BUILD MUSCLE WITH GLUTAMINE

Glutamine remains the supplement of choice for many bodybuilders. Glutamine is an amino acid that can be found naturally in lots of foods such as beans, meat, fish, poultry and dairy products. Glutamine is also an important component of protein powders and is one of the twenty non-essential amino acids found in the body. 




Glutamine is the most common amino acid that is in skeletal tissues and makes up just over 60% of amino acids in muscles. And this is why Glutamine is so important for building muscle.

Glutamine for Building Muscle

Glutamine is distributed throughout the body and plays an important role in protein metabolism. In the eyes of someone that is trying to gain muscle, the strength of glutamine is its ability to reduce the amount of muscle deterioration that occurs as a result of intense physical training. Not being able to replace the high levels of glutamine used up during intense exercise could result in greater status to illness due to a weakening of the immune system. In addition, glutamine 'stolen' from the muscles to maintain the immune system must be replaced to keep those muscles in 'building' mode.




Supplementing with Glutamine

People wanting to build muscle can therefore benefit from supplementing with glutamine each day, preferably taken post-workout to enhance its recuperative effects. Glutamine is a classed as a non essential amino acid. Non essential means the body produces it naturally, not that it is not essential. Just over 60% of our glutamine is found in the skeletal muscle, with the remainder occupying in the lungs, liver, brain and stomach. Glutamine has a unique molecule structure with two nitrogen side chains. This structure makes glutamine the primary transporter of nitrogen in the muscle cells, crucial for supporting muscle growth.





Glutamine Research

Recently, glutamine has gained importance through research demonstrating its unique contribution to protein synthesis (muscle growth), anti-catabolic breakdown functions (prevents muscle tissue breaking down) and muscle building hormone elevating properties. Due to these effects, glutamine plays an important part in your body by aiding recovery of muscle cells. The immune and digestive systems crave glutamine. The digestive system often struggles to get enough glutamine to cope with the high protein diet of a for example a bodybuilder. The other main cause of glutamine depletion is intense physical exercise. When a person undertakes in intense physical activity (working out) more glutamine is required than the total amount produced by the body. If the body cannot get the required glutamine needed from the bloodstream it must revert to the storage facility, the muscles. The body will now break down the glutamine stored in the muscles and send it into the bloodstream. It's under these circumstances that glutamine supplementation is required.


by JonTaylor

The Key Mass-Building Move (Not What You Think)

I was having an e-mail conversation with Mr. America Doug Brignole, which will be part of an exclusive interview in the March ’12 IRON MAN, and I asked him which are his favorite exercises for building mass. 




He’s put on quite a bit of size lately, so I was wondering if he’d made any “discoveries.”

His answer stunned me, even though it’s something related to an animal study on hypertrophy I often quote and directly related to my Positions-of-Flexion mass-building protocol (more on that in a moment)…

“[The best mass-building exercises] are the ones that have a resistance curve whereby the resistance increases as the muscle elongates and diminishes as it contracts–for example, standing cable laterals.”

Whoa! Ask most people what the best size-building move is for the medial-delt head, and you get “presses.” But I know for a fact Doug is not an overhead-press fan. That’s another story. The point here is that his best choice for shoulder size is a STRETCH-position exercise.




Doug said, “A standing cable lateral raise–with the pulley about hip high–provides resistance right from the beginning of the movement [where the medial head is somewhat stretched], and it diminishes as the arm is raised to parallel to the ground.”

That’s the complete opposite resistance curve of a standing dumbbell lateral raise, an inferior delt exercise, according to Doug. There is zero resistance at the start–the most important point–and it gradually increases to where it’s impossible to hold in the contracted position. There should be max resistance at the bottom with much less at the top.

So why is the stretch point so important for stimulating muscle-mass increases? Here’s the scientific explanation from top strength and hypertrophy researchers Steven Fleck, Ph.D., and William Kraemer, Ph.D.:

“At the optimal length [of the muscle fiber] there is potential for maximal cross-bridge interaction and thus maximal force….. With excessive shortening there is an overlap of actin filaments so that the actin filaments interfere with each other’s ability to contract the myosin cross-bridges. Less cross-bridge contact with the active sites on the actin results in a smaller potential to develop tension.”




In case your eyes glazed over while reading all the science lingo, what they are saying is that at the peak-contracted position, like the top of a dumbbell lateral raise, the fibers are very bunched up, so much so that they can’t produce as much tension as when the muscle is in a more lengthened, or stretched, state.

There’s definitely something very special about stretch-position exercises when it comes to triggering mass–semi-stiff-legged deadlifts for hamstrings, overhead extensions for triceps, flyes for pecs, incline curls for biceps and so on. I use those as the second move in standard Positions-of-Flexion mass-building protocol, but maybe they should be first.

I’ve been more intrigued with stretch-position moves since I saw the bird study by Antonio and Gonyea (Med Sci Sports Exerc. 25:1333-45; 1993). They produced a 334 percent increase in mass gain in the “lat” with one month of STRETCH-ONLY “workouts.” They progressively overloaded the bird’s wing at elongation, and according to Antonio, “produced the greatest gains in muscle mass ever recorded in an animal or human model of tension-induced overload.”

With Doug’s comments and revisiting all of the above, I’m going to experiment again with putting the stretch-position exercise first in my bodypart routines. I say “again” because we tried that years ago. In fact, it worked so well we created a video titled “Hypercontraction Training.” Lots of trainees reported excellent mass gains–but it fell out of favor. Why? Because strength was sluggish on the big midrange exercises, which were performed after a few sets of a stretch-position exercise. We thought because strength wasn’t increasing, it wasn’t working well. Wrong…

Now we know that there is not a major correlation with getting a muscle stronger to get it bigger. And maybe, just maybe, stretch overload is the key get-bigger trigger.

I’ll have more in a future blog. Till then, stay Built for Life.




By Steve Holman - Iron Man

Steve has been training for 35 years, since he was 15, and has been IRON MAN Magazine’s Editor in Chief for more than 20 years. He has written more than 20 books on bodybuilding, weight training and nutrition, and his popular “Train, Eat, Grow” series, which he writes with his training partner Jonathan Lawson, appears monthly in IRON MAN magazine. Steve has also interviewed many legendary bodybuilding figures including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Cory Everson, Tom Platz, Lee Labrada and Boyer Coe.