Breakthrough Endurance

     You  know exercise can change your body. Through exercise, one can change parameters such as body composition, endurance capacity, maximal strength, efficiency, etc. The basis behind these changes is that the stress of exercise causes adaptations to occur in the body. The rule of specificity tell us these adaptations are specific to the training stimulus (Hickson).  For example, the most effective way to increase a muscle’s maximum strength would be to specifically train that muscle through short-duration, high intensity resistance training, not through prolonged, low resistance repetitive contractions. Conversely, endurance based athletes like marathon runners or long distance cyclists, should train specifically for their endurance events by training over prolonged amounts of time with a lower sustainable resistance or work rate. With this said, how should athletes in events that require a mixture of strength and endurance train? Employing a training regime combining strength and

I'm taking a step away from exercise performance and physiology this week to talk about another love in my life: Food. I often find myself in the grocery store grabbing the most essential of the essentials: Milk, bread, eggs, meat, cereal... For me, it's usually easy to pick the main entrees for the week -- Say... curry, chicken breasts, chili, steak, pasta, etc. The hardest thing is deciding on what sides items to cook, and remembering what supporting ingredients you need. For those times it helps to have a few things stockpiled in your fridge and pantry. That way, if you forgot an ingredient, you might already have it. And if you don't -- maybe you can still throw something together with those stockpiled ingredients. I think my girlfriend Courtney and I do a pretty good job managing our fridge and pantry. What do we keep on hand? Rice - An excellent carbohydrate source, easy to cook, stores well Beans - black, pinto, chickpea, lentils - pair well with rice

All right, now that we've briefly covered the basics of lactate metabolism, let’s move on to training for lactate production, transportation and oxidation. Production, of course, refers to the creation of lactate through glycolysis. And remember, to be able to create lactate, glucose must be present (from blood glucose or cleaved from glycogen) to run glycolysis. So to create lactate, an athlete needs to engage in training that relies on glycolysis for ATP production, in turn creating H+ and lactate. Again, lactate is not the molecule we need to buffer or transport out of the cell. It is the H+ that accompanies lactate that disrupts glycolysis and muscle contraction. H+ must be transported out of the muscle cells by monocarboxylate transporters (MCTs). These are H+-Lactate co-transporters, meaning H+ and lactate must be present before they are both pumped out of the cell together into extracellular space. Then the lactate and H+ may diffuse into the bloodstream. When the