Build more muscle....

Today's post: Friday, 2-27-2009

Any exercise you do regularly in a way that avoids injury produces abundant health benefits as we have posted about here quite often. Live longer. Avoid Senility. Improve your sex life. Escape cancer. Make heart disease much less likely. Look younger because you’ve actually aged less and more slowly. Be less fat.

But two kinds of exercise build muscle best. They also help you remove or prevent excess fat the best. And, they can be done quickly enough you might actually have time to fit in doing them compared with less effective and slower kinds of exercise.

One is progressive strength training. The other is some form of interval cardio. Both of these kinds of exercise require some vigorous and focused effort. But they also build muscle; increase HDL cholesterol; and cause your body to release growth hormones including testosterone which builds muscle, helps improve your body’s ability to repair itself – including growing new brain cells --and slows aging.

Many of you are already doing these two kinds of exercise. But wouldn’t it be nice to get a bit more results in with the same effort and have some extra leverage in making progress?

There ARE some things that work.

There was a good article on some of them in the Early to Rise on Wednesday this week.

I’ll include the article below and then add my comments after it. There is extra supporting evidence for many of the recommendations in the article. But one may be safer to avoid. Then I include three more not listed in the article.

“This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.”

“Keep Your Muscle, Keep Your Youth

By Al Sears, MD

Unless you do something to prevent it, you'll lose muscle as you age. That makes you susceptible to a host of health problems, including fat gain, sexual dysfunction, and depression.

Here are two steps you can take to rebuild or maintain your muscle mass:

1. Eliminate Aerobics.

Research shows that low-exertion, long-duration aerobic exercise causes muscle loss and actually shrinks your heart and lungs. Instead, your exercise routine should include short bursts of high-intensity exercise with gradually changing intervals over time. It's the most effective way to burn fat and get a ripped body with functional strength.

2. Take Muscle-Supporting Nutrients.

You can also take nutrients daily to build and maintain muscle. Some of the best include:

Protein (as the main focus of every meal). Your body needs protein to maintain your muscles and support new muscle growth. Throw away carb-heavy snacks and snack on boiled eggs and nuts instead.

Creatine (5 mg a day). Creatine increases speed, performance, endurance, and strength. It increases the amount of muscle you build during resistance training.

L-Arginine (500-1,000 mg a day). L-arginine is an essential amino acid that builds strength and muscle mass. I've used it for 20 years.

Carnosine (500 mg a day). Made from two amino acids, carnosine helps protect the integrity of your muscles and make sure new muscle will be healthy and last.

Glutamine (5 g a day as a powder in a shake). This amino acid helps stabilize energy levels and boost the production of natural growth hormone in your body. That tells your body to shed fat and build muscle. It also helps prevent muscle breakdown.

[Ed. Note: Dr. Sears is a practicing physician and the author of the patented PACE program. He is also a nutritional expert, a fitness expert, and is board certified by the American Board of Anti-Aging Medicine. The PACE program proves, once and for all, that a great body and vibrant health does NOT have to be difficult, time-consuming, or boring…..]”

You can get his PACE interval cardio program including a video to make it easy to learn at: www.alsearsmd.com .

And, Jon Benson, who also writes for ETR, has a time efficient strength training program at www.7minutemuscle.com .

X* X* X* X* X*

1. The trick with protein is to get it in the most health supporting and effective ways. Beef fed only grass, wild caught fish, eggs, whey supplements, nuts, nonfat and very lowfat dairy, pasture raised or very lean poultry, and beans and lentils are all such sources. Grain fed beef and farmed fish are more harmful than beneficial and should be avoided however. (Doctor Sears himself has written on how grass fed beef is far safer and dramatically better for your health than grain fed beef.) Whey and egg protein is the highest quality protein; and the other foods on this list are the healthiest way to get protein.

2. Creatine does work according to the researcher I spoke to at the Cooper exercise group in Texas. Taking it will make it easier to make progress in your strength training and build more muscle because of that. One caution. Be SURE to drink plenty of water if you take it on a hot day and exercise.

3. L-arginine also improves your endothelial function on the inside of your arteries; & because it does so it also can lower your blood pressure if it’s high and increases blood flow which can enhance your sex response. Taking l-arginine before you exercise and just before you go to bed also increases your growth hormone release. It tastes pretty bad. But Now supplements sells it in 500 mg capsules that solve that problem. It works better to take more than Al Sears suggests though. I take 6 capsules or 3,000 mg twice a day – once just before I exercise each morning and once just before bed.

Also, taking l-arginine can have a side effect; but you can usually prevent that by taking a bit of the amino acid lysine at a different time of day. I take 1,000 mg of lysine about mid-afternoon each day. (See below as this may also help build muscle.)

4. I read an article that revealed a study that showed that taking carnosine helped people build muscle mass even if they were over 60 years old. In addition, it not only does so by enhancing the repair process, it may also help protect you from highs in your blood sugar and help slow aging by helping to prevent a process called glycation. So carnosine is also an anti-aging supplement that can be good as well for people with high blood sugar.

5. Glutamine has some problems as it can interfere with some medications and can cause people sensitive to MSG to react to it as it is a similar compound albeit without the sodium content. Unfortunately, one of these effects is to make you fatter according to one doctor I read. So I do not recommend that one unless you take no medicines and are either recovering from being sick or are quite young and in either case are skinny and underweight.

6. DMG and TMG, aka as betaine, when taken with lysine allow cattle to add lean bodyweight so they are given regularly to grain fed cattle so they will sell for more later.

But in people adding lean bodyweight means building more muscle; and DMG and TMG are methyl group donors that protect your health including keeping your homocysteine low. And the one mild side effect of taking l-arginine is mostly cancelled by taking lysine.

So I take 500 mg of TMG and two 500 mg capsules of lysine on an empty stomach each mid afternoon.

These supplements can enhance your health and add to the amount of muscle you gain from your exercise.