Good overview on nutrition and hypertrophy

Azdak

I just started following Dr Stuart Phillips at McMasters Univ in Canada and he is a very active and prolific researcher and communicator.

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fphys.2015.00245

This is a free review article on nutritional interventions to augment resistance exercise for muscle hypertrophy. It's a thorough review of the issues, but I also thought it was clearly written and approachable to a more general audience. It is scrupulously sourced, as these articles are.

Some takeaways:

There is a maximum effective dose of protein following exercise. It is first described as 20g, but later refined to 0.4g/kg body wt to account for inter-subject variability.

While the "anabolic window" appears to last up to 24 hr following a workout, the author recommends post-exercise protein supplementation in the immediate time after the workout.

Resistance training provides the key stimulus for muscle building, not the protein itself.

Ingestion of 0.6 g/kg casein before bed enhances muscle protein building and prevents going into negative nitrogen balance.

Whey protein with adequate leucine is the best form of post-exercise protein. The author argues that ingesting BCAAs other than leucine interferes with protein uptake due to competition for uptake transporters.

Some of this, if not all, is probably already known by the more knowledgeable and experienced members of these forums, but I still found this thorough and informative. The nice thing about a lit review at this level is that the conclusions are drawn with more confidence from the literature.

Hope you find it helpful.

jofjltncb6

I thought these conclusions were entirely debunked 80s broscience.

(So I'm obviously in to watch this unfold.)