Maintaining a positive nitrogen balance is essential for your body to synthesize proteins. This process enables your muscles to recover quickly and rebuild more efficiently, thereby maximizing performance, strength, and power. However, while you can simply consume proteins to maintain or increase your nitrogen levels, there are a few factors that can throw your nitrogen balance into a negative state without you even being aware of it.

Positive Nitrogen Balance: This is the anabolic state for muscle growth. It is when your nitrogen intake is higher than your nitrogen elimination. The greater the nitrogen balance, the faster the recovery.

Negative Nitrogen Balance: This is where nitrogen loss is greater than the balance. Muscles will have a difficult time repairing, rebuilding, and recovering.

So, now that you know the difference between the two, it is essential to know what is destroying and eliminating nitrogen from your body.

1. Emotional Stress

Stress causes the release of adrenaline, norepinephrine, cortisol, and epinephrine. These hormones are catabolic and create a negative nitrogen balance. Therefore, it is detrimental when it happens regularly.

2. Poor Nutrition

Firstly, not consuming enough protein can lead to a negative nitrogen balance. The Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) is the balance point of 0.08 grams per kilogram of body weight daily. Therefore, if you want to build muscle, you must consume between 0.08-1.5g of protein per kilogram of body weight to maintain or increase nitrogen levels.

However, consuming poor-quality proteins that lack amino acids, cold-cut meats, hydrogenated fats in meats, etc., produces a negative balance. Therefore, to create an anabolic state, it is essential to have the correct proportions of protein, amino acids, and hormones.

3. Glycogen Stores Need to Be Normalized

After training, protein synthesis will be high but work best and more rapidly when glycogen levels are being stored. Glycogen is a critical component of recovery and for protein synthesis to occur. Therefore, to ensure optimal functioning, it is important to consume simple carbohydrates such as fruits or a drink to normalize glucose levels quickly post-competition or training. When glucose levels are normalized, glycogen can begin to be stored, which in turn increases nitrogen levels. Furthermore, simple sugars stimulate the release of insulin. Insulin is an anabolic hormone.

Conversely, depleted or low glycogen levels create a low nitrogen environment that inhibits protein synthesis. Consequently, protein synthesis cannot be fully activated until glycogen stores are replenished, thus promoting a positive nitrogen balance. Completely restoring glycogen post-competition and training takes about 90 minutes to two hours.

4. Overtraining/ Lack of Rest and Recovery

Training breaks down your muscles and activates protein synthesis. However, excessive training can deplete nitrogen levels, throwing your body into an imbalance that will dampen protein synthesis function. If you train too much, your muscles won’t have the opportunity to rebuild and take advantage of protein.

If you’re experiencing any of these issues, it could be the reason why your muscles aren’t repairing and growing as quickly and effectively as they should. To ensure optimal muscle growth and recovery, obtaining the right balance and consuming high-quality amino acids is essential. The higher the quality of the protein, the more nitrogen it contains.

To ensure you’re getting the best possible protein sources, consider incorporating complete proteins such as eggs, meat, chicken, fish, whey, and milk into your diet.

How to Stay Anabolic and Nitrogen Positive

Anabolic does not equate to steroids; rather, it simply refers to growth in scientific terms. To ensure that your muscle’s nitrogen balance remains in a beneficial state, it is important to strive for a positive nitrogen balance before, during, and after competition and training. This will help to prevent muscle breakdown and keep your body in an advantageous position.

• Before you train or play, to spare and slow down muscle breakdown, drink a shake with 20g of whey protein and 25-30g of carbohydrates 30-45 minutes before training or your game. This will release insulin (an anabolic hormone) and activate protein synthesis.

• Immediately after your training, within 15 minutes, drink the same drink except increase the protein to 30g and the carbohydrates to 80-100g. After training and performance, the body shifts from a catabolic to an anabolic state for 36 hours, where it can fully promote and focus on protein synthesis. But after about 3-5 hours, it drops significantly in half, so you want to ensure you eat your meal within that time frame.

• Before bed, consume a drink containing whey or a slow-time release protein like casein.

• Avoid overtraining. Long training sessions or doing more than you can sustain does more harm than good and increase the catabolic state. Only train again when you feel recovered and rested.

To stay anabolic and in a positive nitrogen balance, eat 4-5 meals every three hours. Convert your kg to body weight and multiply by .08-1.5. Once you have that number, divide it by 4-5 meals. For example, 80kg x 1g protein = 80g each day. 80g/5 meals = 16g per meal.