Post-exercise Dietary Protein Strategies

Optimal Anabolic Nutrition Interventions

Protein ingestion increases the rate at which the body builds new proteins in skeletal muscle (muscle protein synthesis. This study is designed to examine how the pattern of feeding affects muscle protein synthesis following resistance exercise. There is reason to believe that the large rapid increase in blood amino acid concentrations that accompanies the ingestion of a bolus of protein is important to increasing muscle protein synthesis. Thus, we hypothesize that the consumption a bolus of protein will elevate muscle protein synthesis to a greater extent than the consumption of an equivalent amount of protein that is consumed in small divided doses.

The rapid appearance into the blood of essential amino acids, and leucine in particular, may act as an important signal to stimulate muscle protein synthesis after resistance exercise. This may explain why consuming rapidly-absorbed whey protein may have an anabolic edge over slowly-absorbed proteins such as casein. Previous investigations into importance of the rate of absorption to muscle protein synthesis that have used 'fast' and 'slow' proteins have been confounded by differences in amino acid composition. The present study addresses this issue by administering the same protein source, whey, as either a bolus or in small divided 'pulse' doses to achieve divergent amino acid profiles after a bout of resistance exercise. This study is being conducted in young (18-35) men. Our outcome measures include: blood amino acid concentrations, rates of myofibrillar protein synthesis, anabolic intracellular signalling markers

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