You don’t need to be told about the benefits of exercise for your overall health. If you have wheeled your body out to engage in a bit of this life promoting activity you will also know that any decent amount of exercise is followed by an equally, and proportionally, decent amount of muscle soreness. If your pain threshold is low and you want to avoid that muscle soreness, or even if you don’t mind the pain but would like your muscles to recover more quickly, the good news is that a natural way to prevent muscle soreness post-exercise has emerged in a very tasty form: watermelon juice.
Watermelon has gained a range of positive publicity emerging from the research over recent years. It is a good source of the antioxidant lycopene and the antioxidant properties of watermelon have been shown to increase muscle protein. However, watermelon is also an excellent source of L-citrulline a compound that helps with nitric oxide synthesis and increases the glucose transport in skeletal muscle. Nitric oxide helps open up blood vessels. All of this suggests that watermelon should help with post-workout recovery which is what these researchers set out to test.
To test this the researchers gave their subjects either a natural watermelon juice, watermelon juice enriched in L-citrulline, and a control drink containing no L-citrulline. The drinks were given to volunteers an hour before exercise.
Results showed that both the natural juice and the enriched juice relieved muscle soreness in the volunteers. However, L-citrulline in the natural juice seemed to be more bioavailable, in other words it was in a form the body could better use.
It is believed that watermelon has this effect because the actions of citrulline speed up the process of lactic acid removal. This is important because lactic acid build-up can cause a burning sensation in the muscles and make them sore.
As any parent of young children will recognise from the Play School song, “I love, you love, watermelon!†Now we have another reason for that affection.
