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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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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