What Are You Training For? Introduction to Our New Series – the Physiology of Exercise

Many of you immediately respond to the question by identifying a particular race, event, or series of events you are training for; while others may answer they train to improve their performance in another sport such as basketball or hockey.  However, a great number of you dismiss the idea of “training.”  You may think, “I’m not an athlete, I just spin to exercise.”  If that is your response, I want you to take a moment to reconsider.

What is the difference between training and “just” exercising? And could slight shift in focus make all the difference?  

When we come to RydeOn! to exercise, our goal is to elevate our heart rate, burn some calories and more than likely – sweat!  When we come to RydeOn! to train, our goals are more well defined. We are looking for improvement in our performance that will translate to activities outside of indoor cycling. 

I have never considered myself to be an athlete, yet I realize I am training and the event is LIFE! Corny? Maybe . . . but so true. My training as an indoor cyclist has made me strong and has enabled me to better meet the mental and physical challenges of everyday life.

Christina and I both strongly believe that the best foundations are built on solid information and good understanding. So we are bringing you a series of articles that will explore what is happening beyond the sweat when we Ryde.

Enjoy – Learn – Train for Life

What happens to your body when you do indoor cycling or other forms of exercise? What kinds of exercise are best for people who just want to get into better shape as opposed people who want to train for long-distance events – or people who are training for events based on all-out sprinting?

Is lactic acid really the cause of post-exercise muscle burn, like most of us have been taught?

For some people it's enough to walk, run, do indoor cycling classes, etc. But whether you want to just “do it” or are a person who loves knowing the nuts and bolts (so to speak) of how the human body works, at least some knowledge about the physiology of exercise will help you maximize the benefits you get from working out.

For that reason, and to make the process both interesting and painless, we're introducing a new series on the Physiology of Exercise beginning with this post. To begin, we'll be bringing you a short series of posts covering 101-level topics like the body's energy systems, the different types of calories burned during exercise, and the different ways our bodies work during long-distance events vs. sprints. From there we'll move on to posts about lactate threshold training and High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). And from there, we'll continue to inform you about topics ranging from exercise and changes in brain chemistry to the latest news on nutrition and exercise physiology.

Are you ready to start? Great! The first topic we're going to cover is our bodies' three energy-creating systems – the aerobic system, ATP-CP, and the lactate system. Don't let the technical terms make you uncomfortable; these are easy concepts for anyone who survived high school biology.

Our muscles need energy to do their work – whether that work is an indoor cycling class or writing on a computer. The energy our muscles use is called adenosine tri-phosphate (ATP); our bodies generate this energy or ATP from the foods we eat, particularly carbs and fats (our systems use protein to a much lesser extent). When we exercise – again, anything from an indoor cycling class to writing on a keyboard – our bodies generate ATP  using three separate systems. One of those systems is an aerobic (with oxygen) system and the other two are anaerobic (without oxygen) systems.

If you remember your RydeOn! instructor talking about staying in an aerobic zone during your indoor cycling class, this is what she or he is talking about.

We'll talk more specifically about these systems and exactly what they do in the next post in this series. For now the important things to note are that our bodies' aerobic system is the system we train for and use during longer-term exercise like an hour-long indoor cycling class, a longer run, or just to give ourselves more energy to use during the day. The two anaerobic systems, on the other hand, are used to “power up” our bodies – the first gives the aerobic system a few seconds to kick in, while the second is used when we're doing full-out sprinting whether while cycling, running, or during other intense exercise.

And one of them, the lactic system, is most definitely not the cause of your post-exercise muscle aches; in fact, lactic acid builds up to help alleviate the burn!

Ready to learn more? Wonderful! Stay tuned for our next post.

Source: Indoor Cycling Association,April 3, 2012: “A physiology primer for intervals: what you need to know to design effective interval classes” by Jennifer Sage. 

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