The Muscles Research Hub

Muscle is not a fixed asset. It is continuously broken down and rebuilt, and the balance between those two processes determines whether you hold muscle or lose it. In younger adults, a given amount of dietary protein and a given amount of physical load produce a reliable building response. After menopause, that response weakens.

The technical term is anabolic resistance. The same protein meal, the same set of exercises, produces less muscle-building signal than it once did. This is why women often find that what maintained their strength at forty no longer maintains it at sixty, despite nothing obvious having changed.

Muscle power declines faster than muscle mass. Power is the rate at which you can produce force, the quality that catches you when you stumble and gets you out of a low chair. It depends on fast-twitch fibres, which are lost preferentially with age. A woman can retain reasonable muscle size and still lose the reactive strength that keeps her independent.

The response to anabolic resistance is not resignation. It is a higher threshold. More protein per meal, and load heavy enough to demand adaptation.

Why protein requirements rise rather than fall

The intake that prevents deficiency is not the intake that maintains muscle. Public guidelines are set to avoid the former, and they are frequently misread as sufficient for the latter.

Two factors matter beyond the daily total. The first is the per-meal dose. Muscle protein synthesis responds to a threshold quantity of protein in a single sitting, not to the daily sum spread thinly. A woman eating adequate protein overall but concentrating it in one evening meal may spend most of the day below the threshold that triggers building.

The second is leucine, the amino acid that appears to act as the trigger for that response. Protein sources differ substantially in leucine content, so two servings of equal protein weight are not equivalent in the signal they send. Anabolic resistance raises the leucine threshold, which means the source matters more after menopause than before.

Protein without loading is also incomplete. Amino acids supply the raw material. Resistance training supplies the instruction to use it for muscle rather than for fuel. Neither works well alone.

How Silvie evaluates the evidence

We select ingredients by form, not only by name. The form determines how much of a nutrient reaches the tissue that needs it, and two products naming the same compound can differ substantially in what the body absorbs. Where a specific form has been used in the human trials, that is the form we use.

We dose to the levels tested in those published trials rather than to the smallest quantity that permits a claim on the label. A dose below the studied range is not a smaller version of the same effect. Often it is no effect at all.

We prioritise human studies. Mechanistic and animal research is useful for understanding why something might work, but it is not evidence that it does. Where the human evidence is mixed, preliminary or limited to a narrow population, we say so in the article rather than omitting it from the marketing.

We are also clear about what supplementation cannot do. Protein supplies the substrate for muscle. Resistance training supplies the signal. The research is consistent that the two together far outperform either alone, and no formulation substitutes for the training.

You can read how we assess evidence, select ingredient forms and set doses in our approach to research.