Leucine, also known as L-leucine, is an amino acid that is critical for muscle growth. It’s also one of the most commonly used supplements by bodybuilders and athletes trying to build muscle.
This is because leucine tells your muscle fibers to use the protein you have in your body to grow. Leucine is an anabolic trigger.
What is Leucine?
Leucine is one of the 20 amino acids that are the building blocks of protein. Every single protein is made up of some sort of combination of amino acids. Your body doesn’t produce these on its own, you get them in either supplement form or as a food.
Leucine isn’t just any BCAA though. This supplement is unique because of its ability to stimulate more muscle growth. Without leucine, muscle growth can’t start. The theory behind muscle growth with leucine is that when blood levels have high enough amounts of this amino acid, they flip on a sort of switch that tells your body to start growing.
Leucine Builds Muscle
Leucine ultimately helps increase your muscle mass and your muscle growth. It’s also great for helping people not lose muscle, if you were injured or couldn’t lift for a set period of time.
The recommended amount of leucine to take per day is 17.7 milligrams per pound of your body weight. This is just the recommended dosage, and you can always have more. In fact, you should typically go about 1.5-1.8x over the recommended dosage of supplements like these when you really need to put on some muscle.
Now that you understand the importance of leucine, it’s time to talk about where you get leucine from. Leucine is an amino acid, so it naturally comes from high protein foods. Red meat, seafood and chicken all have this amino acid in their proteins.
If you supplement with whey protein, leucine also comes in a scoop of that. The real question is, are you getting enough? It’s recommended you take BCAA’s or straight leucine to ensure you get enough of it.
You are probably getting enough leucine if you have a high protein diet, but if you want to be sure, the best thing to do is directly supplement with it.
All in all, leucine is critical to help your body build muscle. It’s a critical amino acid because it tells your body to go into anabolic growth mode. The best way to ensure you’re getting enough leucine is to directly supplement with BCAAs or straight leucine.
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