It seems that these days the building blocks of protein, affectionately known as “amino acids,” are little nuggets of gold that bestow superhuman powers on anyone lucky enough to stumble across them in a sports gel, capsule, soda drink, or a cocktail After all, nutritional supplement manufacturers are starting to put these little guys in just about everything, from your designed pre-workout snack, to your intra-workout drink, to your post-workout shake mix.
But why are amino acids so prevalent now?
And more importantly, do amino acids really work?
We’re about to find out and have a little fun in the process.
Back in biology class, it was convenient to think of a muscle as a big Lego castle (or a Lego pirate ship, depending on your taste), and amino acids as all the little Legos that made up the giant Lego structure ( your muscle). Convenient, yes. complete, No. The role of amino acids goes beyond building blocks: they are essential for the synthesis of proteins, enzymes, hormones, neurotransmitters, metabolic pathways, mental stabilization and almost every function that takes place within the human body. So using the example of Legos being amino acids, a more appropriate analogy would be that you take all the Legos out of the box and they self-assemble into a magical pirate ship, then they float up into the air and fly around the room shooting. miniature cannonballs.
In other words, the role of amino acids goes far beyond simple “building blocks.”
In the nutritional supplement industry (when I use that word, it seems to refer to big, fat guys in black suits sitting around an oak conference table, but in reality, most of these people are skinny athletes in white shoes and slacks) short), amino acid supplements fall into two basic categories: essential amino acids (EAAs) and branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs).
Essential amino acids
Essential amino acids, as the name implies, are essential because our body cannot produce them, like all other amino acids. Instead, we have to get them from our diet. Have you ever heard of Private Tim Hall aka Pvt. Tim Hall? If you’re a biology or chemistry fanatic, you probably have, because it’s the pneumonic commonly used to remember the essential amino acids, which are phenylanine, valine, threonine, tryptophan, isoleucine, histidine, arginine, leucine, and lysine. Thanks Tim, we’ll send you a check if we ever win any money on Biology Trivial Pursuit.
Anyway, let’s take a look at why the heck Pvt. Tim could do us any good during the exercise, starting with P.
Phenylalanine is traditionally marketed for its analgesic (pain-relieving) and antidepressant effects, and is a precursor for the synthesis of norepinephrine and dopamine, two “feel good” brain chemicals. This could be a good thing because elevated levels of norepinephrine and dopamine in the brain can actually lower your “RPE” or rating of perceived exertion during exercise, meaning you might be happier when you’re suffering in the hallway during a session of deadly training or an Ironman bike ride.
Valine, along with isoleucine and leucine, is a real player, because it is BOTH an essential amino acid and a branched chain amino acid. Valine is an essential amino acid. It can help prevent muscle protein from being broken down during exercise. This means that if you take Valine during exercise, you could recover faster because you would have less muscle damage. More details on that in the section below on BCAAs.
Research on threonine is a bit sparse. Personally, I couldn’t find much to explain why threonine might help with exercise performance, but I’d hazard a guess that it’s included in essential amino acid supplements because it’s just that: essential. And a lot of the studies done at EAA basically use all of them, instead of isolating one, like Threonine. For example, and this is a bit interesting for people who are masochistic enough to exercise starving, there is a significant muscle-sparing effect of an EAA + Carb solution ingested during fasted training, and a decrease in indicators of muscle damage and inflammation. Basically, this means that if you took in some essential amino acids, even if you didn’t eat anything, you might not “cannibalize” as much lean muscle during a fasted training session.
OK, sorry, I got sidetracked there.
Tryptophan is interesting. It’s a precursor to serotonin, a brain neurotransmitter that can suppress pain and, if taken before bed at night, even induce a little drowsiness. The main reason to take tryptophan would be to increase pain tolerance during intense workouts, games, or races. But studies up to this point go back and forth on whether or not that actually improves performance.
Isoleucine, another BCAA/EAA combination, has some of the same benefits as Valine. More on BCAAs in a moment.
Histidine, as its name implies, is a precursor to histamine and, in fact, has some antioxidant properties and plays a key role in carnosine synthesis. Looking back, that sentence I just wrote is not very user-friendly, and it’s more or less a geek language. Here’s a clarification: histamine might help you fight off the cell-damaging free radicals you produce during exercise, and carnosine helps you get rid of muscle-burn more quickly and helps convert lactic acid back into usable muscle fuel. So hooray for histidine, it’s got a gold star.
Next up is arginine, and if you’re reading this and you’re an old man who has depended on a little blue sill for a happy time in the bag, you have arginine to thank. Arginine helps with nitric oxide synthesis, and nitric oxide is a vasodilator that increases blood flow and may help with exercise capacity (in the case of the blue pill, for a specific part of the body). Most studies on arginine show that it actually helps people with cardiovascular disease improve exercise capacity, and like tryptophan, studies go back and forth on whether it really does help the athletic population, but it’s very promising .
Leucine is another BCAA/EAA combination. We’ll get to BCAAs in about 30 seconds, depending on how fast you read.
Lysine is something my mom used to take to help her cold sores she got from eating citrus foods. That’s basically because it helps heal the oral tissue. But more importantly for people who exercise, lysine can actually help with growth hormone release, which could greatly enhance muscle repair and recovery, although if you take lysine in its isolated form, the amount you would have to take to increase growth hormone release would cause GI upset, or as I like it, sad poopies. But combined with all other essential amino acids, there may be a growth hormone response at smaller doses, and there is some clinical evidence that essential amino acid supplementation might stimulate growth hormone-releasing factors.
That wraps it up for the essential amino acids. The only thing I didn’t mention is that they may have a bit of an insulin- and cortisol-boosting effect. Before you recoil in shock and flush all your essential amino acids down the toilet because you’ve heard insulin and cortisol make you fat, remember that both insulin and cortisol are crucial (in smaller amounts) to the “anabolic process” or the growth. , repair and recovery of lean muscle tissue. The amount of essential amino acids you get is very different from the stress and insulin/cortisol response you get from eating a pint of ice cream while drinking whiskey and working on an all-night work project.
branched chain amino acids
BCAAs include leucine, isoleucine, and valine. They are interesting (at least to people in white lab coats) in that they are metabolized in the muscle, rather than the liver. This means that BCAAs can be relied upon as a real source of energy during exercise and therefore could prevent premature muscle breakdown. In fact, there was a compelling study by a guy named Ohtani that showed that exercisers who got BCAAs had better exercise efficiency and capacity compared to a group that didn’t get BCAAs.
Other studies have found that BCAAs could increase a ton of factors that are really helpful to an exercising athlete, like red blood cell count, hemoglobin, hematocrit, and serum albumin, and could also lower blood glucose by fasting and decrease creatine phosphokinase, which means less inflammation. , better red blood cell formation and better formation of storage carbohydrates. Post-exercise BCAA supplementation has been shown to lead to faster recovery of muscle strength and, more interestingly, the ability to slow muscle breakdown even during intense training and “overexertion” (coming very close to overtraining). ). Just Google Sugita and Kraemer’s branched-chain amino acid studies to learn more about it (yes, surprise, this is a newsletter article, and not a peer-reviewed scientific journal report with full citations, because if it was the latter, I’d be asleep by now, so if you’re a science Nazi, then get to work at Google Scholar).
Okay, continuing on to the many great things BCAAs can do: When you supplement with them, they lower blood indicators of muscle tissue damage after long periods of exercise, indicating reduced muscle damage, and also help maintain blood levels Taller. of amino acids, which, if you remember, can make you feel happier even when you’re struggling during exercise. Logically, low levels of BCAAs in the blood correlate with increased fatigue and reduced physical performance.
Heck, they even use BCAAs in medicine. They could help people recover from liver disease, they could help with improvements in patients with lateral sclerosis, and they could help with recovery in patients who have been through trauma, extreme physical stress (can you say “Ironman triathlon”?), heart failure, kidney and burns.
Resume
So if you’ve stuck with me so far, here’s the takeaway (and thanks to Dr. David Minkoff for helping me out with this nice summary):
If all 8 essential amino acids are present, muscle repair and recovery can begin even before you’re done with your workout, and when you’re mentally stretched toward the end of a hard workout, game, or race, high amino acid levels in your blood it can allow the body and brain to continue working hard instead of shutting down.
Based on all this, do I take BCAA’s and EAA’s? Bet I do. I personally use http://tinyurl.com/RecEase for BCAAs and Master Amino Acid Pattern (MAP) for EAAs.