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2003/12/05, 08:54 AM
This is a section taken from www.hussman.org
I thought some of you cardio junkies might like it hehehe.
"OK. First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy is neither created nor destroyed, only converted from one form to another. Second Law of Thermodynamics: That conversion is never 100% efficient.
When you do aerobics at a relatively high level of blood glucose, your muscles are fueled directly by their existing glycogen, and by the glucose in the blood supply, which is fine. When you do the aerobics at a lower level of blood glucose (in the morning, or a few hours after your previous meal) the muscles have less of a supply to work with, so as your muscle glycogen gets depleted, two things happen. 1) your body has to replenish the glycogen by converting free fatty acids, which means that the enzymes responsible for "lipolysis" become more active. As Covert Bailey puts it, "you become a better butter burner". And 2) the replenishment of that glycogen has taken a longer path. Food that you previously ate that was first converted to fat (never 100% efficient) then has to be converted back from fat to glycogen (never 100% efficient), and then burned as energy in the muscles (really inefficient, with 60-70% expended as heat). So by doing the aerobics on lower blood glucose (not too low or you'll get dizzy) you condition your fat-burning enzymes and expend a little extra energy on the back-and-forth conversions. That, by the way, is also why you wait about an hour before eating carbohydrates in particular - you want the glycogen replenished indirectly, through lipolysis, rather than directly through intake. There's increasing evidence that leucine intake (no carbs) immediately after intense training can help muscle synthesis. So if you eat anything, go for a protein powder high in "branched chain amino acids".
Also speeds up your metabloism during the day."
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\"He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior.\"
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