Weight training - like fasting - promotes autophagy?

This post is more about joining up a couple of ideas - just me thinking out loud. The following abstract was pointed to to me over the weekend. It looks at some of the effects of resistance training and the role of various amino acids in controlling protein synthesis.

Amino acids taken immediately before or immediately after exercise increase the post-exercise rate of protein synthesis. Therefore a protein that controls protein degradation and amino acid-sensitivity would be a potential candidate for controlling the activation of protein synthesis following resistance exercise.

Ok, now what is interesting is that they then point out a particular protein:

One such candidate is the class III PI3K (phosphoinositide 3-kinase) Vps34 (vacuolar protein sorting mutant 34). Vps34 controls both autophagy and amino acid signalling to mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin) and its downstream target p70 S6K1 (S6 kinase 1).

The abstract goes on:

We have identified a significant increase in mVps34 (mammalian Vps34) activity 3 h after resistance exercise, continuing for at least 6 h,

Now it is hard to be clear about what else the full paper is saying because I can only get the abstract, but it seems to say that resistance training promotes autophagy.

Autophagy is a fairly recent discovery in immunology that I have written about before in connection with fasting. Fasting turns on autophagy and now it seems that - potentially - so does resistance training.

Autophagy as I said before:

........... (literally self-eating) a process in which your cells consume and recycle damaged internal material.

The process seems to be triggered when the energy content of the cell declines so that the cell literally consumes itself. It goes after the damaged materials first, so there is a strong link between repair of damaged tissues and fasting or low energy state in the cell. So, it you are over-fed you down regulate cellular repair. You want to go hungy episodically to turn on cellular autophagy and repair those damaged tissues.

Anyway, just some ideas......