Training & Sports Protein Synthesis Let’s talk about protein synthesis and muscle. Protein synthesis is key to maintaining, repairing and growing your skeletal muscles –the muscles that push your bones around, allowing you to move. Cardiac muscle and smooth muscle, your internal organ structures, are dependent on other cell maintenance methods for function and health.
Exercise stresses skeletal muscles, breaking down and separating muscle fiber.It doesn’t matter if it’s low impact, continuous exertion, or movements demanding immediate and significant force. As exhaustive as any physical call for strength and stamina may be, the body is equally challenged by the immediate need to repair and restore compromised muscle, and build fresh, healthy muscle tissue when there is significant muscular activity.
It’s the amino acids in digested protein that are the fuel for protein synthesis in our skeletal muscles. Leucine levels are of particular interest and importance. Sports nutrition experts have found that higher blood levels of the amino acid Leucine tilt an athlete’s muscles towards efficient protein synthesis. This can be major when considering that the rate of protein synthesis is most rapid in adolescence and young adulthood, but begins to slow after age 20.
Independent research, recently done in Canada, found that whey protein accelerated protein synthesis while athletes were at rest, better than soy or casein, in two ways. One of the determining factors seemed to be that whey protein was more easily digested so the aminos got a more rapid fire start. More to the point, whey protein was more effective in delivering a better bounce of leucine to the blood. Higher blood levels of leucine promote protein synthesis…. no matter how hard you’re exercising, or how old the body that you’re working.
Exercise stresses skeletal muscles, breaking down and separating muscle fiber.It doesn’t matter if it’s low impact, continuous exertion, or movements demanding immediate and significant force. As exhaustive as any physical call for strength and stamina may be, the body is equally challenged by the immediate need to repair and restore compromised muscle, and build fresh, healthy muscle tissue when there is significant muscular activity.
It’s the amino acids in digested protein that are the fuel for protein synthesis in our skeletal muscles. Leucine levels are of particular interest and importance. Sports nutrition experts have found that higher blood levels of the amino acid Leucine tilt an athlete’s muscles towards efficient protein synthesis. This can be major when considering that the rate of protein synthesis is most rapid in adolescence and young adulthood, but begins to slow after age 20.
Independent research, recently done in Canada, found that whey protein accelerated protein synthesis while athletes were at rest, better than soy or casein, in two ways. One of the determining factors seemed to be that whey protein was more easily digested so the aminos got a more rapid fire start. More to the point, whey protein was more effective in delivering a better bounce of leucine to the blood. Higher blood levels of leucine promote protein synthesis…. no matter how hard you’re exercising, or how old the body that you’re working.
