Skip to main content

Energy systems explained

So training in energy systems is quite an abstract concept. Most trainers are familiar with the aerobic, anaerobic lactic and alactic systems. But what links the systems and how do they work together? Are they always active at the same time or does your body pick and choose? And why is that if you walk your 3-4 flights of stairs everyday, you still feel out of breath when you reach your appartment?

So a very important concept in explaining your energy systems is the use and recycling of ATP. ATP stands for Adenosine triphosphate. Tri being important pat in the name.
Now when our cells want to create energy they do that by splitting of one phosphate group, leaving you with ADP, Adenosine DIphosphate. This leaves is with a problem because our Adenosine can't infinitely give away phosphate to create energy. So how does the body solve for this?

The body has multiple methods of recycling ADP back to ATP. Let's explore this.

So when your body needs glucose it attaches one of the phosphate groups to a glucose (a carbohydrate) molecule. This ensures that the glucose doesn't escape the cell. The first step is to convert the glucose in to pyruvate. As soon as this happens your body has two options.
Convert the pyruvate in to lactate or convert it into Acetyl-CoA.

The aerobic system.
Your body uses Acetyl-CoA to start the Kreb's cycle. In the Kreb's cycle through a number of chemical reactions NADH and FAD is produced. These molecules are used to go in to the Electron Transport Chain (ETC). For every NADH and FAD a number of ADP gets converted into ATP in the ETC. So you can view the NADH and FAD as the molecules that drive the recycling of the ADP to ATP.

The Anaerobic lactic system.
The anaerobic lactic system is when the body needs a vast conversion of ATP to ADP. It does this by converting Pyruvate to lactate. What this does is create NADH, and also produces a lot of carbon dioxide. This increase of carbon dioxide production could be the cause of the burn you feel in the muscles during exercise.

So what happened to the Alactic Anaerobic system?
Well this system you can view as all the ATP that is readily available in the (muscle) cell. Every time ATP is used it get's replenished through either the anaerobic lactic system and the aerobic system.
Now why have two different pathways?
The answer is basically quick and dirty. The anaerobic lactic system is

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Active and passive insufficiency and why it matters

Make a fist and squeeze your hand as hard as you can. Good! Now flex your wrist towards the palm side of your hand and try again. Now you probably failed to apply nearly as much force as in your first try. Why is that? In this article we'll explore the definition of passive and active insufficiencies of muscles. We're going to find out how muscles contract optimally, why regular incline bench press barely works the upper chest, how to target the individual heads of the bicep and how this all ties in to further optimise your exercise selection. Hope you enjoy! How do muscle's contract? To create an understanding of how muscle contractions become insufficient we need to know how they become sufficient first. A sufficient muscle contraction is a contraction where the myosin and actin filaments can comfortably slide over each other. This means that there is an optimal amount of distance the actin filaments can travel to facilitate an optimal contraction. On the opposite...
Post a Comment
Read more

The nervous system and training part 1: the Neuron

The nervous system plays a role in weight training at multiple levels. It influences your state of being and how your whole body functions. The fight or flight and rest and digest mode. Today however we're diving in to a more cellular level of the nervous system the Neuron itself. We'll try to answer questions like, why does slapping your muscles before a set help increase strength? Why do 10-15 rep sets require 45-90 seconds of rest and why does a heave 1-5 rep set require up to 300 seconds? And how do neurological adaptations increase strength? Now the basic function of a neuron is to transport electric signals to either a neighbouring neuron and/or target cell. The target cell usually defines the function of the electric signaling. For instance when a motor neuron signals a muscle to contract, its axons will end up on a muscle fibre (the target) and result in muscle contraction. Thus giving us the function of a motor neuron. Neurons can also to this for the endocrine sys...
Post a Comment
Read more