Are BCAAs worth it?

Let me do you a huge favour:

If you see people selling or promoting BCAAs, I can categorically without doubt 100% tell you hand on heart that they know very little about nutrition.

I don’t care if they’re a top athlete.

Top athletes have little to zero understanding of nutrition (trust me, I’ve worked with plenty).

Top athletes have a natural ability to do what they do, so often don’t comprehend the nuances of training and nutrition because everything to some extent works really well for them.

Branch Chain Amino Acids are just cut down amounts of protein, specifically 3 essential amino acids called L-Leucine, L-Valine and L- Iso Valine.

The thinking behind BCAA’s is to achieve MPS (Muscle Protein Synthesis), which is when your muscles have an uptick in the repair process.

This process is occurring all the time at a low level anyway, but when you consume protein - specifically the main essential amino acid to stimulate MPS, L-Leucine, which is one of 3 amino acids in BCAAs, it’s a bit like turning up a dimmer switch - the muscles begin to repair and continue to do so until they’ve made use of all the available amino acids that have been consumed.

Problem is, there are too few of them in BCAAs to make this uptick in MPS last particularly long.

You can only stimulate MPS maximally about 4 times per day, so what you actually need is to make sure that each MPS spike is taking as long as possible to return back to baseline.

What do you need for this? Not BCAAs, but just about 30g-40g of ordinary protein - whether it’s whey, vegan powders, or any other animal based protein - as long it as has more than 3g of L-Leucine per serving, that will act as the kindling to get MPS started - and all the other amino acids found in “complete proteins” (like animal based proteins, meaning they have all 9 essential amino acids as well as 11 others to make 20 in total - not just 3 that are found in amino acids) will then make that MPS spike last much longer, leading to increased muscle recovery.

End point? Save your money, because it makes zero sense to use BCAAs.