As a Masters Athlete trying my best in Track and Field aiming for the championships I’m putting my body through hell daily. And I always looking for ways I can help my body handles the stresses, and so…. Supplementation with 10 grams of glycine per day makes your joints stronger.
I have discussed Glycine before HERE
All Athletes including masters can protect their joints against the usual wear and injury by supplementation with around 10 grams of supplemental glycine per day. This very same regime can accelerate the healing of injured joints too. These expectations were expressed by researchers in an in vitro study that was published in Amino Acids.
Study
The supplement researchers experimented with thinsg called chondrocytes. These are the small internal cells that you find in our cartilage. Chondrocytes produce the strong type-2 collagen, the most important collagen type in all cartilage structures.
Results
When the supplement researchers exposed the cells to numerous amino acids at a concentration that is a large factor of 3 above the concentration that you would find in everyday athletes’s blood, especially glycine stimulated the growth of that elusive type-2 collagen.
In another experiment carried out, these researchers also exposed their chondrocytes to different amounts of amino acids for 15 days. Proline managed to maximally stimulated the production of type-2 collagen at a concentration that can be found in the everyday average athlete. The concentration of lysine that also stimulated collagen production maximally was just above that.
This level of maximal stimulation of the production of collagen made by glycine outperformed the effects of both proline and lysine. However, this required a very large amount that can only be realistically achieved by using supplements of 10 grams of glycine per day. Or higher.
Interpretation
“The important aspect to understanding with these results is the fact that glycine, is the most required amino acid for collagen synthesis, it is highly essential so it must necessarily be added into the diet of athletes as a supplement”, write the researchers.
“In the average 70-kg human being, the glycine deficiency is approx 10 grams daily – probably the highest of all the essential amino acids, according to our previous results.”
Conclusions
“Increasing supplemental glycine levels in the diet could be a viable way of contributing to fight and prevent cases of osteoarthritis to improve our cartilage regeneration by means of enhancing internal collagen synthesis”, write the researchers. “It may be that the deficiencies mentioned above are of course not the only cause, but it is certainly a feasible place to start.”
“To this our results suggest a viable supplemental strategy through increasing the amounts of these amino acids (glycine especially) in the diet.”
“As these deficiencies will obviously positively affect other connective or mechanical tissues, such as bones, tendons, ligaments and skin, we would like to remark that this conclusion might also well be applied in the treatment of […] conditions such as osteoporosis.”
Source:
Amino Acids. 2018 Jul 13. doi: 10.1007/s00726-018-2611-x. [Epub ahead of print].
