Do Branch Chain Amino Acids Improve Endurance?

 TLDR:

• A study on 11 active males found that supplementing with branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) improved the body's ability to metabolize fats and carbohydrates, leading to an 11% increase in exercise efficiency.

• Subjective feelings of fatigue in the participants decreased by 24%, which correlated with a 19% reduction in post-exercise ammonia levels, a chemical linked to central fatigue.

• The research also noted a 41% decrease in post-exercise insulin, suggesting BCAAs may improve aerobic function and reduce fatigue during endurance activities.
  
  

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Transcript:

Hello everyone, Dr. Wells here from Nutritional Physical Therapy. I'm here with my giant rusted chicken. I'm here with a new research update.

This one is on branched-chain amino acids. I find it fascinating because we talk a little bit about this in our sports section or a supplement section in our three-part nutrition course series, but I don't feel like I do enough to talk about it, particularly in our recent blog posts and research updates. So this is a really good one.

This one's published by Luan et al. in Nutrients. It's a double-blind crossover trial with 11 male athletes.

I should say they're athletes. They're active individuals, maybe not actively participating in athletics, but what they did is they did three days of branched-chain amino acid supplementation at 0.2 grams per kilogram of body weight. Then they did one hour bicycling at 60% of VO2 max, right? After that hour, they then cranked it up to 80% VO2 max and bicycled till failure.

And then what they did is they looked at several different metabolic pathways and measurements. So the one thing they noticed with the branched-chain amino acids, they saw a 19% increase in fat oxidation, about a 15% of bump in carbohydrate metabolism. So what does that mean? It means, effectively, it seems like the branched-chain amino acids help those individuals metabolize both fats and carbohydrates slightly better.

They saw an 11% increase in efficiency, so their work function went up, which is really nice to see. Subjectively, their fatigue went down 24%. That one, I think, is pretty significant and corollary with that is that their ammonia percentage afterwards went down 19%.

We know that ammonia concentrations go up, particularly as we have more intense exercise because of ATP and the ADP cycling with cyclic AMP. We have that additional methane group that gets cleaved off, and then you have that bump in ammonia. With that bump in ammonia, there's been suggested research that it's what plays the central role of fatigue, sort of that mind-fog sort of confusion and things.

So seeing that the fatigue went down, efficiency went up, ammonia went down 19%, there's some probable, you know, causes here, probable, like, physiological mechanisms. Lastly, post-exercise insulin was down 41%. So it seems like in this small trial of active male young individuals, branched-chain amino acids dosed at 0.2 grams per kilogram of body weight did improve aerobic functioning and fatigue.

And this is significant because a lot of the branched-chain amino acid data points have all been, not all, but a lot of them have been pointing towards resistance training, muscle mass, and body composition, not so much on fuel utilization and fatigue. So really great study. If you like this and you want more, check out our board-approved continuing education courses for physical therapists and rehab professionals at nutritionalphysicaltherapy.com. Sign up today and save some money.

Have a good one.