Green Tea for Muscle Protection? GTE Increases Satellite Cell Proliferation & Differentiation, Slows Disuse-Related Atrophy, Does not Promote Hypertrophy in Aged Rodents

Green tea as a magical muscle preservative for injured athletes?

"GTE increased satellite cell proliferation and differentiation, decreased oxidative stress and the abundance of Bax, a proapoptotic protein" (Alway. 2014) - that's the initially exciting result of a recent study from the West Virginia University School of Medicine and Abbott Laboratories. What is not exactly as exciting, though, is how the sentence continues, i.e. "yet this did not further improve muscle recovery in reloaded muscles" (Alway. 2014).

Sounds contradictory, right? Well, before we get deeper into the discussion of the results, let's briefly recap how Alway et al. arrived at these insights, i.e. how exactly the experiment looked like and which experimental evidence it generated.

The scientists from the West Virginia University School of Medicine tested the hypothesis that green tea extract (GTE) would improve muscle recovery after reloading following disuse. In men and women "muscle disuse" would equal lying around in bed or on the sofa all day. In rodents it was simulated by an initial 14-day period of hindlimb suspension (HLS) and a subsequent period of reloading (recovery).

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The subjects the researchers use were Fischer 344 Brown Norway rats who were randomly assigned to receive either 14 days of hindlimb suspension (HLS) or 14 days of HLS, followed by normal ambulatory function for 14 days (recovery). Additional animals served as cage controls.

Figure 1: Muscle wet weight. Muscle wet weight was obtained in hindlimb muscles of cage control animals, after 14 days of hindlimb suspension group (HLS), or after 14 days of hindlimb suspension followed by 14 days of reloading (Recovery). And Ex vivo isometric force. A. Maximal tetanic force obtained at a frequency of 100Hz, or B. Peak twitch force (PT) of the plantaris muscle was measured in cage control rats, after 14 days of hindlimb suspension (HLS) or after 14 days of hindlimb suspension followed by 14 days of reloading (Recovery | Alway. 2014).

Both active treatment groups were given green tea extracts at a dosage of 50 mg/kg body weight - that's roughly 600-750mg of green tea extract per day. The control group received pure water, instead.
As you can see in Figure 1, the animals that received the green tea supplement exhibited a significantly attenuated loss of hindlimb plantaris muscle mass and tetanic force during.

In addition, compared to the vehicle treatment, GTE attenuated muscle fiber cross sectional area loss in both plantaris (-39.9% vs. -23.9%, p<0.05) and soleus (-37.2% vs. -17.6%) after HLS. This green tea-induced difference was not transient but it was maintained over the reloading period.

Increased muscle retention = increased fat loss!?

That's particularly interesting in view of the fact that the changes in body weight did not differ between the green tea and water group (see Figure 2).

Figure 3: Relative reductions in total body body weight in the two groups (Alway. 2014)

Why? Well it signifies that there is a significantly reduced negative impact on the body composition, with green tea. That does not change, though, that "GTE failed to further improve recovery of muscle function or mass as compared to vehicle treatment" (Alway. 2014)

This begs the question - would you recommend GTE? As a muscle preserver during periods, where you cannot workout, yes. The way it conserved the muscle mass in the study at hand should help help you to get back to the grind after a debilitating exercise, even if the recovery in the study at hand seemed to be identical in both groups. The green tea induced increase in satellite cell proliferation and differentiation, as well as the decreased oxidative stress and the abundance of the catabolic protien Bax, on the other hand, is probably not going to have a significant effect as long as you are still able to move, because exercise alone will induce more pronounced benefits in these domains.

Figure 4: Changes in body composition in a study w/ obese subjects comparing GTE to resistance training and a combination of both green tea extract and resistance training on body comp. (Cardoso. 2013)

Plus: We should not forget that the effects were observed in old rats and thus in a model of a population group that appears to benefit from antioxidant supplementation more than young(er) people. If you don't belong to the corresponding group of human beings whose muscles are particular prone to oxidative damage and suffer from a reduced ability to adapt to exercise induced stress, the effects remain questionable. In obese individuals green tea has yet been shown to promote the beneficial effects of exercie on body composition (Cardoso. 2013) - the risk that it a low dose of GTE does anything but good, does thus appear to be very small; and that's true for the benefits for athletes, too - at least according to previously reported results | Comment on Facebook!

References:

• Alway et al. "Green tea extract attenuates muscle loss and improves muscle function during disuse, but fails to improve muscle recovery following unloading in aged rats." Journal of Applied Physiology (2014). Ahead of print.
• Cardoso, Gabrielle Aparecida, et al. "The effects of green tea consumption and resistance training on body composition and resting metabolic rate in overweight or obese women." Journal of medicinal food 16.2 (2013): 120-127.

Barefoot or Shod? A Question of Faith & Science: Science Says It's Safe and Economic, Practitioners Say "It's Making Me Faster & Helped Me Get Rid of Nagging Injuries!"

Minimal or no shoes, trendy, healthy and performance enhancing?

Honestly, I am not even sure if it's a question of faith and science. I think for many people out there it is more a question of faith or science. Now some of you may think: "Well, of course, science says: It's bullocks. Faith says it's 'right' to run barefoot." Right? Wrong!  No, I don't want to tell you what to do. I want to tell you about the scientific evidence in favor of barefoot running. Evidence as it is presented in "Barefoot running survey: Evidence from the field" a recent paper by David Hryvnial, Jay Dicharry and Robert Wilder that's about to be published in one of the upcoming issues of the Journal of Sport and Health Science that's based on data from more than 500 runners (Hryvniak. 2014).

Not everyone will do his HIIT sprints barefoot, I think, but maybe minimally shod?

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Prior studies have found that barefoot running often changes biomechanics compared to shod running with a hypothesized relationship of decreased injuries. The study at hand, which reports the results of a survey of 509 runners and does therefore represent both the "faith" and "science" appears to confirm these findings, as the majority of respondents report benefits and/or no serious harm from transitioning to barefoot or minimal shoe running.

Figure 1: Impact of switching from shod to barefoot-running on performance (Hryvniak. 2014).

As the data in Figure 1 clearly confirms, 67% of the surveyed runners reported noticeable improvements, 19% even say their performance increased significantly.

There is evidence from controlled trials that running barefoot reduces the oxygen cost and thus the running economy (Hanson. 2011)

What does previous research say? Where barefoot and shod populations co-exist, as in Haiti, injury rates of the lower extremity are substantially higher in the shod population (Robbins. 1987). The same often-cited study by Robins & Hanna does also confirm that running-related chronic injuries to bone and connective tissue in the legs are rare in developing countries, where most people are habitually barefooted. Whether these associations are of correlative or causative nature, however, is hard to tell, because controlled trials are rare.

This, in turn, is in contrast to studies on running economy most of which shown that wearing shoes increases the energy cost of running (Burkett. 1985; Hanson. 2011, cf. figure to the left) - in other words, it made the runners run more efficiently.

What's even more intriguing, though, is the injury balance. While 64% of the runners report that they have not had any injury, foot injuries (reported by 20% of the participants) may have become slightly more common.

Figure 2: Barefoot runners don't run barefoot, all the time, but there is hardly a terrain they avoid.

Unlike the grassy fields, which are the most frequented running grounds, city streets and sidewalks are not exactly "safe" places to run are where the study participants run more than 50% of their weekly mileage. Against that background it's also surprising that the number of knee injuries, injuries of the hips, lower back and ankle decreased in spite of the absence of the highly advertised "buffers" professional running shoes are supposed to offer.

Figure 3: Answers to the question " Did you have Achilles or foot pain when you initially began the transition to barefoot" (Hryvniak. 2014)

Bottom line: Just like most of the more recent experimental evidence the quasi-anecdotal data from the 509 runners Hryvniak et al. surveyed for their latest paper suggest: Running barefoot is safe and effective.

And while it took 45% of the study participants some time to get used to the increased achilles tendon stress + foot pain, Hryvniak. et al. say that "those that did primarily experienced foot and ankle injuries indicating the need to progress slowly so that the new areas of loading can adap"t (Hryvniak. 2014). In conjunction with the reduction of previous injuries after starting barefoot running programs, the result of the survey at hand should thus provide an incentive to try and see how you fare without / with minimal shoes, as well - I mean, what do you have to lose?

References:

• Burkett, L. N., WENDY M. Kohrt, and R. I. C. H. A. R. D. Buchbinder. "Effects of shoes and foot orthotics on VO2 and selected frontal plane knee kinematics." Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 17.1 (1985): 158-163. 
• Hryvniak, David, Jay Dicharry, and Robert Wilder. "Barefoot running survey: Evidence from the field." Journal of Sport and Health Science (2014).
• Robbins, Steven E., and Adel M. Hanna. "Running-related injury prevention through barefoot adaptations." Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 19.2 (1987): 148-156.