Lactic acid is a joke!

[tikistitch]

For those of you who are still interested (BOTH of you), not sure if you'll be able to clickie the linkie without a NY Times subscription, but it oughta be free to anyone with a university account:

Lactic Acid Is Not Muscles' Foe, It's Fuel

Everyone who has even thought about exercising has heard the warnings about lactic acid. It builds up in your muscles. It is what makes your muscles burn. Its buildup is what makes your muscles tire and give out.

Coaches and personal trainers tell athletes and exercisers that they have to learn to work out at just below their "lactic threshold," that point of diminishing returns when lactic acid starts to accumulate. Some athletes even have blood tests to find their personal lactic thresholds.

But that, it turns out, is all wrong. Lactic acid is actually a fuel, not a caustic waste product. Muscles make it deliberately, producing it from glucose, and they burn it to obtain energy. The reason trained athletes can perform so hard and so long is because their intense training causes their muscles to adapt so they more readily and efficiently absorb lactic acid.

They lied to us! They lied!



They go on to interview George Brooks, a crazy exercise physiologist at Cal. We've been reading some of this dude's papers this week.

A theory was born. Lack of oxygen to muscles leads to lactic acid, leads to fatigue.

Athletes were told that they should spend most of their effort exercising aerobically, using glucose as a fuel. If they tried to spend too much time exercising harder, in the anaerobic zone, they were told, they would pay a price, that lactic acid would accumulate in the muscles, forcing them to stop.

Few scientists questioned this view, Dr. Brooks said. But, he said, he became interested in it in the 1960's, when he was running track at Queens College and his coach told him that his performance was limited by a buildup of lactic acid.

The Eureka! moment....

"I gave rats radioactive lactic acid, and I found that they burned it faster than anything else I could give them," Dr. Brooks said.

It looked as if lactic acid was there for a reason. It was a source of energy.

Here's the best bit: SCIENCE FIGHT!!!

Dr. Brooks said he published the finding in the late 70's. Other researchers challenged him at meetings and in print.

"I had huge fights, I had terrible trouble getting my grants funded, I had my papers rejected," Dr. Brooks recalled. But he soldiered on, conducting more elaborate studies with rats and, years later, moving on to humans. Every time, with every study, his results were consistent with his radical idea.

Heh. Scientists can be awfully bitchy.

It's the mitochondria stupid!

The understanding now is that muscle cells convert glucose or glycogen to lactic acid. The lactic acid is taken up and used as a fuel by mitochondria, the energy factories in muscle cells.

Mitochondria even have a special transporter protein to move the substance into them, Dr. Brooks found. Intense training makes a difference, he said, because it can make double the mitochondrial mass.

The funniest thing, which the article goes on to point out, is that athletes have basically been training the right was anyways, using a combination of pushing endurance and high intensity workouts. Like, the coaches got it right, but the scientists were all scratching their little bald heads.

The realization dawns, however, that if we want to increase Mr. Tikistitch's mitochondrial load, we need to actually start doing "speed work" as well as the long slow runs. Which is not going to be easy, since tiki is, as Howlin' Wolf might say, "built for comfort," she doesn't really do the speed thing. Hrmmmm....

Comments

[twotone]

:-O

THEY LIEEDDDDDD

[spazzygirl19.livejournal.com]

Am I the other interestee? ^_^

Uh ... much of that scientist stuff is making my head spin. Why does it remind of chemistry class at UCLA (which I got a D in)? Also, I thought mitochondria was in *plants*?!? Or is it just too many years since I've taken a biology class. Remember - I ended up graduating as a Liberal Arts major.