The anabolic window, does it exist? There are quite a few fitness and personal trainer blogs saying the anabolic window is rubbish. If you are unsure what this is, it has been predominately known as the window of opportunity to maximise increases in muscle mass by ingesting a protein-rich meal or supplement within 30mins post-exercise. A lot of this debate has been put forward by this review conducted last year. What I have noticed is a lot of information passed on by blogs/pages is that they have disregarded particular details that may leave the reader uninformed about some of the vital information put across in this study: - Carbohydrates: they found that sufficient muscle glycogen (carbohydrate) stores prior to training were of vital importance for particular intra-cellular signals to aid regulation in muscle hypertrophy/protein synthesis. - Protein for muscle growth: Ingestion time and amount (based on this review) really comes down to a) your exercise/training history and experience, b) your age. If you have only just started a weights program (untrained individual) or have not participated in exercise regularly until now, then the anabolic window does not really apply as much to you, unless you are an elderly individual.Due to sacropenia (degenerative muscle loss), it is essential that elderly individuals do try to capitilise on providing their body with nutrition ASAP post-exercise. For those that are chronic exercisers, this still remains unclear. However, suggestions from trials that have looked at nutrient timing with trained individuals actually suggests the sooner the better for supplement/meal timing post-exercise. There have been trials investigating having a protein rich meal prior to training which have shown elevated amino-acid content during and post-training bout, which could negate the need for a post-workout supplement. This is a point to consider with your own personal supplementation. - They have also investigated that an increase in muscle protein synthesis supplemented by a protein-rich meal, will return back to baseline levels within 3 hours. Therefore, there still may be an anabolic window. So there are some points on this review that I think have been neglected. Check out the link below to access the article :) jissn/content/10/1/5
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 04:08:56 +0000