Glutamine has to be among the most misunderstood and hyped supplements in the region of sports. If you ask ten different people about what glutamine is and what it does you will most likely get ten different answers. Many bodybuilders and strength athletes utilize glutamine because they say it helps their recovery. In actuality, they say the only way for it to have any impact is to have a high number of grams daily.

Glutamine

Exactly how recovery is assisted is a subject for some disagreement. Most posts about it are crap written simply for you to buy tubs of the stuff. Glutamine is the most abundant naturally occurring amino acid in the human body. Amino acids are the building blocks for proteins and glutamine is one of the few that can cross the blood brain barrier so it’s quite a popular element in the body’s physiology.

Under normal circumstances it’s not an essential amino acid, meaning there’s not any need to supplement it using the exact same idea as you’d take additional protein to support anabolism (larger muscles). In actuality, your body is most likely producing its usual amount and storing lots of it on your muscles if you’re eating some of them: Beef, chicken, fish, eggs, milk, dairy products, wheat, cabbage, beets, beans, spinach, parsley, tofu, yogurt and cheese.

Take note

About 90 percent of the glutamine synthesized in the body is from the muscles. In actuality, when research testing is done to determine how much glutamine is present in muscle mass, biopsies are sometimes removed from the vastus lateralis (external biggest quadriceps muscle). I’m too fat. Should I take glutamine for weight loss? No, there’s absolutely not any evidence or studies to show that supplementing with glutamine will help to drop fat. It’s not a fat burner or diet pill. Fat loss is only possible through burning more calories than you put in your mouth and restricting the amount of carbohydrate foods you consume.

I’m a scrawny guy. Will glutamine help me with weight gain? No, you only have to eat more healthy food, prepare for hypertrophy, and possibly look into improved daily protein on the order of a whey protein supplementation. Glutamine won’t impact weight gain directly but it does play a role in protein synthesis as any other amino acid. Will glutamine affect my weight training functionality? No, supplementing with glutamine won’t influence your lifting directly.

Research

One study demonstrates that it has no direct impact on strength performance. It isn’t like Creatine Monohydrate which functions as a cell volumizer and makes it possible to get that extra rep or two when doing a set. What’s the difference between glutamine and L-glutamine? They’re the same. When you purchase a supplement product off a store shelf, it will usually have L-glutamine written on it. There are “L” forms and “D” forms of amino acids (like in d-glutamine). The “L” is latin for “levo” (abandoned ) which refers to a specific molecular structure into the left and is the one sold for human consumption.

Immune system

What is the connection of glutamine into the immune system? When you take part in a really intense anaerobic exercise, your immune system takes a massive hit as does your body’s glutamine levels-and this is extremely interesting: If the levels of glutamine in your body were measured immediately after a stressful immunity type of exercise session, they would be at about the same levels as when you started. After about two hours, however, those amounts would have decreased by up to 30-35%. (The amounts of some essential amino acids, incidentally, would decrease also by that time).

Where can the glutamine go? There’s some evidence to indicate that they’re used by white blood cells, lymphocytes and neutrophils, as metabolic fuel. Neutrophils are the most abundant type of white blood cells of your immune system. They travel through your bloodstream and migrate very quickly to areas of injury from the body where there is infection or inflammation. If your immune system requires more fuel in the kind of glutamine to recuperate then it only makes sense that you ought to supplement greatly with it, right? In 1 study where subjects were given 20-30 grams of glutamine daily to see if this affected their white blood cell count. It was discovered that although glutamine is required for the rapid reproduction of lymphocytes (white blood cells), the degree of glutamine after a stressful work done performed by “healthy, well nourished humans” don’t drop low enough for white blood cells in the immune system to need more help to repopulate.

The research goes on to state that although healthy people are able to endure such large daily amounts (20-30 g ) of glutamine, administering mega doses of this supplement doesn’t prove to encourage the immune system nor seem to have some miraculous anti-catabolic consequences. If you are healthy and eating nutritiously with sufficient vitamins, minerals and nutrients and staying hydrated, drinking a lot of water, your immune system will look after itself. You already have a whole lot of glutamine stored up under ordinary conditions. Someone may have sufficient nutrition but occasionally under extra-ordinary physiological conditions, the immune system is put into constant jeopardy. In the domain of Sports science, there are studies which show that with overtraining syndrome (OTS) among elite athletes, glutamine levels are much lower than usual. It is thus suggested that glutamine levels should be monitored and tested at regular intervals throughout the training program. If the levels are low then additional rest could be indicated in addition to mega doses of glutamine supplementation.

Conclusion

This is when glutamine becomes what is called a conditionally essential amino acid, meaning, it’s necessary to take additional from external sources. There are other sorts of conditions like acute athletic overtraining at an elite level that might result in the glutamine stores in the muscles to never completely recover unless there’s ample supplementation. Glutamine levels might become reduced due to immune-suppression because of bone marrow transplants, burns, surgery, and sepsis. There’s one regarding bone marrow transplant patients who underwent less disease and whose hospital stay was shortened as a result of glutamine supplementation. Should you supplement your weight training regimen with glutamine? If you’re training a couple of hours every week for approximately a half hour to forty five minutes at a time or not then you probably don’t need it. Save your money. If, however, you’re training six days a week and approaching outstanding levels of functionality then it might be suggested to take mega doses in powder form mixed with some type of liquid. Also if you understood you were going in for some sort of invasive elective surgery it probably would not hurt to stock up on glutamine and begin supplementing immediately.