According to new research conducted by scientists at a French University, those looking to build pounds of lean muscle mass while working out are going to want to add a significant amount of L-citrulline amino acids to their daily diet (just before they go to sleep) – especially if they are on a low-calorie diet and want to lose weight at the same time as they bulk up.
This new research report has been published by scientists at the Universite Paris Descartes in the most recent issue of research journal Amino Acids.
According to the in-depth report that these researchers have been working on for a number of years, they found that millions of people worldwide spend a lot more time “dieting” than they do following a traditional, typical, or what may be described as “standard” diet.
Those in the fitness, weightlifting, and athletic communities are most likely to bounce around from one diet to the next, looking for an edge and advantage to improve their success and build upon the results they are working hard towards.
At the same time, these researchers discovered that this “permanent dieting” nutritional lifestyle can cripple the body’s ability to not only build lean muscle mass but to maintain lean muscle mass that has already been built as well.
Muscular tissue is very calorie hungry, needs fuel to maintain size – and even more to grow – and traditional low-calorie diets standing diametric opposite to this biological law.
The French research team understood this well, but were looking to discover whether or not specific amino acid “dumps” into the body could protect lean muscle mass as well as help those eating low-calorie diets actually build on the lean muscle mass that they have already cultivated.
The researchers focused on two separate amino acids to begin with – L-citrulline as well as L-leucine – and the discoveries they were able to uncover surprised all of them.
Working first with laboratory rats, the researchers first came up with a baseline to see how much weight would be lost if these rats were only given 60% of the food that they would have eaten if they were allowed to continue eating anything and everything they wanted.
Unsurprisingly, the rate of weight loss here was significant – but a lot of that weight loss came in the form of muscle mass and not just body fat.
Next, the rats were given a daily dosage of 1 g of L-citrulline per kilogram of body weight just before they went to sleep every night. With this supplement that they were able to maintain significantly more muscle mass, especially when compared to the same dosage of L-leucine given to these rats (something that was found to have no statistically significant impact whatsoever).
Most surprising of all this research is that when both L-citrulline and L-leucine were used together there wasn’t a compounding of the benefits that L-citrulline brought to the table, but instead a complete and total washout of those positive benefits by the L-leucine being introduced into this “stack”.
Extrapolating the conclusions made by these French researchers seems to suggest that those serious about maintaining (and even improving) there muscular gains when eating low-calorie diets should supplement regularly with plenty of L-citrulline just before they sleep.
