Adding supplements???

Free acid.

I see no reason to add leucine. The reason leucine works is because your body metabolizes it to HMB.

Here's the skinny on how it works.

Our bodies are in a constant state of building and tearing down. Humans are still not fully evolved for a life of abundance. We are set up to be in a constant state of preparation for starvation and thus we resist building any more muscle than we need to, because muscle is "expensive" to maintain, and our bodies are still paranoid that there is no.guarantee that the food will keep coming, so don't build anything you don't absolutely need and go ahead and tear down whatever you can so you aren't stuck maintaining something you can't afford. This is amplified further once we are past reproductive age. We are designed to deteriorate once we've raised our kids because past that point all we do is compete with them for resources.

Leucine is an essential amino acid (we cannot make it ourselves and must get it from our food). It is metabolized in part to HMB. It is relatively uncommon in most (not all) non-animal foods. Thus, the level of HMB in your blood serves as an indicator to your body of the leucine available to you and in turn the quality of protein available to you.

By increasing serum HMB concentrations, your body is being told "high quality protein is consistently available. You can chill out at breaking down protein."

It was discovered in the late 80s that adding leucine to animal feed made the animals grow faster (there's a hilarious movie about it with Matt Damon called "The Informant"). For some bewildering reason it took a while for science to wonder if it did the same thing to humans. It was first thought to be all BCAAs but later found to be primarily due to the leucine.

As it turns out, HMB directly fed to you works better than leucine supplementation.

[quote=vabeachcouple33]I feel pretty strongly about HMB. I have a background in medicinal chemistry and I believe that the evidence for it is strong.[/quote]Interesting. Do you take the Calcium HMB (Ca-HMB) or Free acid HMB (HMB-FA) version. Also curious if you by chance add leucine, as it seems it may boost it's potential effect.

I feel pretty strongly about HMB. I have a background in medicinal chemistry and I believe that the evidence for it is strong.

[quote=mayhem8]Coffee hides the flavor a bit better than the tea, as expected, but I can still tell it's there. Next time I take it I'll try it with the Greek yogurt and berries. I suspect that no matter what I do I will get an aftertaste from this stuff. I may need to split it up over 2 or 3 drinks/food items in the afternoon so it's not as pronounced.

Tomorrow is my full fast day. I will probably try a scoop of this in a large cup of bone broth to break my fast on Thursday. That is supposedly one of the better times to consume it to get the most benefit.[/quote]Late to respond but just in case - We make an egg, sausage, cottage cheese, cheese mixture that we also load in collagen and protein o=powder to. We don't taste the additives in it. The mixture also has savory and spice in it. So I'm suggesting perhaps more substantial and bolder flavors will allow you to add without tasting it.

Weight gain is definitely more of an issue as you get older as it's definitely easier to pack on the pounds. Creatine will cause muscle to hold onto more water. Water is considered "lean mass", but I don't know that I would consider that more intercellular water in the muscle, even though your muscles will weigh more, to be actual muscle.

FWIW - I'm seeing in terms of strength, there are 2 approaches. One is to gain more muscle and the other is to improve the signaling to the muscle by using the muscle more often. This latter approach suggests that you NOT work a muscle to failure. The idea is there is no significant damage to the muscle as there is when lifting heavier weights, so it allows one to work the muscle more often due to less recovery needed and, in theory, helps with more efficiently firing of the muscle (signaling).

There are a bunch of YouTube videos on this topic, if interested.

[quote=john_paul]Supplements in general, and Creatine in particular, shouldn't be taken lightly. (No pun intended) You're working with your physician, that's great. I won't go into my experience with Creatine as a supplement because we're all a bit different from a chemistry standpoint. I will say that after blood work on a regular basis, my physician recommended that I stop taking it. I went from 170 to 150 over two years by being consistent , every day, with exercise and eating sensibly.[/quote]Good advise John.

My experience with Creatine was not a good one. Initially i found it to be a boost to muscle recovery, but the befits sis not outweigh the weight gain. A friend had recommend Creatine and that is how i got into taking it, but soon felt the need to stop.

To your point - I generally never take any supplements and prefer to just be consistent with what I eat, portion control and a consistent workout routine.

Supplements in general, and Creatine in particular, shouldn't be taken lightly. (No pun intended) You're working with your physician, that's great. I won't go into my experience with Creatine as a supplement because we're all a bit different from a chemistry standpoint. I will say that after blood work on a regular basis, my physician recommended that I stop taking it. I went from 170 to 150 over two years by being consistent , every day, with exercise and eating sensibly.

After almost 2 weeks of adding the creatine supplement my weight is about 3 lbs heavier. That was kind of expected. Creatine is supposed to help your muscle hold onto more water. Being on a high protein diet, this is probably a good thing. High protein diets are supposed to be slightly diuretic.

The interesting thing is that if things worked the way I think they did, a DEXA scan would show an increase in lean mass. Apparently lean mass is anything that is not fat as far as I can tell. Another interesting thing is my pants seem looser and I'm on the last hole in my belt. Probably time for a smaller belt soon. I think the ones I have are for 34-36 waist.

I have decided to add 5g of creatine monohydrate to my daily suppliements. Will be interesting to see if I notice any difference. I've been on the fence about creatine for a while now but continue to see good things about it, so figured I'd give it a try.

One thing of interest will be any weight changes. Creatine, as far as I can tell, causes your muscles to hold onto more water, among other things. Anyone else that takes this notice any obvious changes?

Hard to tell if it's just placebo effect or not, but I do feel like I've recovered faster from my minimal workouts since taking the taurine. Where I feel it most is with my chin ups and pull ups. The chins ups in particular stress the muscles, tendons and ligaments in the inner bend of one of both elbows.

I have since added a workout band to assist when doing these exercises. I've gone from the heaviest band to a lighter one, and am almost ready to go to an even lighter one. I can do some amount of them with no band, but I need to develope things so that I don't injure myself when I do. In that respect the taurine seems to be helping a bit.

Interesting concept in resistance training is measuring the amount of work done. For example, in theory it is the same end result of lifting 100 lbs ten times as it is lifting 200 lbs five times. That of course assumes you can lift 200 lbs, but the idea seems to be to push to more weight and do less reps to get the same workout in less time. This is probably fodder for another topic though.

Been working out and experimenting with supplements a better portion of my life. This is my daily
Wake up: Fish Oil,Beet Supplement,2 Maca root supplement (For Libido and Testosterone), Multivitamin eat a banana coffee 45-hour after

Late Morning
L-Arginine, 2 L-Cittrunil,2 Ginseng this mix is good for libido,blood flow (working out and sex) I will repeat this laterif I know I have a play date that night

Train right after that.

I do offer training and nutrition/supplement consultation if anyone is in the NY NJ area I can guarantee real improvements in less then a month

Not sure about the other stuff, but I'm thinking the Tadalafil (Cialis) alone would have me fucking like a porn star since Viagra does that for me now, but I only take the Viagra before I play with others. It's not needed if it's just the Mrs and I.

The gym time (regular workouts) also help. In my case I have a regular set of exercises and stretches that I do, which is good. The bad is that went you have a regimented workout you know exactly what you're capable of, so if things decline even just a little bit, you notice. I've noticed a slight decline, so hoping the taurine offsets that a little for now. Eventually we reach an age where decline is inevitable, but it doesn't mean you can't continue to fight back to maintain.

The thing that I'm seeing now is that it's a myth that you can't keep and even build muscle in your 60', 70's, 80's and beyond. Granted it won't be like when you were in your 20's, but it is still possible. There is also a limit as pushing yourself too hard can supposedly reduce your life span and benefits from exercise. The art is in finding the proper balance as far as I can tell.

So I feel I need to respond here. I have been in and out of the gym since I was 18. 58 now and take Shilajit, Sea Moss, separate bottles (Amazon) Testosterone Optimizer and 5 mg Tadalafil daily. This is a solid stack with many benefits. Try not to eat at least 2 hours before bed - except your wife. Highly recommend lots of sex. And yes the morning, noon and night wood ! Fuck Like a Porn Star

Finally getting around to trying this. Between pills and powder, the powder seems a lot more cost effective. A single serving is 2000 mg and is 4/5ths of a teaspoon. A bag with 500 servings is $23 on Amazon. Will be ordering it today. I continue to hear good things about it and the only bad so far is that if you take too much for too long, it can give you diarrhea.

A doctor commenting about his experience with this on YouTube was taking 10 grams a day and started getting diarrhea after about 90 days and had to back off. This is about 5x the high end of the recommending dose. He said while taking it at that dosage he felt like superman but his patients were noticing a difference at the 2000 mg level, which is what I figured I'd try.

One of the other supplements I'm hearing good things about is taurine, especially as you get older. Anyone else have anything to share about this, good or bad?

Was watching something that indicated that a number of people these days are deficient in magnesium because they drink only filtered water. Some municipal water supplies can be low in magnesium. We have well water, so while we do get magnesium from that, we don't get flouride. Green leafy vegetables, nuts and seeds (like pumpkin) are high in magnesium.

I use a flouride mouth wash daily to get flouride, and I'm not drinking it like I would be if we had flouridated water. Flouridated water is generally safe, but prefer not to do that over a lifetime.

The Mrs has been having issues with her neck for a while now and was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease. She finally started doing the collagen powder a couple months ago and told me that her chiropractor said things appear to be doing much better with her neck now. She also did have a cortisone shot.

Anyway, she told her chiropractor that she started taking collagen and he said, "See. I told you it would likely help". This was the first that I was hearing her chiropractor also recommended a collagen supplement. Sounds like she's sold on it now.

I do realize this is anecdotal but hoping it really doesn't help longer term.

So, even though the newer stuff I got appears to be a finer powder than the last stuff, it doesn't seem to dissolve quite as well. That is more than made up for by the fact the new stuff is truely tasteless and odorless. The first stuff really did make it seem like I was consuming powdered horse hooves.

The dissolving thing is less of an issue in a hot drink vs a cold one, and because a blender is involved, it wouldn't be an issue if I was into smoothies, but I'm not.

LOTS of GREAT information in here.. Thank you all soo much...

Someone - "If I take more than that I tend to get clogged up..."

I guess it affects people differently. Probably TMI, but I have had the opposite problem with even the regular dose, but then I am usually drinking it with ice coffee. Coffee tends to get things moving for me by itself.

I do take advantage of the couple of bucks savings by doing it as an Amazon subscription.

Someone - I noticed that the Neocell super collagen has a 10 g and 20 g of collagen/day product on Amazon (red label vs blue label). The 20 g product also uses a 2 scoop dose as does the 10 g. The 20 g product is only $3 more. If you are doing 2 scoops of the 10 g product at the same time, you could get 10 g of collagen in a single scoop of the 20 g product for around 1/2 the price. The one container of the 20 g product would last for 60 days instead of 30.

If you wanted to do it twice I day, I'm not seeing a downside of using 1/2 a scoop of the 20 g product. Perhaps I'm missing something, but it seems like the 20 g product is a much better deal to get the same daily dose of collagen from the same company/product.

The latest stuff I'm trying is made by Microingredients. The last stuff I tried was by Zen Principle, but that only had the Type 1 & 3 collagen.

From what I've seen/read, type 2 collagen is primarily what you want for helping with joint/cartilage maintenance. I was getting that somewhat regularly before the supplement because the Mrs either buys or makes a rotisierre chicken about once a week and always boils down the carcass to make bone broth. She either uses that broth in a soup or a dish or I drank it directly. Apparently that is a good source of type 2 collagen.

My newer collagen supplement has it as well. It made no sense not to switch to a supplement that had this because there is no real difference in the price.

There isn't a lot about how much you should take. Different products have doses that range in the mg's/day but it seems 10-11g is about the norm. I've seen some suggest you may want to up that as you age with some saying as high as 30 or even 40g's/day. For now, I'll stick to the regular dose and see what it does.

I haven't tried it yet, but I did get the new collagen powder today and I do not get that "ground horse hoof" smell from it like I did with the other stuff. Timing was perfect because I just finished the last of the old stuff today.

Like the last stuff, a daily dose is 2 scoops, but the scoop is slightly smaller for the new stuff and hoping it disolves better. When using the old stuff in my ice coffee, I had to warm a small amount of coffee up to get it to mix well.

I'm nearing the end of my first order of collagen and picked a different one to try when it runs out. The first had only type 1 and 3 and the one I chose to replace it with has type 1,2,3,5 and 10.

Hard to say if it's making any real difference, but in the realm of supplements it is fairly inexepensive at ~$15/mth.