SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

12 weeks of serious resistance training will transform the body of beginners, but it'll do that regardless of whether you supplement with protein or not, doctoral thesis shows. The headline of today's SuppVersity  article summarizes the research question of a recently published doctoral thesis by Christopher Brooks Mobley (Mobley 2017). In that, Mobley started with the hypothesis that "[w]hey protein in combination with resistance training will provide the greatest anabolic and ergogenic response" - Was he right? Well, without giving away too much, the most appropriate one-word-answer to this question is "No!" How's that? Well, let's take a look at diet, training, and supplementation and you may be realizing why the only "magic" whey did was to increase the skeletal muscle satellite cell pool ( learn more about Whey's effect on satellite cells ). High-protein diets are much safer than some 'experts' say, but there are...

No, the message of this article is not that protein shakes don't work. It is that your (hopefully) tasty 20g of serving of whey is not going to build slabs of extra muscle. You all know studies which show that protein supplementation during resistance exercise training enhances muscle hypertrophy. As a SuppVersity  reader, you will yet also be aware of the numerous studies which indicate that extra-protein (before or after workouts) can be wasted if the baseline protein intake of the subjects amounts to 1.2-1.5g/kg protein, already (cf Table 1 ). For some of you, this is yet probably not the only surprise this article holds. The large-scale clinical trial by Reidy, et al. did after all also confirm that protein blends may yield slightly better results than everyone's beloved whey protein. High-protein diets are much safer than some 'experts' say, but there are things to consider... Practical Protein Oxidation 101 5x More Than the FDA Allows! Native Wh...

I still believe that the ill effects of fasting on skeletal muscle are way overrated, but  I guess it won't hurt if you would be able to minimize it by sipping 60g of protein, right? A new study says: That's right, but there's more to it. While the beneficial effects of whey protein and leucine have been shown to be independent of age and route of administration in anabolic conditions, there is, as scientists from Aarhus University Hospital  point out, almost no information "about the effects of leucine-rich protein supplementation to humans during catabolic conditions such as fasting" (Rittig. 2016). This is however, only partly right. From previous articles here at the SuppVersity  you know that studies investigating the effects of protein supplements on muscle protein maintenance exist and that the effect is - due to increased wastefulness - less pronounced than you probably hoped for. Learn more about high-protein intakes / diets at www.suppversity....

Even though the study at hand has been conducted in an endurance training scenario, there's no reason to believe that the superiority of milk protein, the natural mix of whey and casein would be a "cardio-specific" thing. In fact, evidence to the contrary has been discussed previously, here  and  here . Whey, casein, soy or the rarely used alternative, milk protein, what's best to kickstart the protein synthetic machinery even after endurance workouts? The absorption kinetics of the different proteins, the effects of which a group of scientists from Japan recently re-assessed would suggest that the answer is clear: whey protein, it's the fastest of the four proteins, contains the highest amount of BCAAs (esp. the mTOR- and MPS promoter leucine) content and has been repeatedly shown to rapidly cause significant hyperamonoacidemia (=extremely elevated amino acid levels in the blood | Boirie. 1997; Dangin. 2001; Norton. 2009). In spite of the fact that whey is ...