Glutamine And It's Role On Muscle Growth

I am irritated by the many supplement articles that grab hold of your attention with positive information on how that supplement will get you ripped in 4 weeks. The problem is that the article is only a sales pitch, and even worse, the writer does not add any value in your life, and does not accurately describe the effects the supplement will have on your muscles. The only explanation is, "GET RIPPED IN 4 WEEKS". The article you are about to read is different from theirs. Instead of describing what glutamine will do, I'll go further in depth to the basic blocks of how muscles are formed and stimulated.

To comprehend how muscles are grown, we must first understand the structure of muscles themselves. Every muscle is composed of muscle fibers, which are all structurally the same. Looking further into the fibers, we find that each muscle fibers is essentially a bundle of protein strands called myofibers. These myofibers we notice, they are composed of even smaller strands called actin and myosin. The myosin strand is surrounded by six actin filaments. When muscle contraction occurs, structures from the myosin filaments grab hold of the actin filaments and pull, creating contraction needed to lift a weight. The more myofibers your body has, the more muscle you'll build and the stronger you will get.

Strength training increases both the number of myofibers, thereby increasing the amount of myosin and actin filamints. Basically, when you lift weights, your muscle fibers get bigger. However when you ingest glutamin or any other supplement, your fibers will grow faster due to the removal of toxins and supply of nutrients. The process by which you get stronger is when your body accommodates to the heavy weights by assigning more and more motor units( motor units are groups of muscle fibers.) The heavier weights you lift, the more motor units are sent, the stronger you become. This process is known as Neural Adaptation.

When you muscles have received the maximum amount of motor units available, it starts adding protein filaments to the fibers to make them grow larger, and generate more force. However maintaining this process is not easy. Your body will shed muscle tissue when any of the following occur: illness, injury, malnutrition, or even a fixed or decreased strength training activity. In my opinion, there are two ways to reduce muscle loss, first by supply your body with supplements, and secondly giving your muscles heavier loads to lift or force them to lift the same loads faster.

Now that you are aware of how muscles are built, I'll explain how glutamine supports muscle growth. To prevent muscle loss, glutamine is the best supplement to take because it consist of 60% of free-form amino acids in your muscles. Catabolism occurs if the body robs muscles of glutamine for use in nitrogen transport and maintaining your immune system. Protein is composed of 16% nitrogen, so this loss in nitrogen is also a loss of protein for your muscle fibers to synthesize. Unlike other amino acids that have a single nitrogen atom, glutamin contains two. This additional nitrogen atom allows for faster recovery time, and muscle growth.

Benefits of Glutamine: Improves protein synthesis

- increased nitrogen retention
- decrease muscle tear down
- decrease recovery time
- enhanced immune function

Our muscle fibers are constantly going through a cycle of protein synthesis and protein breakdown. During protein breakdown we lose nitrogen, protein, and glutamine. Since glutamine is the most abundant amino acid in our body, without any glutamine the muscles do not have protein to build muscle mass, thereby causing the muscles to breakdown and not create myofibers. Therefore, it's important to take glutamine and place high stress on your muscles to create more fibers. This supplement's anabolic effects are so effective that it is used during surgery to reduce healing time. Glutamine also increases the body's ability to secrete Human Growth Hormone (HGH). HGH assist in metabolizing body fat and helps to support new muscle fiber growth. When you workout with high intensity, there are toxins being excreted such as ammonia. This toxin is more rapidly removed by glutamine.

Some of the information in this article can be found in: Ian King and Lou Schuler's "The Book of Muscle

If you found this article helpful please visit http://www.musclebuildingreview.net/ for more strength training advice.