The ultimate growth combo > muscle gain and fat loss
Bulletin No. 59, The Ultimate Growth Combo
Visit Parrillo Performance and view the product line
(800) 344-3404
There are several criteria we must consider when evaluating a nutritional supplement for bodybuilders. First, is there some plausible mechanism by which the supplement might work? This just means is there some logical 
reason why the supplement should be expected to produce results. For example, we might expect protein supplements to be helpful because they provide the building blocks the body needs to build more muscle tissue. Second, is the supplement actually absorbed by the body and delivered to the site where it?s supposed to act? If your supplement is not absorbed into the bloodstream and carried to muscle cells, it probably won?t do much. Third, does it produce its effects at the recommended usage level, or is the amount used too small to really be effective. And fourth, the most important criteria is, does the supplement actually produce the desired effect better than a placebo or control. The first few criteria are really asking, “CAN the supplement work?” And the last question is asking, “Does the supplement REALLY work and do what it?s supposed to do?”
Unfortunately, few scientifically controlled studies have been performed to specifically evaluate how well nutritional supplements work to help bodybuilders. Many of the supplements out on the market have never been tested to see if they really work. Some of them have been, however. A recent article in the Journal of Applied Physiology (1) tested the effects of either a carbohydrate supplement alone (CHO), a protein supplement (PRO), or else a mixture of carbohydrate and protein (CHO-PRO) to see how the various supplements affected the levels of anabolic hormones in healthy drug-free weight lifters. In addition to merely providing the raw materials for building muscle tissue and storing glycogen, foods and supplements can affect the hormonal environment of the body. In this magazine I have written extensively about how to use food to control various hormone and enzyme levels to create an anabolic environment in the body where nutrients are shuttled to the lean compartment (muscle) while drawing on stored body fat as an energy source. This concept of “nutrient partitioning” amounts to eating in such a way that the food you eat is used to build muscle tissue while your body fat is burned as a fuel source. To me, this is the essence of bodybuilding nutrition. This works because many of the body?s anabolic and catabolic hormones are significantly influenced by diet, and it is the levels of these hormones that determines to a great degree whether the calories you eat will be stored as fat or turned into muscle.
At Parrillo Performance, we do a lot of “end point” testing of our supplements before a formulation is released on the market. By this I mean we try various formulations of supplements on elite, competitive bodybuilders to find out what actually works. The competitive bodybuilder is the ultimate research lab for studying bodybuilding supplements, because any little change in his or her physique is readily apparent. We follow the athlete?s weight, lean body mass, percent body fat, strength on the core lifts, overall “look” and hardness, plus subjective information such as energy level, training intensity, and how he or she feels. By making small changes in formulations we can see how these affect size, strength, conditioning, endurance, and energy level. This is really results-driven testing, because the reason people come to Parrillo Performance is for results. Sometimes (often times, actually) we figure out what works “out in the field” with real bodybuilders before the scientists back in the labs have figured out why or how it works. It?s always gratifying when the biochemical research explains some of the results we’ve seen in the gym, and that?s the case with this paper.
It has been well established that weight lifting causes an increase in growth hormone and, to a lesser extent, testosterone (2,3,4). This is no doubt part of the way in which resistance exercise brings about muscle growth. The question is, can we use any nutritional “tricks” to help this process along, above and beyond simply providing the raw materials needed to make more muscle protein? In fact, we can use supplements to improve the anabolic milieu to further enhance muscle growth. The most obvious way to improve the situation is to increase insulin levels, which acts as a potent stimulus to increase muscle amino acid uptake and activate the protein synthetic machinery. Exercise tends to lower insulin levels, which is great because this promotes fat burning during exercise, but then after exercise during the recovery period we want to activate insulin to take advantage of its anabolic properties. This is one time when we don?t have to worry so much about insulin causing fat accumulation, for two reasons. First, right after training the muscle cells are hungry for nutrients and they will gobble up all the calories before the fat cells can get them. Second, after exercise glycogen stores are depleted so any carbohydrates you eat at that time will be stored as glycogen rather than being converted to fat.
Carbohydrate alone or in combination with protein (but not protein alone) serves as a potent stimulus for insulin release (5,6). Furthermore, we know that protein feeding stimulates growth hormone and IGF-1. The tension placed on muscle during weight training somehow activates protein synthesis and induces muscular hypertrophy (by some mechanism not yet completely understood) - the question is can we use supplements to enhance this process? If so, do the supplements work by favorably modulating hormone levels to create a more anabolic environment?
To investigate this issue a group of researchers at The Exercise Physiology and Metabolism Laboratory at the University of Texas used a group of nine healthy drug-free weight lifters. Their average age was 25, average weight around 180 pounds at 11.8% body fat, and all had at least 2 years of weight training experience. This is important because it means we can apply their results to real bodybuilders, which is a problem in many studies which use novice trainers and low intensity programs. The subjects were given four different supplements to test: carbohydrate (CHO) which was a mixture of dextrose and maltodextrin, protein (PRO) which was a mixture of milk protein isolate and whey protein, carbohydrate plus protein (PRO-CHO) which was 70% carbohydrate and 30% protein, or else plain water, which was used as the control. This is also good news because the protein and carbohydrate supplements used are virtually identical to the most popular protein and carb supplements used by bodybuilders. The CHO supplement was given at a dose of 1.5 grams CHO per kg of body weight, which works out to be about 120 grams of carbs, or 480 calories on average per supplement dose. Again, this is good news because this is a realistic amount of supplement and we should expect to see an effect, if there is one. The other supplements (PRO and CHO-PRO) were given at equal caloric loads to the CHO supplement, so we can directly compare the effects of the different formulas.
The subjects performed high intensity training sessions going to failure between 8-10 reps on 8 core exercises. Then immediately after exercise and again 2 hours after the exercise session the athletes were given one of the supplement formulas. Before exercise and for the next eight hours after exercise the athletes? blood was monitored for glucose, testosterone, growth hormone, IGF-1, and insulin levels. Thirty minutes after the exercise and the supplement ingestion, plasma glucose levels in the CHO and CHO-PRO groups were significantly elevated compared to the PRO and control groups. Another supplement dose was given two hours after exercise, but this did not seem to further affect blood glucose levels. Going along with this, plasma insulin was significantly increased in the CHO and CHO-PRO groups, and to a lesser extent in the PRO supplement. The combination CHO-PRO supplement actually increased insulin levels to a greater degree than CHO alone. We might not have expected this, since the CHO supplement alone increased blood glucose levels greater than the combination supplement, but keep in mind that protein also serves as an insulin stimulus. So even though carbohydrate alone increases blood sugars levels more, adding some protein to it results in a higher insulin level. So far we can already draw some very important conclusions. First, when you take a supplement after training you definitely want to include some carbohydrate in it, rather than just using a pure protein powder. This results in a much higher insulin level than protein alone, and this will help drive the amino acids into the muscle. Second, mixing protein along with the carbohydrate further boosts insulin levels beyond carbs alone, which is exactly the effect we want here. We?re not too worried about carbs spilling over into fat stores because right after a workout glycogen levels are depleted, so the carbs will be used to replenish glycogen and will not be converted into fat. Third, taking a second supplement dose 2 hours after training has minimal effect on hormone levels. The big benefit seems to come from taking a respectable dose (120 grams in this study) of the supplement as soon as possible after training, and certainly within 30 minutes after you finish your workout. I suggest taking a shaker bottle to the gym with you and drinking your supplement at the gym as soon as you finish training.
Growth hormone levels rose sharply immediately after the exercise bout but declined back to baseline within two hours after exercise. The supplements seemed to have no immediate effect on GH levels, but at 6 hours after exercise the GH levels were higher in the CHO and CHO-PRO groups. It seems that the exercise itself has a bigger short-term impact on GH release than the supplements, but by six hours after exercise the effect of the supplements becomes apparent. It is also worth mentioning that the GH increase brought about by the exercise session itself was greater than the GH increase seen at six hours post-exercise, which was attributed to the 
supplements. This really comes as no surprise, since we know that weight training is really the prime stimulus for muscle growth, not supplements. Plasma testosterone levels were seen to rise sharply immediately after exercise, but then within one hour declined to below pre-exercise levels. All of the supplements resulted in testosterone levels declining below the value seen with water alone. Within 6 hours after exercise the CHO and CHO-PRO groups had returned essentially to pre-exercise levels, but the PRO alone was still depressed. More on this later.
What does this all mean? We know that the early rapid gains seen by beginning weight trainers are primarily due to increased motor learning (1). This means training the nervous system to recruit more muscle fibers to fire simultaneously. The more efficiently the nervous system can activate the muscle, the stronger the contraction. So early on we are mainly training the nervous system. It?s not unusual for a novice trainer to basically double his strength in the first six months of training. After a few months of initial training, you likely remember hitting a plateau, where further increases in strength came more slowly. At this point further increases in strength are more closely related to increased muscle mass and muscle cross-sectional area (1). Several factors influence the rate of increase of new muscle mass. These include the volume and intensity of training, the availability of adequate nutritional substrates and calories to support growth, and the hormonal environment of the muscle. If the only purpose of nutrition was to supply the building blocks for growth, then it wouldn’t matter that much what you ate. If, however, you want to control the hormones directing the anabolic drive, this takes a more sophisticated approach. The hormones most directly related to muscular growth are insulin, growth hormone, testosterone, and IGF-1. Insulin may potentiate muscular hypertrophy by stimulating amino acid uptake and protein synthesis by muscle. Furthermore, insulin seems to increase growth hormone levels by inducing hypoglycemia (7). This is probably what was happening when we saw GH levels increased by the CHO and CHO-PRO supplements six hours after exercise. The supplements caused an initial increase in insulin levels, which after a few hours resulted in hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) which in turn stimulated GH release.
Probably the biggest surprise was observed with testosterone?all the supplements seemed to decrease testosterone levels compared to plain water. What?s up with this? Either testosterone secretion by the testes was decreased, or else possibly the supplements caused more testosterone to be cleared from the blood (maybe by moving it inside cells) thereby resulting in a lower blood level. To investigate this the authors looked at LH (lutinizing hormone) levels. LH is the stimulus for testosterone to be released from the testes, so if the supplements caused decreased testosterone secretion then LH levels should be depressed as well. They found that LH levels were unaffected by the CHO supplement (the only one they tested for this) suggesting that the testosterone level was decreased as the result of increased removal of testosterone from the blood rather than decreased secretion. While it remains to be proven, the authors suggest that plasma testosterone may have been decreased by the supplements as a consequence of increased movement of testosterone into muscle cells, where it acts to promote protein synthesis. A number of important conclusions can be drawn from this study. You should supplement with a combination of protein and carbohydrate after training because this results in a more favorable anabolic hormonal environment than either protein or carbohydrate alone. You should take the supplement soon after training, within 15-30 minutes. A second dose of supplement two hours after exercise seems to confer little additional benefit in terms of altering hormone levels compared to a single dose. The dose used here was about 120 grams of protein and/or carbohydrate. We agree that this is an appropriate dose size for stimulating growth and optimizing recovery after training. Also, the anabolic hormone most responsive to dietary control is insulin, and to a lesser degree growth hormone (whose secretion is stimulated mainly by protein). This comes as no surprise. Growth hormone and testosterone are best stimulated by intense training. This is why we need a combination of hard training plus a carefully crafted diet to generate optimal hormone levels to maximize muscle growth and fat loss.
Since this study came out a couple of years ago we have used this as a starting point and done some of our own trials here at Parrillo Performance. We have tried various formulations on some top level competitive bodybuilders and fitness athletes and have taken the idea described in this paper a few steps further. First, we found that with our athletes, who train harder and longer than the ones in this study, a ratio closer to 50% protein - 50% carbs works better. Top level bodybuilders just seem to need a little more protein to get that degree of muscle hardness we?re going for. Also, we get better results if we use maltodextrin without the dextrose as the carbohydrate source. Dextrose is another name for glucose, a simple sugar. We find that our athletes can pack on more muscle without gaining fat if we leave the sugar out of the formula. Third, we have added glycine (an amino acid) to the formula to further improve its anabolic effect. 50/50 Plus? contains no sugar and no fat. We have settled on a combination of whey protein and other milk protein isolates to generate what we feel is an optimal amino acid profile.
This new product line is called “50/50 Plus?” to reflect its composition of about 50% protein and 50% carbs. It also provides a good source of calcium and includes vitamins important for muscle repair and growth. We?re very proud of this new supplement development. It?s designed specifically to promote nitrogen retention and muscle growth. The ideal times to use it are immediately after training, as your first meal of the day to set up an anabolic hormonal environment, or any time as needed with or between meals. The beauty of this product is that it is “programmed” to generate a hormonal environment which results in muscle growth. Not only does it provide the raw materials your muscles need to grow, but it also programs your hormone levels to channel the nutrients into muscle and not fat. It comes in four delicious flavors: chocolate, vanilla, milk (which is great in oatmeal), and orange-cream. I suggest a serving size of 4 scoops if you are using it as a post-workout recovery and growth supplement, 4 scoops in place of a meal, or 2 scoops if used as a calorie boost with or between meals. I think this product is very solid and deserves to be considered a “first line” supplement for bodybuilders. An excellent entry level supplement program would be 50/50 Plus?, Creatine Monohydrate, and the Essential Vitamin and Mineral- Electrolyte Formulas. I think you?ll find this supplement might easily push your growth to the next level. The work of hormonal control and nutrient partitioning has been done for you - all you have to do is train hard and take the supplement and you?re guaranteed to provide your muscles with the ultimate hormonal milieu for growth.
Visit Parrillo Performance and view the product line
(800) 344-3404
References
1. Chandler RM, Byrne HK, Patterson JG, and Ivy JL. Dietary supplements affect the anabolic hormones after weight training exercise. J. Appl. Physiol. 76(2): 839-845, 1994.
2. Kraemer RR, Kilgore JL, Kraemer GR, and Castracane VD. Growth hormone, IGF-1, and testosterone responses to resistive exercise. Med. Sci. Sports Exercise 24: 1346-1352, 1992.
3. Kraemer WJ, Gordon SE, Fleck SJ, Marchitelli LJ, Mello R, Dzaidos JE, Freidl K, and Harmon E. Endogenous anabolic hormonal and growth factor responses to heavy resistance exercise in males and females. Intl. J. Sports Med. 12: 228-235, 1991.
4. Kraemer WJ, Marchitelli L, Gordon SE, Harmon E, Dziados JE, Mello R, Frykman P, McCurry D, and Fleck SJ. Hormonal and growth factor responses to heavy resistance exercise protocols. J. Appl. Physiol. 69: 1442-1450, 1990.
5. Rabinowitz D, Merimee TJ, Maffezzoli R, and Burgess JA. Patterns of hormonal release after glucose, protein, and glucose plus protein. Lancet 2: 454-457, 1966.
6. Zawadzki KM, Yaspelkis BB, and Ivy JL. Carbohydrate-protein complex increases the rate of muscle glycogen storage after exercise. J. Appl. Physiol. 72: 1854-1859, 1992.
7. Roth J, Glick S, and Valow RS. Hypoglycaemia: a potent stimulus of growth hormone. Science Wash. DC 140: 987-988, 1963.
Recent Entries
- Good Fats for Good Health
- The Glycemic Index and Bodybuilding
- Oblique Training-The Full-Contact Twist
- Bodybuilding after Y2K
- Vitamins and Minerals Part II
- Shape Up in Eight Weeks The Easy Way
- Kelly Greene
- Parrillo Bars for Every Fitness Need
- Regaining Your Weight Loss “Oomph”
- Jennifer Hendershott > USA Fitness Champion
