The Importance of Amino Acids for Muscle Recovery!

Whether your training for a marathon, a professional bodybuilding competition, or just to keep in shape, you need to be eating enough quality protein in order to build muscle!

Amino acids are the basic components of protein, so consuming enough protein is essential for the amino acids to determine the rate of muscle recovery.  There are twenty amino acids in the body, and nine are essential to your diet because your body can’t produce them on its own.  Of those nine, three are the branched chain amino acids (BCCA): leucine, isoleucine, and valine.

Benefits of BCCA’s

• Decrease Muscle Soreness

We all know the feeling; a day or two after your workout, climbing a flight of steps and getting up from a low chair ain’t that easy anymore! Well this is because of delayed onset muscle soreness, and researchers believe it’s because of tiny tears in the muscles after exercise.

Research has shown that BCCA’s can decrease muscle damage, and shorten the length of muscle soreness. In addition, supplementing with BCCA’s before or during your workout, can speedup recovery time.

Personally I have seen a huge improvement in my muscle repair by supplementing with DCCA’s.  After several pulled muscles, I have seen my recovery time shorten significantly!

• Increase of Muscle Growth

BCCA’s are a popular method to build muscle growth! Studies have shown that consuming BCCA’s post workout can increase your muscle growth by 22%.  In addition, consuming a whey protein drink after a workout has also proven to greatly increase muscle growth.

• Reduce Exercise Fatigue 

At some point everyone has experienced exercise fatigue, when were tired the last thing we want to do is exercise right? We may experience fatigue while in the middle of exercise, or 10 minutes into our workout and we just feel too tired to finish.

How quickly you get tired depends on several things, including how strenuous the exercise, duration, and your overall health.  However, studies have shown using BCCA’s during exercise helps to improve mental focus and reduce fatigue. This is because during exercise BCCA’s in our blood decrease, and tryptophan increases.  In our brain, tryptophan is then converted to serotonin and this contributes to fatigue during exercise.

• Prevent Muscle Atrophy

As we age we lose muscle mass, it’s also a sign of malnutrition, chronic infections, cancers, or from a lack of physical activity.  Muscle atrophy occurs when our protein breakdown exceeds muscle protein synthesis.

In order to halt or slowdown this progression, it’s so important that we replace our BCCA’s during times of muscle atrophy.  Studies have shown supplementing with BCCA’s can improve the outcome for people who are experiencing muscle atrophy, such as cancer patients, and the elderly.

Foods to eat high in BCCA’s

Thankfully BCCA’s are found in many foods and protein supplements.  For those who consume a high protein diet, supplementing with BCCA’s may not be necessary.

Here are a few examples of animal protein rich foods:

• Beef
• Chicken
• Tuna
• Turkey
• Eggs
• Whey protein powders

A few examples of plant-based protein rich foods:

• Soy protein powder
• Tofu and tempeh
• Lentils
• Chickpeas
• Nut butters
• Kale
• broccoli

Conclusion

BCCA’s can only be obtained through food and supplements because our bodies cant produce them.  Eating foods high in BCCA’s and supplementing with them can decrease muscle soreness, increase muscle growth, reduce fatigue and prevent muscle atrophy.

Now if any of you follow me on Instagram you know I am no gym rat, and only consistently started to exercise and weight train less than a year ago!  I’m also not a huge fan of supplements, because my belief is you can get all the vitamins and nutrients you need through the food you eat.

With that said because I don’t eat a lot of animal protein, and I try to eat a mostly plant-based diet, I started taking a BCCA supplement a few months ago during my workouts, and I LOVE it!  I found a really awesome BCCA powder that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, doesn’t have a lot of fillers and tastes pretty good. With the powder, muscles feel so much better after a long workout, and when I tweak a muscle (which happens once and awhile), I’m usually back to normal within a few days.

Do you take a BCCA supplement? How do you like it? Please comment below, I would love to hear from you!