Gym activities are becoming increasingly popular in the United States, and approximately 39% of the population currently holds a gym membership.
Whether you’re hitting the gym for fun, socializing, or to maximize your muscle gains for bodybuilding competitions, there’s a science to achieving your goals quicker. Metabolism, catabolism, and anabolism are at the center of it.
Here’s your guide to understanding the anabolic process and making the most of it in your workouts.
How Does the Anabolic Process Work?
Anabolism and catabolism are both parts of metabolism, which is a group of bodily processes vital for survival.
These two processes work together to contribute to your molecular architecture. They release and absorb the energy needed to maintain optimum health and function.
Hormones play a major role in maintaining and regulating these processes.
Anabolism
Anabolism centers on expansion and construction. It builds small, simple molecules into larger, more complex ones.
Some examples of anabolism include:
- Bone development
- Muscle development
- Gluconeogenesis
- Mineralization
Catabolism provides the energy and raw materials for these processes.
Catabolism
Catabolism essentially breaks down large food molecules in the digestive tract, breaking them down into the smaller building blocks that anabolism uses for growth.
Glycolysis, which is the conversion of glucose into energy, is a catabolic process.
From the above, it’s easy to see how these two processes are closely related to muscle growth, development, and endurance for gym enthusiasts. Anabolic workouts produce the biggest gains in muscle growth, while catabolic workouts burn fat and calories.
The Stages of Anabolism
Despite its seemingly complex nature, anabolism comprises three simple stages. In stage one, the anabolic process produces the precursors needed to start the process. These are:
- Amino acids
- Monosaccharides
- Isoprenoids
- Nucleotides
During stage two, these precursors use energy from ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) generated during glycolysis to become reactive.
Finally, these activated precursors assemble into complex molecules, including:
- Proteins
- Lipids
- Polysaccharides
- Nucleic acids
These are the building blocks of your body.
It’s possible to manipulate your body’s anabolic processes by enhancing any of these stages.
Anabolism and Carbohydrates
Anabolic processes get to work on carbohydrates in stage one, breaking them down into monosaccharides like glucose. We call this process glycolysis, and it involves harvesting the following from carbs:
- Pyruvate
- Lactate
- Glycerol
- Glycerate 3-phosphate
- Amino acids
Gluconeogenesis then converts pyruvate to glucose-6-phosphate, using some of the ingredients common to glycolysis. Glucose-6-phosphate is key to energy production.
Anabolism and Proteins
Proteins come from amino acids created during anabolism. Mammals can synthesize only ten non-essential amino acids in this process.
Each protein comprises a different chain of amino acid residues. Anabolism also creates nucleotides from amino acids, formic acid, and carbon dioxide, using huge amounts of metabolic energy.
Other substances generated from protein during anabolism include:
- Nucleosides from purines
- Thymine and cytosine from orotate (glutamine and aspartate)
- Adenine and guanine from inosine monophosphate
In turn, inosine monophosphate comes from the following amino acids:
- Glycine
- Glutamine
- Aspartic acid
- Formate
Anabolism and Fatty Acids
Anabolic processes synthesize fatty acids via fatty acid synthases. This process polymerizes and reduces acetyl-CoA units. These
Acetyl-CoA is vital for reactions that add to the acetyl group, which controls how your body synthesizes molecules.
All these complex names and terms might seem extremely foreign to you, but there’s a good reason you need to know about them.
Simply put, when you come across these terms when researching supplements, you’ll know where they fit into the anabolic process. This helps you fine-tune your diet to support and maximize the anabolic process.
What Is The Anabolic Window?
In the gym, there’s often a lot of talk and speculation about the anabolic window. This concept implies that it’s essential to ingest carbohydrates and proteins within a specific time window after a workout.
The basis of this theory revolves around putting in what you used up during your workout.
Ingesting carbs and protein after a workout will certainly increase glycogen levels. This is most beneficial for endurance athletes who need to refuel during extended bouts of exercise.
Many bodybuilders believe that consuming protein and carbs after a workout will assist with muscle repair and growth by spiking their insulin levels. Unfortunately, research shows that things are a lot more complicated than that.
It won’t harm you to gobble up some protein directly after your workout, but it won’t make a difference if you wait till later, either. It’s much more important to focus on eating a balanced, healthy diet, than timing your meals precisely.
How to Make the Most of the Anabolic Process
There are three main ways to maximize anabolism for the best muscle gains. These are diet, exercise, and supplementation.
Let’s take a look at each in turn:
Eating for Muscle Growth
Food is what kick-starts and powers the metabolic process. Without a balanced diet, you could become seriously ill, feel lethargic, and struggle to meet your fitness goals.
Some types of exercise require a diet higher in energy (carbohydrates and sugar), while others rely on muscle-building blocks (proteins and amino acids) for success.
Following a diet designed to support the anabolic process is one way to ensure your body can cope with the demands of the gym or produce the muscle growth you desire.
An anabolic diet involves alternating carbohydrate intake, so you burn fat as fuel, and preserve your muscle mass. It’s based on cycling your carbohydrate intake between weekdays and weekends.
The weekday diet comprises 60 to 65% fat, 30 to 35% protein, and just 30 grams of carbohydrates per day.
After five days of this, this eating plan advises replenishing your carbohydrate supplies by eating meals comprising 60 to 80% carbohydrates, 10 to 20% fat, and 10 to 20% protein.
It’s never a good idea to follow extreme diets like this for a long time. The basis of your eating plan should always center on what your body needs, rather than how you’d like to look.
From our description of anabolism, it’s pretty obvious what your body needs to make the most of this process, i.e. protein, carbs, and a whole lot of complicated acids.
These are the best foods to include in your diet for maximum anabolism:
- Lean meat poultry, and fish
- Low-fat dairy products, like cottage cheese, yogurt, cheese, and milk
- Whole grains
- Fruits
- Starchy vegetables like potatoes, beans, and corn
- Vitamin-rich vegetables like broccoli, spinach, mushrooms, and salad greens
- Seed and nuts
- Beans and legumes
- Healthy oils like olive and avocado oil
Avoid alcohol, added sugars, and deep-fried foods. These can cause inflammation and disease.
Pay attention to complete proteins. These foods contain all nine essential amino acids:
- Beef
- Poultry
- Fish
- Eggs
- Dairy
- Soy
- Quinoa
- Buckwheat
Incomplete proteins, like nuts, seeds, some grains, and beans do contain some amino acids, so you should include them in your diet, too.
Training for Anabolism
Compound weight training is great for boosting anabolism as it uses multiple joints and muscles at once. It activates the central nervous system better than single-joint exercises and recruits more muscle fibers in the process.
Presses, deadlifts, squats, and pull-ups stimulate anabolism, leading to greater protein synthesis. This type of resistance training helps increase muscle strength and size.
Studies show that resistance training can also boost your health and reduce the incidence of heart and kidney disease, as well as cancer.
Intense workouts with short rest periods and heavy weights increase muscle-building hormones and reduce catabolic hormone production.
Supplementing Your Diet for Muscle Growth
Protein, vitamin, and mineral supplements are an obvious choice to enhance our diet during workouts, but most bodybuilders want more than these over-the-counter products can offer.
These are the most effective supplements for maximizing muscle gains:
Creatine
This is one of the most widely-tested and most often-used supplements of all and has no harmful side effects. It occurs naturally in muscle cells and helps produce the energy needed for high-intensity exercise and heavy lifting.
As far as chemistry goes, creatine is similar to amino acids, and your body can produce creatine in the liver and kidneys, using glycine and arginine. Red meat and seafood contain high levels of readily available creatine, too.
When you’re exerting yourself beyond the norm, it’s difficult to ingest enough creatine for your needs, so you can supplement your diet with a powdered creatine supplement.
For extremists, there are two other ways to boost your anabolic system, and they both use the power of hormones to achieve this. These are:
Anabolic Steroids
Anabolic steroids refer to synthetic substances that mimic the actions of the male muscle-building sex hormones, like testosterone.
They’re powerful agents of protein synthesis and can lead to rapid muscle growth. They are also prescribed by doctors to treat conditions like delayed puberty, wasting disorders, and osteoporosis.
Apart from these medical applications, steroids are illegal across the globe due to their many negative side effects. These include:
- Acne and cysts
- Aggression
- Erectile dysfunction
- Enlarged prostate
- Male characteristics in women
- Liver disease and cancer
- Heart problems, including heart attack
Prolonged use of steroids can cause the body to stop producing testosterone in the testes. This leads to these organs shrinking and can also cause female characteristics, like breast growth, to occur in men.
Although many steroid users try to control these side effects with other drugs, they’re often irreversible.
Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators (SARMs)
Pharmaceutical companies developed SARMs as a safer alternative to steroids. They’re intended for use by people suffering from age- and disease-related muscle loss.
There is a lot of ongoing research surrounding SARMs, but they aren’t FDA-approved yet. Although most of the research has revealed encouraging results, the long-term effects of using SARMs are as yet unknown.
Some known side effects of using SARMs include nausea, fatigue, headache, and back pain.
SARMs bind to androgen receptors and can be full or partial agonists, or antagonists in the anabolic system. Antagonists
Although it’s illegal to buy SARMs for anything other than research and in any form other than a liquid, bodybuilders take SARMs in powder, liquid, and capsule form.
The most widely used of these substances are the ones considered the best SARMs for boosting anabolic processes, namely:
- Ostarine
- Ligandrol
- Testolone
- Cardarine
- Ibutamoren
Ostarine causes an increase in alanine transaminase (ALT) and reduces high-density lipoproteins (HDL). It lowers insulin and blood glucose and increases insulin resistance.
Ligandrol is similar to anabolic steroids in that it has a selective androgen-binding ability. It promotes the growth of skeletal muscle tissue for increased strength.
Testolone increases red blood cell production and blood supply to muscle tissue.
Strictly speaking, Cardarine isn’t a SARM, it’s a PPAR receptor agonist. That means it burns body fat without impacting muscle density.
Ibutamoren promotes the secretion of GH (growth hormone) and increases IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor 1).
It does this by binding with the ghrelin receptors. In this way, it fools the body into reacting to it as it does to the ghrelin hormone, which increases GH levels.
There are dozens of other SARMs available, but these are by far the most widely tested and widely used, despite legal restrictions. Ligandrol has undergone several human tests already.
Get the Most Out of Your Gym Membership
These tips to help you boost the anabolic process are essential for serious bodybuilders as well as gym enthusiasts who want to maximize their workouts.
After all, there’s nothing more disheartening than working out for hours every week without seeing results. If you’re unsure where to start, hire a gym instructor to help you maximize your diet, exercise, and supplements for the best results.
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