It seems these days that the construction blocks of proteins, affectionately known as "amino acids", are tiny exiguous gold nuggets that confer superhuman powers upon anything lucky adequate to stumble upon them in a sports gel, capsule, fizzy drink or cocktail. After all, these exiguous guys are beginning to get put by food supplement manufacturers into just about everything, from your engineered pre-workout snack, to your while workout beverage, to your post-workout smoothie mix.
But why are amino acids so prevalent now?
And more importantly, do amino acids of course work?
We're about to find out, and have a bit of fun in the process.
Back in biology class, it was favorable to think of a muscle like a big Lego castle (or Lego pirate ship, depending on your tastes), and amino acids as all the exiguous legos that made up the giant Lego structure (your muscle). Convenient, yes. Complete, no. The role of amino acids goes beyond construction blocks - they are essential for the synthesis of proteins, enzymes, hormones, neurotransmitters, metabolic pathways, reasoning stabilization, and just about every function that takes place within the human body. So using the Legos-are-amino-acids example, a more appropriate analogy would be that you dump all the Legos out of the box and they self-assemble in a magic pirate ship, then float into the air and fly colse to the room shooting exiguous cannon balls.
In other words, the function of amino acids goes far beyond straightforward "building blocks".
In the food supplement business (when I use that word, it seems to denote big fat guys in black suits sitting colse to an oak discussion table, but in reality, most of these folks are skinny athletes in white shoes and shorts), amino acid supplements fall into two basic categories: essential Amino Acids (Eaa's) and Branched Chain Amino Acids (Bcaa's).
Essential Amino Acids
Essential amino acids, as the name implies, are essential because they can't be made by our bodies, like all the 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 geek, you probably have, because he's the pneumonic generally 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 money in Biology Trivial Pursuit.
Anyways, let's take a look at why the heck Pvt. Tim might do us good while exercise, beginning with P.
Phenylalanine is traditionally marketed for it's analgesic (pain-killing) and antidepressant effect, and is a precursor to the synthesis of norepinephrine and dopamine, two "feel-good" brain chemicals. This could be good because elevated brain levels of norepinephrine and dopamine may of course lower your "Rpe" or Rating of Perceived attempt while Exercise, which means you could be happier when you're suffering hallway through a killer workout session or 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 to preclude muscle proteins from breaking down while exercise. This means that if you take Valine while exercise, you could recover faster because you'd have less muscle damage. More details on that in the section below on Bcaa's.
Threonine investigate is a bit scant. I personally couldn't find much at all that explained why threonine could assist with rehearsal performance, but would hazard a guess that it is included in essential amino acid supplements because it is just that: essential. And many of the studies done on Eaa's just basically use all of them, rather than isolating one, like Threonine. For example, and this is a bit engaging for citizen who are masochistic adequate to like working out starved, there is a essential muscle-preserving effect of an Eaa + Carbohydrate clarification ingested while training in a fasted state, and decreased indicators of muscle damage and inflammation. This basically means that if you popped some essential amino acids, even if you didn't eat anything, you might not "cannibalize" as much lean muscle while a fasted workout session.
Ok, sorry, I got sidetracked there.
Tryptophan is an engaging one. It is a precursor for serotonin, a brain neurotransmitter that can suppress pain, and if you're taking some before bed at night, even induce a bit of sleepiness. The main presuppose to take tryptophan would be to growth tolerance to pain while hard workouts, games or races. But studies to this point go back and forth on either or not that of course improves performance.
Isoleucine, another Bcaa/Eaa combo, has some of the same advantages of Valine. More on Bcaa's in a bit.
Histidine, as the name implies, is a precursor to histamine, and of course has some antioxidant properties and plays a key role in carnosine synthesis. Finding back, that sentence I just wrote is not very user-friendly, and is pretty much just geek speak. Here's a clarification: histamine could help you fight off the cell damaging free radicals you produce while exercise, and carnosine helps you get rid of muscle burn more quickly, and helps turn lactic acid back into useable muscle fuel. So hooray for histidine, it gets a gold star sticker.
Next is arginine, and if you're reading this and you're an old man who has relied on a exiguous blue sill to have a happier time in the sac, you can thank arginine. Arginine helps with nitric oxide synthesis, and nitric oxide is a vasodilator that increases blood flow and could help with rehearsal capacity (in the case of the blue pill, for one specific body part). Most of the studies on arginine show that it of course helps folks with cardiovascular disease improve rehearsal capacity, and like tryptophan, the studies go back and forth on either it of course helps with the athletic citizen - but it has a great deal of promise.
Leucine is yet another Bcaa/Eaa combo. We'll get to Bcaa's in about 30 seconds, depending on how fast you read.
Lysine is something my Mom used to take to help cold sores that she got from eating citrusy foods. That's basically because it helps heal mouth tissue. But more importantly for exercising individuals, lysine may actual assist with growth-hormone release, which could vastly improve muscle mend and recovery, although if you take lysine in it's isolated form, the number you'd have to take to growth growth hormone issue would cause gastrointestinal distress, or as I like to it, sad poopies. But combined with all the other essential amino acids, there may be a growth hormone response in smaller doses, and there is some clinical evidence that essential amino acid supplementation could stimulate growth hormone releasing factors.
That about wraps it up for essential amino acids. The only thing I didn't mention is that they may have a bit of an insulin and cortisol expanding effect. Before you draw back in shock and go flush all your essential amino acids down the toilet because you heard insulin and cortisol make you fat, remember that both insulin and cortisol are crucial (in smaller amounts) for the "anabolic process", or the growth, mend and salvage of lean muscle tissue. The number you get in essential amino acids is far distinct than the stress and insulin/cortisol response you get from eating a pint of ice cream while you drink whisky and work on an all-night scheme for work.
Branched Chain Amino Acids
Bcaa's include leucine, isoleucine, and valine. They're engaging (at least to citizen in white lab coats) they are metabolized in the muscle, rather than in the liver. This means that Bcaa's can be relied on as an actual vigor source while exercise, and could therefore preclude premature muscle breakdown. There was of course one compelling study done by a guy named Ohtani that showed exercising individuals who got Bcaa's had best rehearsal efficiency and rehearsal capacity compared to a group that didn't get Bcaa's.
Other studies have found that Bcaa's could growth a ton of factors that are of course useful for an exercising athlete, like red blood cell count, hemoglobin, hematocrit and serum albumin, and could also lower fasting blood glucose and decrease creatine phophokinase, which means less inflammation, best red blood cell formation, and best formation of warehouse carbohydrate. Bcaa supplementation after rehearsal has been shown to cause faster salvage of muscle strength, and even more interestingly, the quality to slow down muscle breakdown even while intense training and "overreaching" (getting very close to overtraining). Just Google the branched chain amino acid studies by Sugita and Kraemer for more on that (yes, shocker, this is a newsletter article, and not a peer reviewed scientific journal record with full citations, because if it was the latter, you'd be asleep by now - so if you're a science nazi, then go get busy on Google scholar).
Ok, so chronic onto with the many cool things that Bcaa's can do: when you supplement with them, they decrease the blood indicators of muscle tissue damage after long periods of exercise, thus indicating reduced muscle damage, and they also help enounce higher blood levels of amino acids, which, if you recall, can make you feel happier even when you're suffering while exercise. Logically, low blood levels of Bcaa's are correlated with increased fatigue and reduced corporeal performance.
Heck, they even use Bcaa's in medicine. They could help citizen recover from liver disease, could assist with improvements in patients with lateral sclerosis, and could help recover in patients who have gone through trauma, ultimate corporeal stress (can you say "Ironman triathlon"?), kidney failure, and burns.
Summary
So if you've stayed with me so far, here's the take-away message (and thanks to Dr. David Minkoff for helping me with this nice summation):
If all 8 essential amino acids are present, muscle mend and salvage can start before you're even done with your workout - and when you're mentally stretched toward the end of a tough workout, game or race, high blood levels of amino acids can allow the body and brain to continue to work hard instead of shutting down.
Based on all this, do I take Bcaa's and Eaa's? You bet I do. I personally use http://tinyurl.com/RecEase for Bcaa's and scholar Amino Acid Pattern (Map) for Eaa's.
Thanks To : Get Sale Day Shopping 2rd i3x
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