Nutritional interventions to promote post-exercise muscle protein synthesis.

Resistance exercise is a powerful stimulus to augment muscle protein anabolism, as it can improve the balance between muscle protein synthesis and breakdown. However, the intake of food during post-exercise recovery is necessary for hypertrophy to occur. Therefore, athletes need to ingest protein following exercise to attain a positive protein balance and maximise their skeletal muscle adaptive response. The interaction between exercise and nutrition is not only important for athletes, but is also of important clinical relevance in the elderly. Exercise interventions combined with specific nutritional modulation provide an effective strategy to counteract or reduce the loss of skeletal muscle mass with aging.