What is Glycine?

Did you know that your body contains high concentrations of glycine?  It’s true.  In fact, glycine is needed in order for your body and brain to function properly. 

What is glycine? 

Glycine is a non-essential amino acid that can be found in various areas of the body such as your skin, muscle, and joints.  It plays a vital role in cognitive, muscular, and metabolic functioning. 

Glycine is added to many supplements on the market due to the fact that it helps transport nutrients throughout the body – which is important when trying to add muscle mass to your frame.  

Why should you consider using glycine?

There are a plethora of reasons why glycine is beneficial to helping you achieve your health and fitness goals.  For starters, if you’re reading this, you’re probably interested in building quality lean muscle mass.  If so, glycine can help with muscle growth. 

When supplementing with glycine, you help boost overall muscle recovery as well as helping to retain your lean muscle mass as well as reduce inflammation that can occur in the body. 

Glycine also has the ability to improve your energy levels naturally throughout the day without the need for stimulants.  Another area that glycine shines when it comes to muscle growth is that is can help with hormone production and regulation which can aid in dropping body fat while increasing lean muscle mass.

Due to the fact that you exercise intensely and put your body through extreme amounts of stress when weight training, your joints can very easily get banged up through overuse and being overstressed.  For that reason, supplementing with glycine should be on your radar. 

Glycine has the ability to improve the health and function of your joints to keep them strong and flexible as well as repair any damages caused to the joint itself.  Healthy joints allow you to perform at a high level while in the gym and when training.

For many of us, not only are we exercising regularly to maintain our health and improve our physique, but we can’t forget about Father Time.  It’s inevitable that we all are aging – some of us faster than others.  But many individuals never knew the power glycine has on helping to slow the aging process. 

Free radicals and oxidative stress can wreak havoc on our body (at the cellular level), yet when you supplement with glycine, it helps form glutathione (an extremely powerful antioxidant) that can then go in search for free radicals and destroy them before they can do harm. 

By minimizing oxidative stress on the body, you are able to reduce free radical damage that can speed up the aging process. The last piece of the equation when we talk about muscle growth is rest and recovery.  If you aren’t getting enough sleep, you are limiting your true muscle building potential.  For that reason, supplementing with glycine can help you relax to improve your overall sleep quality which improves your REM sleep and allow you to get the proper amount of rest that your body demands. 

Remember, your body makes change when you rest, not while you are in the gym.  Proper rest is vital to your muscle building success. While building quality muscle is a priority for many of us, let’s not forget about managing weight and body fat.  Glycine has you covered on that front as well. 

When you supplement with glycine, it increases adiponectin (a protein hormone that aids in fat metabolism as well as managing blood glucose levels) which can help enhance weight loss and fat reduction.  The combination of muscle growth potential and weight management capabilities make glycine one tremendously powerful amino acid to add to your regimen.

Related Article: Amino Acids to the Rescue