** This is from an article identified at the end (bottom); which can help you improve your life!

As you can see, whey protein supplementation can effectively allow you to get the minimum leucine you need to build muscle without consuming freaky amounts of food and calories.

Note that the anabolic impact of leucine is proportional to its availability and is dependent on its circulating levels. In other words, the more leucine you consume from food, the better chances for anabolic impact you get.

But there is one more factor that can dictate whether you gain or lose muscle mass. And that's the glycemic factor.

The Glycemic Factor

As noted, the triggering of your mTOR to increase muscle mass requires healthy insulin and glucose homeostasis. Any impairment in the regulation of blood glucose and insulin activity could inactivate your mTOR and jeopardize your muscle protein synthesis.

Studies have reported that dietary protein has beneficial stabilizing effect on insulin levels when entering the circulation from ingested food. In other words, protein food benefits your body's glycemic control. And furthermore, protein serves as a perfect fuel during times of fasting and intense physical hardship.

Protein is Your Perfect Fuel During Intense Training

Amino acids can serve as the ideal muscle fuel during intense exercise. But note that your body uses only certain amino acids for muscle fueling.

As a general rule, a large percentage of dietary amino acids are oxidized before even reaching your circulation. Nearly 100 percent of dietary glutamate and glutamine and nearly 40 percent of phenylalanine are removed during the absorption process, largely by oxidative degeneration.

But the exception to this pattern of protein degradation are the branch chain amino acids (BCAA), with over 80 percent of dietary content of leucine, valine and isoleucine reaching circulation.

It seems that the body spares these amino acids for one purpose: Muscle fueling.

Scientists now know that BCAA and leucine reach your muscle directly to serve as emergency fuel. BCAA contribute carbon to synthesize glucose via the alanine glucose cycle. Called gluconeogenesis, this process converts BCAA into alanine and glutamine which then serve as carbon donors to the production of glucose.

And all this without spiking insulin.

It has been reported that the alanine-glucose cycle accounts for 40 percent of endogenous glucose production during prolonged exercise. Gluconeogenesis occurs mainly in the liver and it grants a perfect supply of glucose to the muscle tissues during fasting and exercise. Your liver releases to the muscles exactly the right amount of glucose needed.

This fueling mechanism is so efficient that it persistently keeps blood sugar from overspiking or overplummeting. In other words, amino acids serve as PRIMARY FUEL during times of intense physical or nutritional stress. They could be the ideal fuel for athletes engaged in non-aerobic drills including weight lifters, wrestlers and mixed martial artists.

That's the right fuel to prevent "hitting the wall".

It's plausible that we evolved to possess this perfect protein fueling mechanism during primordial times when humans were engaged in extreme physical hardship while being on a frugal diet that was primarily low glycemic, devoid of grains and sugar. In fact, this fueling system benefits us only when we're deprived of dietary carbs.

High carb meals shut down this primal fueling mechanism and your body shifts instead to the less effective carbohydrate fuel.

So is Carbohydrate Fuel Bad for You?

Endurance athletes such as long distance runners can certainly benefit from complex carb loading. For aerobics training, complex carbs are certainly a viable fuel. However, there is growing evidence that the human body has not evolved to do well on a high carbohydrate diet. And as we age, we tend to further lose our tolerance to carbohydrate food and particularly to the glycemic load.

Recent studies reveal that the addition of simple carbohydrates to protein supplement negated the anabolic impact of the protein, and blunted muscle protein synthesis in a group of healthy people over 60. These are the facts and we can't afford overlooking them.

One of the major problems with today's fitness is the ignorance towards muscle fueling. We have been shifting away from the primal low glycemic fat/protein fuel into the high glycemic carbohydrate fuel and again, we pay the consequences with ever growing rates of diabetes, obesity and related disorders.

To retain and improve your physical shape, you must shift back to the low glycemic fuel foods you were originally programmed for. And by all means, you should minimize the consumption of high glycemic foods and avoid all sport nutrition and diet products (bars and powders) that are high in sugar or refined carbs.

How Can You Translate All this into Practice?

More studies are needed to fully elucidate the role of nutrition and exercise in supporting your health and physical condition. As for your fitness, there are obviously additional topics which must be addressed.

• How should you combine food?
• What's the right meal timing?
• And how much should you eat per meal?
• When do you need fast assimilating protein?
• And when do you need slow assimilating protein?
• What is the best protein food for your muscle?
• And what's the best protein blend?
• How does the muscle fueling system work?
• Who needs carb fuel?
• Who needs fat fuel?
• Why is training complexity so critical?
• What training regimen protects your neuro-muscular system from degradation?
• How long and how often should you train?
• Can you improve your muscle fibers quality?
• Can you possibly develop a hybrid super muscle fiber?
• And could you adjust our diet/training protocol to counteract aging and prevent muscle wasting?

Obviously there isn't enough space here to cover all this. Nonetheless, we can still draw some important conclusions based on the information in this article.

Following are practical guidelines to the right physical and nutritional protocols.

The Physical Protocol

Train intensely in short intervals. The short intense exercise intervals protocol has shown to improve body composition (build muscle, burn fat) more than the prolonged moderate exercise and aerobics. It has also shown to help counteract muscle aging by retaining fast muscle fibers and increasing the capacity to perform intense, physical tasks.

Avoid long aerobic cardio sessions.

• Incorporate strength and speed exercises with intense push and pull drills to maximize the mechano-overload impact on the muscle. Keep increasing your exercise intensity (weight load, speed and complexity) as you progress to keep your muscles adequately challenged.
• Work your whole body rather than body parts. Isolation exercise have a limited and often limiting effect on your progress.
• Incorporate minimum rest between intervals. This will force your body to improve its durability and strength at the same time.

Remember to keep challenging your body. To do that, rotate your exercise routine; change the order of your exercises and add new elements to your drills.

Incorporate drills that mimic fight or flight activities, such as punches, kicks and sprints. Like other species, we're inherently programmed to improve our physical capacity and resiliency to stress by unlocking this primitive survival apparatus within us.

Avoid moderate exercise. Moderation is fatal to muscular development. High intensity programs like CFT (Controlled Fatigue Training) and Peak 8 are ideal to help improve your fitness level.

The Nutritional Protocol

Follow a high protein, low glycemic diet. Keep a high ratio of protein/carbohydrates to improve body composition.

Here are a few other key points:

• Increase your intake of leucine rich foods such as high quality whey protein, raw cheese and organic, pasture-raised eggs.
• Increase the gap between meals to potentiate the anabolic effect of each meal. Remember, fasting stimulates a substantial peak in muscle protein synthesis when feeding is resumed.
• Feed your muscle with quality whey protein after exercise. Make sure the whey protein is derived from grass fed cows and is cold processed. Note that whey protein is the fastest to assimilate among all protein foods. Its anabolic impact after exercise is unmatched. Whey protein is also ideal for muscle fueling before exercise. It has the highest content of leucine and BCAA among all foods.

For best results, incorporate at least two recovery meals after exercise / 20g-30g protein per meal. 20g is about the threshold amount of protein needed to grant maximum utilization efficiency without wasting nitrogen.

Keep 1-3 hours gap between meals (depends on meal size).

Make all your muscle meals low glycemic. Avoid protein bars and powders made with added sugar. Note that mixing whey protein with low glycemic fruits such as berries is ok. This will not cause a substantial increase in the glycemic load of your meal.

Additionally:

• Increase your intake of antioxidants from fruits and vegetables to support your muscle antioxidant defenses and allow recuperation and buildup.
• Stay away from any product made with added fructose. Fructose is the worst fuel for your muscles.
• Start your morning with a whey protein meal to cover your minimum leucine requirement. This will allow all additional protein meals to become increasingly anabolic (by releasing extra leucine for anabolic purposes).
• Use whey meals as a primary source of protein during the day to grant maximum protein/leucine loading efficiency with minimum digestive stress.
• Have your slow assimilating proteins (eggs, cheese, fish or meat) at night to grant a steady release of leucine and a long lasting anabolic impact during the sleeping hours.
• One way to spare leucine for anabolic purposes is by adding coconuts' MCT (medium chain triglycerides) to a whey protein meal. MCT has shown the capacity to swiftly convert to energy without spiking insulin and without the need for bile acid digestion. MCT can help shift leucine's pathway from fueling into muscle building.
• Keep your diet clean from chemicals, pesticides and preservatives to minimize the metabolic stress on your body. Accumulated metabolic stress and toxicity present major obstacles to muscle recuperation and buildup.

Final Note

Life isn't just about looking hard and feeling strong. And often you get too busy to pay attention to how you eat or exercise. Nevertheless, with the right knowledge and practice, you can become increasingly efficient in restoring and improving your physical shape even when your available time is scarce.

The protocols suggested here can fit any lifestyle. Even 10 minutes of intense exercise can still yield positive results while you're on a super busy schedule. And you can easily pre-pack whey protein in your bag or case and bring it with you anywhere you go. Life requires you to act.

The choice is now in your hands.

About the Author

Ori Hofmekler is the author of The Warrior Diet, The Anti-Estrogenic Diet, Maximum Muscle Minimum Fat, and the upcoming book Unlocking the Muscle Gene/North Atlantic Books.

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