Muscle Research up date: Maximize Protein Synthesis and Maximize Muscle Mass!

by Paul Cribb, B.H.Sci HMS
AST Director of Research

In recent years, the science of how to build muscle hasn’t made big advances, its made friggin’ quantum leaps!

If you’re into building muscle then listen up, I’m going to share with a number of critical breakthroughs in how to do it. This information will save you years of wasted effort. Armed with this knowledge virtually anyone should be able to make tremendous gains and add pounds of drug free muscle to their physique.

Great strides in the application of stable isotope tracer technology, immunohistochemical muscle fiber typing, more accurate body composition assessments and powerful microarray methods (that can measure genetic responses to training and diet) are all contributing enormously to a better understanding of the factors that ultimately control the size of human muscle mass.

Okay, all that may sound a little geeky, but hey I’m a scientist……It’s the geeky stuff that gets me going! Especially if it’s got anything to do with muscle.

The best part about my job is that I can pass on this information to others so that more people understand exactly what is required to build muscle, shed body fat and achieve the physique they’ve always wanted.

It is now clear (about as clear as it gets in research) that stimulating muscle protein synthesis is THE facilitating process that underlines changes in the size of muscle mass [1,2]. In essence, a high stimulation of muscle protein synthesis (let’s just shorten that to MPS) is absolutely essential to gaining muscle. Now to some of you, this may not sound like an incredible, scientific revelation. However, rest assured this info’ is an incredibly important piece in the overall picture of how to improve your physique with diet and exercise, and I’ll explain why.

Without a doubt, the mechanisms that regulate the size of human muscle mass are complex. I sure as hell don’t profess to know all the answers about how to build muscle, but I’m getting there! Seriously, there are many, many factors that influence the muscle growth process including, but not limited to, physical activity, hormones, disease, age, genetic factors as well as the quality and quantity of nutrition.

In reality, scientists have only just begun to scratch the surface on how these aspects influence our ability to build muscle. However, don’t despair. Armed with our new, exciting information, I’m going to show you how to utilize it to your advantage. Best of all, it’s going to save you months or even years of wasted time, particularly if you’re one of those guys or gals that has to work their butt off just to add a molecule of muscle to their frame.

Building Muscle Mass 101

If building muscle was a subject at University or college then there would be three fundamentally important rules you would need to learn in order to pass. We’ll get to these in a moment. First we’ve got to cover some basic ground work. If we get right down to the scientific nuts and bolts of it, an ultra-high stimulation of MPS, 24:7 really is the name of the game if you want to build muscle and transform your physique. Stimulating MPS simply means that muscle proteins are being synthesized. As Paul Delia has told you many times, muscle is protein and protein is muscle! It’s true. However, there are other factors that work against your ability to build muscle.

The quality and quantity of protein within your muscles is essentially maintained through a continuous remodeling process that involves constant synthesis and breakdown [3]. It is a process that never stops. Even without the influence of exercise, muscle proteins are constantly being broken down and regenerated. Even when you’re doing nothing physical except tapping on a key board or just kickin’ back watching the tube, muscle protein synthesis and breakdown is always occurring. Scientists call this process protein turnover.

As I said, this process never stops but it can speed up or slow down in response to various circumstances. For example, dieting (calorie restriction) slows down this process. Ageing also slows down protein turnover, or the rate at which new muscle proteins are regenerated. Alternatively, after you’ve hit the gym for your Max-OT workout, protein turnover is accelerated, enormously.

Because muscle tissue is the body’s largest reservoir of bound and unbound proteins (amino acids) (it constitutes 50-75% of all proteins in the human body), this means that muscle protein turnover is synonymous with whole body protein turnover.[3] What’s happening within your muscles has an enormous impact on the entire body. In fact, muscle’s huge impact on whole body protein turnover is a clear reflection of the key role this tissue plays in the regulation of protein metabolism. In other words, muscle is drawn upon constantly to supply the amino acids that are required for a vast array of physiological demands, every single day.

For example, muscle mass is the main reservoir of fuel that powers immune function and the development of every new cell [4]. Cells are important, they make up all tissues and organs within the body (we go through several thousand gut cells every day alone!) Just like your bank account, muscle tissue is constantly being tapped by these regular withdrawals. If you don’t make some rather substantial deposits, the balance just keeps diminishing. If you haven’t been gaining muscle the way you’d like to, are you starting to understand at least one reason why?

As I mentioned earlier, it is quite clear that any change in muscles mass such as growth (or hypertrophy is the technical term), is a result of an increase in protein turnover. It’s the stimulation of MPS that is the facilitating process that underlines changes in muscle mass. Hypertrophy can only occur by increasing the synthesis rate of muscle proteins faster than they are broken down [2]. Therefore, if the stimulation of MPS is the critical regulatory event that leads to muscle growth, let’s look specifically at how to stimulate an increase in this vital process.

Science has confirmed that weight lifting exercise is a most potent stimulus for increasing MPS. A single bout of weight lifting exercise stimulates an increase in MPS by 100% for at least 24 hours and maybe up to 48 hours. In people that don’t train with weights, any old protocol should create this effect. Obviously, if a person has never lifted a weight before, no matter what exercise, sets and reps they perform is going to be a “stimulus” their muscles have never experienced before. However, if there is one thing we do know about human physiology is that it adapts to stimuli very quickly.

For example, as a result of regular weight training, less muscle mass is recruited to lift a given load, [5] and the stimuli to increase MPS for a given load is diminished [6]. Therefore, if lifting weights has the potential to cause a tremendous increase in MPS but regular training diminishes this response, then the most important question is, what type of weight training program is most effective at providing a high stimulation of MPS?

Let’s take a look at what the science tells us.

Recent work in molecular physiology has provided some very important clues as to how we should train to build muscle. Recent research has confirmed earlier work (and that’s a good thing in science that gains in muscle mass observed in response to loading, correlate with the magnitude of stimulation of MPS.

For you muscle research buffs, seminal work completed by Baar & Esser [7] confirmed that the degree of overload placed on muscle correlates with the magnitude of stimulation of MPS and the subsequent increase in muscle mass. In other words, muscle mass gains are directly proportional to the stimulation of MPS which, in turn is proportional to the amount of overload placed on muscle.

The greater the overload (amount of weight used), the higher the stimulation of MPS, this sets the stage for gains in muscle mass!