dose the ISSN position stand says consistently raises muscle carnosine and improves high-intensity performance, taken for at least 2–4 weeks

Trexler et al., J Int Soc Sports Nutr 2015;12:30

42% vs 64%

Rise in muscle carnosine after 4 weeks of supplementation at 3.2 g/day versus 6.4 g/day in the original dose-response trial

Harris et al., Amino Acids 2006;30(3):279–289

+14%

Extra total work completed on repeated 30-second upper-body sprints when beta-alanine was combined with sodium bicarbonate, versus either taken alone, in judo and jiu-jitsu competitors

Tobias et al., Amino Acids 2013;45(2):309–317

Not listed

Beta-alanine's status on the WADA 2026 Prohibited List and the 2026 Monitoring Program: it appears on neither

World Anti-Doping Agency, The Prohibited List and 2026 Monitoring Program

What this comes down to

The published effective range is 4–6 g/day for at least 2–4 weeks. Shorter exposures do not reliably raise muscle carnosine by enough to matter, and a single dose on fight day does nothing — there is no acute effect to chase.
The loading response is dose-dependent and slow. The original dose-response trial found 3.2 g/day raised muscle carnosine by roughly 42% and 6.4 g/day by roughly 64% over four weeks, with further gains out to ten weeks in athletes who continued.
The only side effect reported with any consistency is paresthesia — tingling in the face, neck, scalp and hands. It is harmless, it is tied to the size of a single dose rather than the daily total, and it is avoidable.
A 2023 systematic review conducted specifically in combat-sport athletes — seven clinical trials screened from 41 candidates — found consistent improvement in strength, power, total work capacity and combat-specific performance measures, and judged the supplement safe in the populations studied.
Trial-level evidence now exists across three combat disciplines: boxing, where it improved punch force and frequency in a simulated contest; judo and jiu-jitsu, where it raised total work on repeated efforts and stacked additively with sodium bicarbonate; and kickboxing, where a 2026 trial found gains in anaerobic performance, neuromuscular power and strength endurance.
A 2024 meta-analysis of 18 studies and 331 participants found a significant overall benefit and suggests the useful effort window may run longer than the original one-to-four-minute estimate — closer to the length of an actual round.
Unlike caffeine or creatine, the effect comes on slowly and leaves slowly. Muscle carnosine stays measurably elevated for roughly nine to sixteen weeks after stopping, which changes where loading belongs in a training calendar.
Beta-alanine does not appear on the WADA 2026 Prohibited List or the 2026 Monitoring Program, and it has no meaningful acute effect on body mass — it is not a weight-cutting tool and has nothing to do with the scale.

What beta-alanine actually does

The mechanism is specific enough to be worth stating precisely, because it explains why the effect shows up where it does and nowhere else.

High-intensity effort produces hydrogen ions inside working muscle faster than the body can clear them, and that acidosis is one of the things that makes a third round feel different from a first one. Carnosine, a dipeptide stored inside skeletal muscle, acts as an intracellular buffer against exactly that kind of acid accumulation.

The muscle can synthesise carnosine itself, but the reaction has a bottleneck. Histidine, carnosine's other building block, is abundant in a normal diet. Beta-alanine is not, and it is the rate-limiting ingredient. Taking it as a supplement raises the ceiling on how much carnosine the muscle can hold, which is why the whole intervention is described in the literature as "carnosine loading" even though the capsule contains beta-alanine, not carnosine itself.

What follows from that mechanism is a prediction the trial evidence below actually confirms: the benefit should be largest in short, repeated, maximal efforts where buffering capacity is the limiting factor, and closer to irrelevant in a steady lower-intensity effort where it never becomes one. A combat sport, built from repeated bursts of near-maximal output inside a longer bout, is close to the textbook use case.

The dose, and the four-week floor

The 2015 ISSN position stand on beta-alanine sets the effective range at 4–6 grams per day, taken for a minimum of two to four weeks, with the clearest performance benefits showing up in high-intensity efforts in the short end of that range and open-ended time trials.

The dose-response relationship behind that range comes from the original loading study, which supplemented subjects with either 3.2 or 6.4 grams of beta-alanine per day in divided doses. After four weeks, muscle carnosine had risen by roughly 42% in the lower-dose group and roughly 64% in the higher-dose group, and in the subjects who continued to ten weeks, the increase climbed further still. The relationship is not a threshold effect — more beta-alanine over more weeks keeps building the store, at a diminishing but real rate.

The practical read is that four grams a day is a floor, not a target, and that four weeks is a floor for duration as well as dose. A fighter who starts beta-alanine in fight week is not early; they are too late to have raised muscle carnosine by any amount the trials below measured.

Paresthesia: what it is, and how to not have it

Ask anyone who has taken a single large dose of beta-alanine what it feels like, and they will describe the same thing: a tingling or prickling sensation, usually in the face, neck, scalp, hands or feet, starting within twenty minutes and fading over an hour or so. This is paresthesia, and it is the one adverse effect the literature reports with any consistency.

It is unpleasant for some people and barely noticeable for others, and it is harmless — no study of beta-alanine supplementation has tied it to any lasting effect. What drives it is the size of a single dose, not the total taken across a day. A bolus of roughly two grams or more in one sitting is where it becomes common; the same total amount split into several smaller doses across the day — commonly around 1.6 grams per serving — produces far less of it, and a sustained-release formulation reduces it further by slowing absorption directly.

The practical takeaway is an operational one rather than a safety one. There is no reason to tolerate the tingling: split the daily dose into three or four servings with food, or use a sustained-release product, and the loading proceeds the same way without the sensation. The one thing worth avoiding is taking a large single dose for the first time on a day that matters, purely because an unfamiliar sensation is a bad thing to be managing during a session, a media appearance or a weigh-in — not because it is dangerous, but because it is distracting and entirely avoidable.

The combat-sport evidence, read as a body of work

Most supplement claims in combat sports borrow evidence from cycling, running or general resistance training and hope it transfers. Beta-alanine is one of the few with a systematic review conducted specifically inside combat athletes.

A 2023 review in Nutrients searched for clinical trials of beta-alanine supplementation in combat-sport populations specifically, following PRISMA guidelines. Forty-one candidate studies were screened down to seven that met its inclusion criteria — a reminder of how thin the combat-specific literature still is relative to the general sports-nutrition base, even on a well-studied supplement. Within those seven trials, the review reported consistent improvement across strength, power, total work capacity and combat-specific performance measures, and concluded the supplement appears safe and is a suitable ergogenic aid for combat athletes. A broader 2022 review of nutritional ergogenic aids across combat sports reached a compatible conclusion for beta-alanine specifically, alongside caffeine and creatine, as supplements with a defensible evidence base in this population.

That is the summary. The individual trials underneath it are worth reading discipline by discipline, because each one tested something slightly different about where the benefit shows up.

What it did in boxers

Two trials have looked at beta-alanine in boxers directly, and both used the same discipline-specific outcome: output during actual punching rather than a generic fitness test.

The first randomised sixteen amateur boxers, each with around six years of experience, to beta-alanine at 1.5 grams four times a day — 6 grams total — or placebo, for four weeks. During a simulated contest with maximal-output punching, the beta-alanine group showed significantly greater improvement in both mean punch force and punch frequency than the placebo group. A second trial combined four weeks of strength training with the same supplement in eighteen male boxers and found a similar pattern on anaerobic Wingate testing: the group training with beta-alanine showed larger gains in anaerobic power alongside a measured rise in carnosine, compared with strength training and placebo.

Punch force and punch frequency are not proxy measures. They are the two numbers a boxing judge's scorecard is actually tracking, inside a sport where the whole contest comes down to how many clean, hard punches land in three minutes. A supplement whose effect holds up on that specific outcome, rather than only on a cycle ergometer, is unusual in this category.

What it did in judo and jiu-jitsu

A trial in 37 judo and jiu-jitsu competitors tested beta-alanine against sodium bicarbonate, and then tested the two combined — a design that answers a question fighters actually ask: do these stack, or does one just duplicate the other.

Athletes took either placebo, beta-alanine alone at 6.4 grams a day for four weeks, sodium bicarbonate alone (500 mg per kilogram of body mass) for the final seven days, or both together. Performance was measured across four 30-second upper-body sprint efforts separated by three-minute rests — a protocol chosen specifically to mimic the repeated high-intensity, incomplete-recovery demand of grappling exchanges. Beta-alanine alone increased total work done by about 7%, sodium bicarbonate alone by about 8%, and the two combined produced an additive 14% increase — meaningfully more than either alone, not merely the better of the two.

A separate trial using a comparable co-ingestion design in healthy trained males found the same direction of effect on buffering capacity and time to fatigue during high-intensity exercise, reinforcing that the two compounds are acting on related but distinct parts of the same acid-buffering system — beta-alanine inside the muscle cell via carnosine, sodium bicarbonate outside it via blood bicarbonate — rather than one making the other redundant.

What it did in kickboxers

The newest of the discipline-specific trials, published in 2026, randomised 28 trained male kickboxers to beta-alanine at 6.4 grams a day or placebo for four weeks, in a double-blind design built specifically to test kickboxing-relevant outcomes rather than a generic fitness battery. The supplemented group showed improvements in sport-specific anaerobic performance, neuromuscular power and strength-endurance measures relative to placebo.

The significance of a kickboxing-specific trial existing at all is worth pausing on. Kickboxing sits structurally between boxing's hand-output demand and judo's grappling-exchange demand — rounds built from combinations and clinch work rather than either one exclusively — and until recently the discipline had no dedicated beta-alanine data of its own, only the inference that findings from boxing and judo would probably transfer. They did.

The newer meta-analysis widens the window

The 2015 position stand's headline finding was that beta-alanine's clearest benefit sits in high-intensity efforts lasting roughly one to four minutes. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis revisited that question across 18 studies and 331 participants and found a significant overall effect — an effect size of 0.39 in favour of beta-alanine over placebo — with the benefit extending to efforts in the four-to-ten-minute range as well, a longer window than the original estimate.

That revision matters for how the supplement maps onto an actual fight. A three-to-five-minute round built from repeated short bursts — combinations, scrambles, clinch exchanges — spans exactly the territory the newer analysis covers, where the earlier one-to-four-minute estimate left some ambiguity about whether a full round counted. The practical conclusion has not changed — this was never a supplement for a ten-round decision fought at a steady pace — but the evidence for rounds built from repeated high-output exchanges, which describes most combat-sport rounds, has gotten stronger rather than narrower since 2015.

The part that is not like creatine or caffeine: on, and off

Creatine saturates muscle stores within about a week of loading and the effect is largely gone within a few weeks of stopping. Caffeine works or does not work on the same day it is taken. Beta-alanine behaves on a completely different clock in both directions, and treating it like the other two is the most common way a fighter gets no benefit from a month of supplementation.

The loading side is covered above: four weeks is closer to a floor than a target. The washout side is less widely known and arguably more important for camp planning. A dedicated washout study supplemented subjects with 6.4 grams a day for eight weeks, then tracked muscle carnosine for sixteen weeks after stopping. Carnosine stayed measurably elevated above baseline for most of that window, with decay running at a rate of roughly 2–4% per week and full return to baseline taking anywhere from around nine weeks to sixteen weeks depending on how much an individual had built up and how they responded to loading in the first place.

The practical consequence runs in both directions. Loading belongs at the start of a camp, not fight week — there is no way to compress four weeks of carnosine accumulation into the final days before a bout. And once the store is built, there is no need to keep dosing right up to the bell to keep it: stopping beta-alanine one to two weeks out, for instance to simplify what an athlete is taking around a water-fluctuating weigh-in, costs very little measurable carnosine, because the washout runs in months, not days.

Anti-doping status

Beta-alanine is a naturally occurring amino acid, present in meat and poultry as part of the dipeptides carnosine and anserine, and its supplement form is the same molecule in a larger dose. That profile — a nutrient rather than a drug, with a buffering mechanism rather than a hormonal, stimulant or masking one — is reflected in its regulatory status: it does not appear on the World Anti-Doping Agency's 2026 Prohibited List, and it does not appear on the 2026 Monitoring Program either, the list of substances WADA tracks for patterns of misuse without prohibiting them.

That is a meaningfully different status from caffeine, which sits on the Monitoring Program, or from several amino-acid and hormone-adjacent products marketed to combat athletes that do carry restrictions. It is not a status that requires checking before every camp — an unregulated amino acid with no mechanism resembling any WADA class is a stable category, not a developing one — but the broader discipline of checking the current list rather than relying on memory applies to every supplement a fighter takes, and is covered more fully in banned supplements and anti-doping risk. Contamination of a finished product with something that is restricted remains a separate risk beta-alanine's own status does not address, and it is the reason third-party batch testing exists as a category.

Does it help you make weight?

No, and it is worth saying plainly because the supplement aisle does not distinguish between "raises performance" and "helps the cut" and fighters are often shopping for both at once.

Beta-alanine's entire documented mechanism is intracellular pH buffering through muscle carnosine. It has no meaningful effect on water retention, lean mass or total body mass at the doses studied — nothing like creatine's well-documented effect of pulling water into muscle cells, which is itself not a cutting tool but does move the number on a scale in the other direction. An athlete choosing a supplement with weigh-in logistics in mind should treat beta-alanine as irrelevant to that decision in either direction: it will not make a cut easier and it will not make one harder. Its entire case rests on what it does inside a round, not on what it does to the number on fight-week morning.

What the evidence does not cover

The combat-sport trial base for beta-alanine is unusually good for a single supplement, and it still has real gaps.

The population is almost entirely adult male. Every discipline-specific trial cited above — boxing, judo and jiu-jitsu, kickboxing — recruited male athletes. Whether the same dose produces the same carnosine response and the same performance effect in female combat athletes has not been tested in this population, and extrapolating from it is an assumption rather than a finding.

No trial has dose-ranged specifically within combat athletes. Every combat-sport trial used either 6.4 grams a day or the boxing-specific 1.5 g × 4/day protocol, both of which were set by the general sports-nutrition literature rather than derived from testing multiple doses in fighters. Whether a combat athlete's specific training demand changes the optimal dose is unknown.

Nobody has studied beta-alanine during concurrent acute weight loss. The loading trials were conducted in athletes training normally, not athletes simultaneously restricting food, manipulating fluid or doing so for the express purpose of rapid mass loss. Whether a late-camp energy deficit changes carnosine synthesis or the performance response has not been isolated as a question.

Long-term safety data runs out early. The longest loading-plus-washout protocol tracked in the literature above covers eight weeks of supplementation and sixteen weeks of follow-up. Multi-year, repeated-camp use across a competitive career is unstudied, in a sport where athletes commonly take supplements for a decade or more.

What we could not verify

Any combat-sport trial in female athletes. We did not find one. Every discipline-specific study cited here — boxing, judo/jiu-jitsu, kickboxing — used male participants only.
A dose-ranging trial conducted specifically in combat athletes. The 6.4 g/day and 1.5 g × 4/day protocols used in the combat-sport trials both derive from the general literature; no trial compared multiple doses within a combat-athlete sample.
Beta-alanine's behaviour under simultaneous acute energy or fluid restriction. We found no study isolating this combination, which matters for a sport where supplement use and weight manipulation routinely overlap in the same training block.
Whether paresthesia incidence or severity differs by sex or body mass. The mechanism is described in the general literature, but we did not find data breaking the side-effect rate down by either variable.
Carnosine washout timing in combat athletes specifically. The 16-week washout study was conducted in physically active but non-combat-sport subjects; the nine-to-sixteen-week range cited here is the best available estimate, not a combat-athlete-specific measurement.

Questions fighters ask

What does beta-alanine actually do for a fighter?

It raises the amount of carnosine stored inside skeletal muscle, and carnosine buffers the hydrogen ions that build up during high-intensity effort and contribute to the burning, heavy feeling in a third round. Beta-alanine itself is not the active buffer — it is the rate-limiting ingredient the muscle needs to build more carnosine, since the body's own supply of it, unlike histidine, is not abundant in a normal diet. The practical effect shows up as better-maintained output across repeated high-intensity efforts, which is why the evidence concentrates in combat sports, judo, boxing and kickboxing specifically rather than in steady endurance work.

How much beta-alanine should I take, and for how long?

The ISSN position stand's effective range is 4–6 grams per day, taken for a minimum of two to four weeks, and the combat-sport trials cited in this article used either 6.4 g/day for four weeks or a boxing-specific 1.5 g four times a day (6 g total) for four weeks. Four weeks is closer to a floor than a target: the original dose-response trial found muscle carnosine still rising between weeks four and ten in subjects who continued supplementing, meaning a longer loading period keeps building the store rather than plateauing quickly.

What is the tingling feeling from beta-alanine, and is it dangerous?

It is paresthesia, a prickling or tingling sensation usually felt in the face, neck, scalp or hands within about twenty minutes of a dose, and it is not dangerous. No study of beta-alanine supplementation has linked it to any lasting effect; it is simply an uncomfortable sensory response in some individuals, and in others barely noticeable. The research ties its intensity to the size of a single dose rather than the total amount taken across a day, which is why dividing a daily dose into smaller servings is the standard way to avoid it rather than a reason to avoid the supplement.

How do I avoid the beta-alanine tingles?

Split the daily total into smaller doses rather than taking it all at once. A single serving of roughly two grams or more is where paresthesia becomes common; dividing the same daily total into three or four servings of around 1.6 grams each, taken with food, produces markedly less of it. A sustained-release formulation, which slows absorption directly, reduces it further for anyone who still notices tingling at divided doses. None of this changes how much muscle carnosine accumulates over the loading period — it only changes how the dosing feels.

Does beta-alanine actually work for combat sports, or is that extrapolated from other sports?

It has direct trial evidence inside combat sports, not just an assumption carried over from cycling or running. A 2023 systematic review screened the clinical-trial literature specifically for combat-sport populations and found seven qualifying trials showing consistent improvement in strength, power, total work capacity and combat-specific performance measures. Beyond the review, individual randomised trials exist in boxers, in judo and jiu-jitsu competitors, and in kickboxers, each using outcome measures specific to that discipline rather than a generic fitness test.

Does beta-alanine help boxers specifically?

Yes, in the two trials that have tested it. A 2012 randomised trial in sixteen amateur boxers found significantly greater improvement in mean punch force and punch frequency during a simulated contest after four weeks of beta-alanine versus placebo. A second trial combining beta-alanine with four weeks of strength training in eighteen male boxers found larger gains in anaerobic power on Wingate testing alongside a measured rise in muscle carnosine, compared with strength training alone. Punch force and frequency are the outcomes a judge's scorecard actually tracks, which makes this a more direct line of evidence than a cycling test would provide.

Does beta-alanine help in judo or BJJ?

Yes. A trial in 37 judo and jiu-jitsu competitors found that four weeks of beta-alanine at 6.4 g/day increased total work done across four repeated 30-second upper-body sprint efforts by about 7% compared with placebo. The same trial found an additional benefit from combining it with sodium bicarbonate in the final week: the two together produced a 14% increase in total work, meaningfully more than either supplement alone, suggesting they act on related but distinct parts of the body's acid-buffering system rather than duplicating each other.

Does beta-alanine help in kickboxing or Muay Thai?

The direct evidence is in kickboxing: a 2026 randomised, double-blind trial in 28 trained male kickboxers found that four weeks of beta-alanine at 6.4 g/day improved sport-specific anaerobic performance, neuromuscular power and strength-endurance measures compared with placebo. No equivalent trial has been run in Muay Thai specifically, but the discipline shares the same repeated-high-intensity-exchange structure that beta-alanine's mechanism and the kickboxing, boxing and judo trials all point toward benefiting.

Should I combine beta-alanine with sodium bicarbonate?

The judo and jiu-jitsu trial above found an additive effect from doing so — 14% more total work than placebo, versus roughly 7–8% from either supplement alone — and a separate trial in healthy trained males found a comparable direction of effect on buffering capacity and time to fatigue. The combination is more logistically demanding: beta-alanine is a weeks-long daily loading protocol, while sodium bicarbonate is typically loaded over the final days before a specific effort and carries its own, more significant, gastrointestinal side-effect risk at the doses studied. Treat them as two separate decisions rather than a single stack, and research sodium bicarbonate's own evidence and tolerance profile before timing it around a fight.

Is beta-alanine banned in MMA, boxing or under WADA rules?

No. Beta-alanine does not appear on the World Anti-Doping Agency's 2026 Prohibited List, and it also does not appear on the 2026 Monitoring Program, the separate list of substances WADA tracks for patterns of misuse without prohibiting them. That puts it in a different category from caffeine, which is monitored, though not prohibited. As with any supplement, the remaining risk is contamination of a specific finished product with a restricted ingredient rather than beta-alanine itself, which is why third-party batch testing matters more than the ingredient's own regulatory status.

Does beta-alanine help with cutting weight?

No. Its documented mechanism is intracellular pH buffering through muscle carnosine, with no meaningful effect on water retention, lean mass or total body mass at the doses studied. That is a genuine difference from creatine, whose well-evidenced effect of pulling water into muscle cells does move a scale reading even though it is not a cutting tool either. A fighter deciding what to take with weigh-in logistics in mind can treat beta-alanine as irrelevant to that decision in either direction — it affects what happens inside a round, not what the scale shows that morning.

What happens if I stop taking beta-alanine before a fight?

Very little, in the short term. A washout study found that muscle carnosine declines at roughly 2–4% per week after beta-alanine supplementation stops, with a full return to baseline taking anywhere from about nine to sixteen weeks depending on individual response. Stopping one to two weeks before a fight — for instance to simplify what is being taken around a fluctuating weigh-in week — costs only a small fraction of the accumulated carnosine store. The mistake to avoid runs the other way: starting beta-alanine in fight week does essentially nothing, because the store that matters takes weeks to build in the first place.

Is beta-alanine safe to take for a long time?

The data that exists supports it at the studied doses over the studied durations — the loading trials generally run four to eight weeks, with the longest washout follow-up extending to sixteen weeks after an eight-week loading period, and no study in that window has reported anything beyond the tingling side effect. What is genuinely unverified is multi-year, repeated-camp use across a competitive career, which has not been the subject of a dedicated study, in a sport where athletes commonly take the same supplements for a decade or more.

Does beta-alanine work for every fighter, or just some people?

The trials report group-average improvements, and like most supplements, individual response varies. The original dose-response and washout research both describe "high responders" and "low responders" in how much carnosine a given protocol builds and how long it persists after stopping, without a validated way to predict in advance which category an individual athlete falls into. The practical approach is the same one that applies to creatine or caffeine: follow the published dose and duration, and treat the group-level finding as a reasonable expectation rather than a guarantee for any one person.

Sources

Sourced to

International society of sports nutrition position stand: Beta-Alanine — Trexler ET, Smith-Ryan AE, Stout JR, et al., Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 2015;12:30. DOI 10.1186/s12970-015-0090-y, PMID 26175657
The absorption of orally supplied β-alanine and its effect on muscle carnosine synthesis in human vastus lateralis — Harris RC, Tallon MJ, Dunnett M, et al., Amino Acids, 2006;30(3):279-289. PMID 16554972
β-Alanine Supplementation in Combat Sports: Evaluation of Sports Performance, Perception, and Anthropometric Parameters and Biochemical Markers—A Systematic Review of Clinical Trials — Fernández-Lázaro D, Fiandor EM, García JF, et al., Nutrients, 2023;15(17):3755. DOI 10.3390/nu15173755
β-Alanine improves punch force and frequency in amateur boxers during a simulated contest — Donovan T, Ballam T, Morton JP, Close GL, International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 2012;22(5):331-337. PMID 22805175
The Effect of 4 Weeks of Strength Training and Beta-Alanine Supplementation on Anaerobic Power and Carnosine Level in Boxer Players — Alabsi K, Rashidlamir A, Hakak Dokht E, Journal of Science in Sport and Exercise, 2023;5(1):62-69. DOI 10.1007/s42978-021-00151-z
Additive effects of beta-alanine and sodium bicarbonate on upper-body intermittent performance — Tobias G, Benatti FB, de Salles Painelli V, et al., Amino Acids, 2013;45(2):309-317. DOI 10.1007/s00726-013-1495-z, PMID 23595205
The effect of β-alanine and NaHCO3 co-ingestion on buffering capacity and exercise performance with high-intensity exercise in healthy males — Danaher J, Gerber T, Wellard RM, Stathis CG, European Journal of Applied Physiology, 2014. PMID 24832191
Effects of β-alanine supplementation on kickboxing-specific anaerobic performance, neuromuscular power, and strength endurance: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial — Küçük FH, Gençoğlu C, Ateş O, et al., PLOS ONE, 2026. DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0346898
Effect of Beta-Alanine Supplementation on Maximal Intensity Exercise in Trained Young Male Individuals: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis — Georgiou G, Antoniou K, Antoniou S, et al., International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 2024;34(6):397-412. DOI 10.1123/ijsnem.2024-0027, PMID 39032921
Kinetics of Muscle Carnosine Decay after β-Alanine Supplementation: A 16-wk Washout Study — Yamaguchi GC, Nemezio K, Schulz ML, et al., Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 2021;53(5):1079-1088. PMID 33148972
Nutritional Ergogenic Aids in Combat Sports: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis — Vicente-Salar N, Fuster-Muñoz E, Martínez-Rodríguez A, Nutrients, 2022;14(13):2588. DOI 10.3390/nu14132588
The 2026 Monitoring Program — World Anti-Doping Agency, published September 2025, in force 1 January 2026
The 2026 Prohibited List — International Standard — World Anti-Doping Agency, published September 2025, in force 1 January 2026
The Prohibited List — World Anti-Doping Agency, current List and Monitoring Program landing page

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