We’ve come a long way in our technical understanding of nutrition. While protein has been popular since we learned to throw a hunk of meat over a fire, in the last few decades we’ve also learned a lot about how the individual amino acids that constitute protein affect our body. Now, if it fits our goals, we can get those amino acids outside of a complete protein. For athletes, two popular types of amino acids are glutamine and the branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs), a trio of biochemically related amino acids. Both the BCAAs and glutamine have been hypothesized to improve exercise performance and recovery, and have been studied to that effect. In this article, we’ll look at what the science tells us about these amino acids and what it means supplementation-wise. Glutamine—Non-Essential, or Potentially Conditionally Essential? Officially, glutamine is a non-essential amino acid, which means our body can produce it