What Is A BCAA

What Is A BCAA

When working out and dieting you are increasing your catabolic rate. This means it can lead to muscle breakdown. When looking to gain muscle mass you need to take this equation into consideration.

Rate of Protein Synthesis – Catabolic Rate = Muscle Mass

Simply, if you have more Protein synthesising than muscle breaking down, you will gain muscle mass. If you breakdown more muscle and don’t synthesise as much protein, you will loose muscle mass. What is a BCAA?

What Is A BCAA?

It is widely accepted that Branch-Chain Amino Acids (BCAAS) in particular leucine (remember leucine), not only increase protein synthesis, but also on a cellular level, increases the cells capacity for protein synthesis. In essence, you gain more cells synthesising protein and those cells will be synthesising more protein. The third and final excellent quality of BCAAs is that they reduce your catabolic rate, it stops your body breaking down muscle as fast.

Going back to the equation, if you increase the rate of protein synthesis and reduce the catabolic rate, you are in turn maximising muscle mass gains.

So Why Choose BCAA supplements Instead of Whey Protein?

You can find BCAAs within whey protein, in fact it’s quite abundant. However, the BCAAs found in whey are bound to other amino acids and in order for them to be absorbed and used, the body needs to first digest them, this means it would takes a couple of hours for the BCAAs to kick in. BCAAs in supplement form are free form and require no digestion, a few grams of BCAAs in supplement form can spike BCAA levels in your body and can have an even greater effect than 30g of whey protein.

Due to supplement BCAAs not needing to be digested, they skip processing in the liver and go straight into your blood stream. Once in your blood stream, it can be converted into glucose to serve as an immediate energy source during your workouts.

We have done a product review on the BCAA Supplement that we use. You can view this by clicking HERE. Alternatively, we have provided costings below.

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