Did you know? Tid Bits I learned from Physiology Class

As I continue with my personal trainer course, I come across all sorts of interesting things. I am now studying exercise physiology and decided to share few quick facts with you:

Last week we talked about what happens in the body during an aerobic workout. The term aerobic refers to using oxygen. An aerobic workout is one where your body needs oxygen to break down sugar, fat and protein in order to produce energy.

Your body always breaks down sugar before it can break down fat or protein. When you feel hungry during a workout it means that there is no more sugar in your body “to burn.”

When I talk about sugar, I mean carbohydrates, not white sugar that you put in your coffee or use to bake cakes.

If you work out for more than 60-75 minutes your body needs energy to keep going, and as we said before, it breaks down sugar before all else so that is what you must eat. The best source of fast sugar in this case is fruit NOT chocolate. The sugar concentration in chocolate is higher than your body needs, so it will be harder to break down and then your body will have to get ride of the excess. Also, chocolate has on average 35% fat, which is also unnecessary for our purposes. Good sources of sugar are bananas, dates and other fruits.

While your body first goes to sugar to get energy, it actually prefers to burn fat. When you are at rest, 70% of your energy comes from fat and the other 30% from sugar (carbohydrates). Your body burns 9 calories/gram of fat (as opposed to 4 cal/gram that sugar and protein have) and you have a bigger reserve of it in your body. You store fat in fat cells which are spread across your body under your skin in various places depending on if you are a man or woman. You only store sugar in your liver and you do not store extra protein at all. The protein breaks down into sugar, which goes into your blood stream, which then goes to your liver.

Burning Protein:
When your sugar level goes down, a hormone called Cortisol is generated. Cortisol is a hormone steroid, which is made from cholesterol. CholeSTERol is a type of STERoid. These steroids are catabolic, which mean that they break down protein.

I hope you have enjoyed these quick facts from my physiology class. I could have written about my biomechanics class, but somehow explaining how muscles move like levers is not quite as exciting.