By Matt Sheeks, Pro Duathlete and Triathlete
Today I’ve got with me some Garden of Life Sport Energy and Focus Drink. This is a new product for Garden of Life. This is Garden of Life’s answer to a pre-workout or energy drink. What they’re trying to do is create a more natural, organic, and healthy energy drink.
It’s a pretty cool little product! It’s something that I would take on a daily basis.
- It’s not super crazy on caffeine, it has 85mg of caffeine from coffee berry.
- The carbohydrates are from cane sugar as well as some other fruit sources
- The nitric oxide booster is pretty innovative. Garden of Life is using nitrate rich foods to give the energy drink it’s nitric oxide boost.
In the past with pre-workout or energy drinks they’ve tried to get the nitric oxide boost from an amino acid called L-arginine. Study after study was done and it turned out the L-arginine did nothing to increase nitric oxide levels. The idea was that if you increased nitric oxide levels you would boost blood flow to the muscles, increasing oxygen flow and red blood cells to the working muscles.
L-arginine ended up being close to a total fail, at least for trained athletes. What they have found though, is that if you consume nitrate rich foods, this will improve nitric oxide production in the body. In turn, increased nitric oxide will improve blood flow to the working muscles. For whatever reason the studies have shown that during sub-maximal efforts this will decrease oxygen consumption. So it will improve your performance during very hard efforts.
The nitric oxide boost for the Garden of Life energy drink comes from organic beet, organic spinach, and organic kale leaf.
I originally got to try the organic energy and focus drink at Anthony Lakes Mountain Resort. Since then, I’ve gotten to test it out a number of times. The big conclusion is that it’s pretty awesome! It seems to be just the right amount of kick for an afternoon pick-me-up, or if you want to have a really good workout and you make sure you’re topped up on energy levels. Like I say, it’s not that crazy on caffeine, so expect an “even-keel” experience. Your mileage may vary, of course, depending on your sensitivity to caffeine.
If you found value in this review and you want to pick up the Garden of Life Organic Energy and Focus Drink, you can do so using any of the affiliate links below, and that would help me out a great deal. I put at least 25 hours of product testing into every product I review and only recommend the products which I use personally.
Buy it: http://amzn.to/2nnkL9X
Read the Science: http://mattsheeks.link/nitrates
Read more about the product: https://www.gardenoflife.com/content/product/organic-energy-focus
Until we ride (or run or swim) again,
Matt Sheeks
[Matt Sheeks is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com]
Garden of Life Organic Energy