muscle soreness and carb uptake

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The campus is a ghost town on weekend mornings but the Human Nutrition Lab is usually percolating to life. As the coffee brews down in the office, I’m regularly joined by Drs. Ron Mendel and Tim Ziegenfuss. It takes three pairs of hands to analyze all those serum (blood) samples. We warm up our ELISA (hormone analyzer), don our lab coats and spend six or eight hours carefully combining antibodies with the bodybuilders’ serum to see how much insulin is present. I won’t bore you with details.


We’ve been statistically analyzing that insulin data for some time now. The picture is becoming clearer as our research continues. In case you missed our last research update, it involves resistance trained athletes and their inability to handle dietary carbohydrate 24 hours after intense lifting. Exercise-induced muscle damage (which we can measure in several ways) seems to create problems for weight trainers that endurance athletes just don’t have. The difference stems from the progressive nature of weight lifting: once a person masters a given weight, he adds to the poundage. The muscle damage is perpetual. Although runners typically add to their distance or try to reduce their race times, it’s rather different. Their "resistance" is still just their bodyweight – and they don’t experience any upper body soreness at all (from the running, anyway). Less muscle mass is traumatized, so consequently there should be fewer difficulties storing dietary carbs in their bodies. Bodybuilders, conversely, purposely "damage" nearly every skeletal muscle every week. Are YOU regularly sore from head to toe? If so, your body’s depository of carbohydrate is compromised on the whole. In summary, it's starting to look increasingly as if the current high dietary carb recommendations are indeed overstated. Not all athletes have the same requirements.

Back to the hard data, we finally know that our original hypothesis was probably correct; bodybuilding subjects are not handling carbohydrates well at all when they’re sore. Insulin levels rise considerably above normal in response to an oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT). This is a laboratory test where we feed 75 grams of glucose and take blood samples every 30 minutes. The data you see here are the first ever to describe a "glucose handling" problem specifically in bodybuilders. There has been indirect evidence regarding muscle trauma and insulin function in the past but that’s not good enough. Bodybuilders and powerlifters need research done specifically on them. A primary goal of the HNL is to provide direct evidence straight to those who matter: the athletes. Just because surgery, sepsis (infection), and even downhill running induce temporary alterations in insulin action, it doesn’t mean bodybuilders experience the same thing. Too long have we relied on extrapolated data from barely applicable studies.


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The above graphs show how the body produces additional insulin after a "meal" (75 g glucose) to try and compensate for damaged muscles. This supports data we shared back in February that dietary carbs appear to stay in the blood of sore athletes. The muscle damage, as indicated by creatine kinase (CK) in the blood and perceptions of soreness, apparently retards muscles' ability to take up blood sugar (glucose). In fact, the subjects with more damage are the ones who exhibit worse "insulin sensitivity". Look closely at the graphs I’ve provided. Those subjects that rank higher in CK or soreness are the ones who over-produce insulin. You see the pancreas won't stand for high blood sugar and attempts to hammer-home the glucose with extra secretion of the hormone.

"But isn’t this a good thing?" you may ask. "Many competitive bodybuilders take insulin, right?" Well, it depends on 1.) Your goals, 2.) Your state of muscle repair and 3.) Even the time of day. If you've read earlier Muscle Monthly, Think Muscle or Virtual Muscle articles on insulin and muscle building, you know that, although highly anabolic, insulin is a "Jeckyl and Hyde" hormone. Too much can be counter productive to the physique athlete by building fatty tissue (lipogenesis). High insulin concentrations are only beneficial to those individuals whose muscles are receptive – if their not, adipose tissue becomes a willing recipient of all that glucose.

The problem therefore is that athletes need to rebuild muscle carbohydrate stores (glycogen) in order to recover - but can't. At least not very well when they use heavy weights and "negatives" to induce additional growth. Yet it’s fairly well established that intense training of this nature is more effective for making gains. Are we hard lifters relegated to limiting our workouts to less than once per week?

Luckily, the answer is probably not. The solution may involve reduced carb intake on days of extreme soreness or possibly insulin potentiating supplements like Glucosol, Inzitol, etc. The picture is not yet crystal clear. As a first step (and to maximize our chances of finding an effect), we supplemented hard-training bodybuilders with a combination of these. We found a modest reduction in one indicator of glucose intolerance known as hemoglobin A1c, or glycosylated hemoglobin. Whether this equates to more muscle tissue or less body fat over time is not known. It does appear encouraging, however. Perhaps proper nutritional support can indeed help bodybuilders regain their recovery ability. Stay tuned.

Please note, these data are still considered preliminary by the author and readers should read as much on the topic as possible. This research update is partly based on an article that appeared recently on www.virtualmuscle.com

Interested individuals can also reach Dr. Lowery at [email protected]


by Dr. Lonnie Lowery
[email protected]