Optimizing muscle protein synthesis: exercise, timing of protein intake, protein quality, and more

from a very selfish standpoint I want to ask you a question so I always do my strength training in the morning and um many days I just don't I I'm either not that hungry or I kind of run out of time before I need to jump into stuff and I'm not always diligent about eating or consuming protein right after that workout um now truthfully in part it's cuz well I'm going to ask you this question let's just assume two scenarios scenario one is finish exercising finish strength training consume nothing but water coffee for another 3 or 4 hours before consuming a high protein meal versus finish exercising and immediately consume 25 grams of whey protein in a shake with nothing else in it just whey protein in water you know you're getting 100 calories chug it down and then eat that you know protein Rich meal of 40 grams four hours later significant difference in muscle protein synthesis between these two over the course of days um or does it all come out in the wash where assuming you get ISO amounts of protein throughout the day uh does it matter um on 24 hours definitely uh there's a difference uh so um for example if you ingest protein immediately after exercise you get at least for the first five hours you definitely have a much greater response because exercise makes the muscle more sensitive to the anabolic response to food intake however what people forget is that your response to breakfast the next day is still increased and probably also your lunch and dinner the next day so if you do an exercise session today and you get all freaked out that you didn't get a a milkshake after your after your session don't worry because the next day all your three meals are going to be greater responses because of the exercise so I get so many times the question like how important is the meal before or after the exercise and I say if you do an cons consistent training then there's always three meals before your session and after your session because you train every day so then every meal is still responding to the previous exercise session now is there a benefit of immediately after exercise versus a few hours later we've done that study by so not sure whether we touch that that topic as well pre-sleep protein feeding that's a topic that we've been working a lot on also on patients so we gave people I think it was even 60 gram really proof principal study exercise in the evening and then 40 or 60 I don't remember um we gave protein then and then we measured the response the next morning after breakfast after 20 grams of protein in the morning so what I was thinking like if there is a window of opportunity then if you give 60 grams of protein immediately after exercise maybe you shorten the window of opportunity so if you already provided the exercise after after the session you don't respond as well to the the next dinner the next morning does that make sense yeah what I'm basically hearing you say is if you have a hundred units of response in you the timing of your meal might not impact the total amount of response it just determines when that response occurs so if you if I slug that 25 grams of whey protein as I'm walking out of the gym I will get more of my 100 units of response then but I will get less of it four or five hours later when I have a big protein lunch I think that's a much clearer explanation than than so that was basically the design of the study and it fits with what I've learned of course for glycogen because you ingest carbohydrates immediately after exercise so you expedite you accelerate glycogen res sythesis but if you don't have to exercise until two days later it doesn't make a difference because then you have a full 100% recovery of your glycogen which again is very different from the way I grew up right I mean when I grew up as an endurance athlete we were and again you know it could all be wives tales but the traditional thinking was you need to be mainlining carbohydrates the second you get off the bike or out of the water or whatever because you have this very small glycogen window where for an hour you're going to maximally assimilate and it might be the case that well that's true true your maximum assimilation would occur in that window but you will still uh you will still incorporate carbohydrate into glycogen later it just might not occur at as higher rate is that kind of the same situation if you're exercising every Saturday it doesn't make a difference Luis Burke has clearly shown within 24 hours you Glen are back to normal if you are in the Tour of France and you have to uh Excel every day you're going to miss uh the second the third day of the tour if you don't start uh taking in carbohy after the session yeah now going back to um so that study protein ingestion after an exercise session before in the evening does that impact your response the morning and so the other trial was no protein after the exercise and doing the same thing in the morning I thought that the response to breakfast would be reduced if you already ingested that 60 grams of protein in the evening it didn't the responses were exactly the same to my surprise so the response to breakfast exactly the same so net I must say that the people ingested the 60 grams prior to sleep had a benefit in that time frame whether it's caught up later on 2448 to 72 hours I don't know in other words I was going to ask you that you only did this for one breakfast and and one dinner breakfast and Bre uh sleep session yeah so so these studies so the studies with infusion of tracers are almost always limited to about 12 to 24 hours why because you have these turnover of the tissues so at some point your Tracer will become available from the breakdown and then you're measuring Tracer recycling yep so you need different techniques and we can go into that with d2o um there's different techniques to to counter that but if there's acute Tracer infusion studies you're limited to 12 to up to 24 hours but so far long-term training studies basically have shown that protein supplementation can further inre inrease gains in muscle mass and muscle strength I mean that that evidence is is is there the the evidence becomes smaller when people eat more protein um and it gets stronger if you look at people that do not consume enough protein I mean we had a black and white response to Freel elderly six months of training if we didn't provide a additional protein they didn't gain more muscle so the the the more frill people are the more important the amount of protein gets but it's also because they're not consuming a lot I want to actually come back to the elderly uh in some detail but I do want to kind of put a bow on this topic here which is we don't really know over the long term meaning over months and years if there is a benefit to consuming a very highly digestible rapidly absorbed good quality amino acid composition protein in the immediate aftermath following exercise it sounds like it's still unclear if there could be a net benefit so if a person listening to this says look I want everything in my favor to maximize my odds of you know optimization and maximization of muscle mass I'm going to consume 25 grams of whey protein following every workout again from a caloric perspective it's irrelevant it's 100 calories right it's like less than 5% of your daily intake but it would arguably be the most uh efficient way to deliver amino acids um is there any reason not to do that let's just start with that is there any is there any downside of of doing that um as opposed to going through the hassle of consuming a meal when you finish your training no on the individual absolutely not uh the only problem that I do have is that if you Advocate too much to to use like like protein supplements and stuff like that people stop thinking about their food yeah so we've had coming in here saying like oh I I'm really really I I put a lot of interest in my nutrition and my diet and then I asked them so how do you do it yeah I take 29 supplements yeah that's I mean I want to just just first think about your nutrition and if every meal contains good solid foods and with Ample Ample protein if you then on top of that decide that it's easier and more practical to take away protein supplements after training session be my guest but if all the rest is is scrap then please do not even consider those whe protein supplements because first think about your nutrition and I've I've never I've never had so I had a lot of people in my life asking me like how important is it whether I take my protein shake before or after the training session but I had never somebody had came up to me like look how important is it if I'm if I skip one training session or I miss one training session consistent training is is the benefit consistent training so that every meal is a greater impact on your muscle protein synthesis it's the same the questions I always get like like interviews on the radio and they say U Luke uh what should we eat in order to lose weight and I have only one resp response is less yeah exactly but that's people people just want to it's easier to to to to drink away protein supplement then actually just uh leave the house at 6:00 in morning and do an extra session of training [Music]

Channel: Peter Attia MD

Views: 100,670

Keywords: Peter Attia MD, Dr. Peter Attia, Early Medical, The Drive Podcast, The Drive, Longevity, Zone 2, muscle growth, protein

Id: _CkUCN95Ico

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2024