In a recent Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research study, investigators wondered how DHA might affect your workout.

Study Design

41 untrained participants took either two grams of DHA every day for 28 days or took a placebo. After the 28 days, they began an exercise and testing protocol that lasted seventeen days. They continued their supplementation for sixteen of those days.

The workout was pretty extreme. The subjects did an eccentric-only curl (just the lowering phase) with 140% of their one-rep-max for six sets of two reps with two minutes of rest in between. This plan was designed to induce a ton of muscle damage, inflammation, and soreness. The participants did this same workout on days one, six, nine, eleven, thirteen, and sixteen.

On several occasions throughout the protocol, the subjects had their blood tested for markers of muscle damage, inflammation, and serum DHA levels. Strength was also tested.

Results

DHA reduced both inflammation and muscle damage, significantly so in the first four days after the first workout. Muscle soreness and strength improvements were not statistically significant. However, we have to be careful when we interpret data like this. If you look at the actual numbers, while the DHA failed to reach statistical significance on some of the studied parameters, there were trends in that direction.

Conclusion

When it comes to full recovery from a brutal eccentric workout, you’ll have a hard time finding dramatic results in any study, even one of moderate size like this one. That’s because no matter what you do, it takes a long time to recover from a hard bout of exercise. It’s just the nature of the beast.

When looking at the trends in this study, we see that DHA outperformed the placebo almost completely across the board on every measured factor. It appears that once the participants had familiarized themselves with the workout, their strength may well have returned sooner by taking the supplement, even if the improvements weren’t statistically significant.

We now know DHA improves post-workout inflammation and muscle damage, and it’s likely to also improve performance in the long term. In fact, these researchers called for long-term study using trained subjects to learn more. Over time, it’s possible that DHA might benefit strength and performance.

References:

1. Frank DiLorenzo, et. al., “DOCOSAHEXAENOIC ACID AFFECTS MARKERS OF INFLAMMATION AND MUSCLE DAMAGE AFTER ECCENTRIC EXERCISE,” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, DOI: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000000617

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We all know that excess fat is a risk factor for disease. Some of us might also know that an imbalance in your polyunsaturated fats is a risk factor for those same diseases. Polyunsaturated fats are a kind of fat considered to be healthy, and are in fact necessary for human health. But having a low omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, two types of polyunsaturated fat, has been linked to cardiovascular disease, much like obesity. However, no one has examined the link between this polyunsaturated fat balance and obesity until now.

Researchers writing for Nutrition and Metabolism recently sought to find out if there was a link. And find a link they did, specifically in one type of fat called eicosapentaenoic acid, better known as EPA. Having low EPA relative to your omega-6s was correlated to excess fat.

Now keep in mind that the people tested were people already sick with a variety of diseases, including diabetes and hypertension. Although researchers considered this, I’d still be interested to know if the discovered link holds true in an otherwise healthy population. It seems that omega-3s have many health benefits, not the least of which is staying lean. One thing researchers were able to study because of this scenario, though, was the increasing likelihood of patients having a low EPA to omega-6 ratio also having metabolic diseases and a history of heart disease.

One consideration that arises from this study is how to correct the imbalance. We might think that we should just eat more omega-3s and that’s that. In fact, the researchers suggest as much. The problem is, that might not always work. Earlier this week, I wrote about omega-3s being good for pregnancy, but in that study a higher dietary intake might not have increased the blood levels of the participants at all. In that study researchers focused on docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), another omega-3, and they found no correlations between a low DHA to omega-6 ratio and obesity. That could be because DHA isn’t reliably maintained in the blood from dietary intake, and both study designs were inadequate to determine effects on health.

For years now, we’ve known the importance of the omega-3s and having a balanced profile of polyunsaturated fats in our diet. We now know these may also be difficult to study by certain designs, but that having imbalanced polyunsaturated fats is bad news no matter how you poke and prod the results. Make sure you’re getting plenty of low-mercury fish in your diet, or otherwise supplementing with fish oils. When supplementing with fish oils, use liquid, as we have good reason to believe that caps simply do not have an adequate amount of oil.

References:

1. Kana Inoue, et.al., “Low serum eicosapentaenoic acid / arachidonic acid ratio in male subjects with visceral obesity,” Nutrition & Metabolism 2013, 10:25

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