Sports Supplements

Intro

1. Learn Vocabulary - Learn some new vocabulary before you start the lesson.

• endurance
• peak performance
• jolt
• heart palpitations

• cracking down
• reform
• outlaw
• off the market

• heat
• adrenaline

2. Read and Prepare - Read the introduction and prepare to hear the audio.

To be a professional athlete, you need to be at your best both physically and mentally. Many athletes, professional and amateur, take sports supplements to increase their abilities. Until recently, Ma Huang (ephedrine) was a popular ingredient in sports supplements in the U.S. because it gave you energy and made you more mentally alert. Unfortunately, it also gave people difficulty breathing and made them pretty irritable when the effects wore off.
Listen to John and I talk about sports supplements in the U.S.

Dialog

1. Listen and Read - Listen to the audio and read the dialog at the same time.

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2. Study - Read the dialog again to see how the vocab words are used.

John

Dave

John:  You know, I remember President Bush talking about cracking down on steroid use in his State of the Union address a couple years ago. I haven’t really heard much about it lately. You think there’s been any kind of reform?

Dave:  I don’t know. That was where, didn’t they outlaw ephedrine for a while?

John:  I’m not sure. I just remember he made it this really big deal and people started talking about it a lot, but…

Dave:  Yeah.

John:  ...guys like Mark McGuire, Barry Bonds and Lance Armstrong – they’ve all come under a lot of heat recently.

Dave:  Yeah. Yeah, I remember Lance Armstrong, he really stood up for himself and said, you know, “I’m not taking steroids,” and he opened himself up to testing, ah, which they did and he passed.

John:  Yeah.

Dave:  But the other guys, you know, they’re using something.

John:  How’s it work? I mean, it helps with their adrenaline and, and their endurance and just makes their muscle mass, you know, more strong, right?

Dave:  Yeah, it’s supposed to increase their peak performance level. I used to take this thing called Ripped Fuel, which had a little bit of ephedrine in it and a lot of vitamins. But it was like a jolt of caffeine, you know, just really wake you up. And if you’re lifting weights, you could really go at it.

John:  That ever give you heart palpitations or anything like that?

Dave:  Well, that was a real problem. I started having difficulty breathing, you know, feel like my heart would skip a beat. It was kind of scary.

John:  Yeah, I remember my friends doing that before they’d work out. But now a lot of them drink a lot of coffee before they go, and I think it has a similar effect.

Dave:  Yeah, yeah. And especially since ephedrine has been taken off the market, that’s what a lot of people are doing.

 

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