Supertraining

Members may find the below to be of some interest:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/sports/playmagazine/601physed.html?
_r=1&ref=health&oref=slogin

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS
>From the perspective of an athlete, few things top the virtuous 
satisfaction that comes from a hard workout. That 10-mile run, that 
1,500-meter pool sprint, that hour with the free weights. Makes you 
feel great, right? You'll do it again tomorrow, for sure. But then it 
hits — the aftermath.

Within a few hours, your muscles begin sending vicious little 
reminders about your impressive efforts. Delayed-onset muscle 
soreness, as it's called, settles in roughly 12 to 24 hours after an 
intense bout of training, especially if it involved unfamiliar or 
extreme movements. The affected muscles become so tender and strained 
that the process of rising from bed the next morning becomes a 
challenge.

Even if you haven't arrived at this sorry state, repeated hard 
workouts can tax the body in insidious ways. Muscles, over the course 
of an hour or so of serious work, use up most of their stored energy. 
Without remediation, those muscles won't respond as well during your 
next workout. They'll be more prone to injury. You'll be slower. The 
70-year-old from down the street will pass you on the running path.

Completing a hard workout, then, is just the first step. You also 
have to undo all the damage you've just done.

Start with your postworkout meal. The regeneration of your muscles 
begins, improbably as it may seem, with that. "Back in the 
early '90s, most athletes, especially runners and cyclists, were 
preoccupied with carbohydrates," says John Ivy, the chairman of the 
department of kinesiology and health education at the University of 
Texas in Austin and one of the pioneers of research into exercise 
recovery. This was in the heyday of carbo-loading, when athletes were 
convinced that the more pasta and bread they ate before a hard 
workout, the more stored energy they'd have.

But carbo-loading in advance of exercise is not the most efficient 
way to stock muscles with fuel, physiologists now know, thanks in 
large part to research conducted by Ivy. When reviewing studies of 
diabetics, he became intrigued by similarities with his own tests on 
cyclists: for both groups, insulin in the blood was more effective at 
carrying energy into the muscles if those muscles had recently been 
active. "Exercise makes your muscles more responsive to insulin, and 
this insulin, in turn, increases glycogen muscle uptake," he says. In 
other words, exercise prompts your muscles to absorb more fuel — 
glucose, which is stored as glycogen — from the bloodstream. (Carbo-
loading can't take advantage of this insulin response because it 
precedes, rather than follows, a workout.) Your body is actually 
primed by the exercise to help itself replenish lost fuel.

This improved insulin response, however, lasts only for a brief time 
after a workout. "You have a window of about 30 to 45 minutes," Ivy 
says. After that, muscles become resistant to insulin and much less 
able to absorb glucose. Drinking or eating carbohydrates immediately 
after a strenuous workout, at a level of at least one gram per 
kilogram of body weight, is therefore essential to restoring the 
glycogen you've burned. Wait even a few hours and your ability to 
replenish that fuel drops by half.

It's also crucial that you take in some protein. Though it poses 
challenges to strict vegetarians, the latest research shows quite 
definitively that protein spurs even more of an insulin response than 
do exercise and carbohydrates alone. "Protein co-ingestion can 
accelerate muscle glycogen repletion by stimulating endogenous 
insulin release," says Luc van Loon, an associate professor of human 
movement sciences at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and the 
author of several important studies about recovery. Translation: 
coupling protein with carbohydrates prompts your muscles to store 
even more glycogen for use during your next workout.

"I'd advise people to have their recovery drink ready and waiting for 
them before they leave on a run or long bike ride," Ivy says. Ivy 
himself often drinks low-fat chocolate milk, but any food or drink 
that includes both carbohydrates and protein — a recovery drink, a 
smoothie, yogurt — will work.

Then have a real meal within two hours. "You can maintain increased 
insulin levels and accelerated rates of recovery for about four to 
six hours if you continue eating," Ivy says. Of course, you can also 
get by without such diet timing. "But you won't recover as well," Ivy 
continues. "You probably won't be able to work out as hard on a daily 
basis." The old guy who chugs his milk and Hershey's syrup will not 
only pass you — he'll lap you.

Meanwhile, there's the physical damage inside your muscles to 
consider. Skeletal muscle is a unique kind of tissue, made up of 
long, thin fibers composed of several different proteins. These 
proteins interlock like Legos inside fibrous compartments called 
sarcomeres. Sarcomeres can stretch, but only so far.

During certain kinds of movements, some sarcomeres are pulled past 
their tolerance. The proteins inside separate, resulting in micro-
tears throughout your muscle tissue. After a few hours, this leads to 
inflammation, swelling, stiffness and pain. (Eccentric muscle 
contractions, which lengthen muscles, are the main culprit in delayed-
onset muscle soreness. Concentric contractions, in which muscles 
shorten — the upward motion of a biceps curl, for instance — cause 
less damage. That's why running downhill makes you more sore the next 
day than running on flat ground.)

"This soreness is actually a good thing," says Thomas Swensen, a 
professor of exercise and sports science at Ithaca College in Ithaca, 
N.Y., and a leading researcher into exercise recovery. "You want to 
stress the muscles. They will adapt positively." The muscles will 
rebuild themselves, becoming stronger and more pliable. "That's the 
whole point of hard training," he says. "But it's only effective if 
you recover fully."

Which is another reason it's important to up your protein intake 
after a workout; that same protein will also help speed muscle 
repair. "Exercise stimulates muscle protein synthesis and protein 
breakdown," van Loon says. "However, without protein or amino acid 
ingestion, the net balance between protein synthesis and breakdown 
will remain negative" — i.e., your workouts, in the long run, may do 
your muscles more harm than good. But eat enough protein immediately 
after exercising and your muscles will repair themselves fully and 
become stronger.

Other postworkout recovery strategies, including many that athletes 
swear by, have far less scientific backing. Take massage. A 2000 
study of British boxers showed that postworkout massage made the 
athletes only feel as if they were recovering quickly; they did not 
perform any better than those not massaged. Swensen's own 2003 study 
of massage and recovery produced similar results as the British 
research.

These studies, however, like many others that have examined massage 
and exercise, were small and short-term. "It's possible that if you 
followed athletes over the course of several months," Swensen 
says, "you might see some benefits from massage. Those studies 
haven't been done."

Similar ambiguity clouds the use of ibuprofen after exercise. 
Although advertised as an anti-inflammatory, ibuprofen doesn't always 
work as expected. A 2006 study of the drug's use among ultra-
marathoners found that it did not lessen muscle damage or soreness or 
reduce inflammation. And although most users do not experience side 
effects, ibuprofen has been associated with kidney damage and 
gastrointestinal bleeding.

Finally, there are ice and heat. Many elite athletes swear by a limb-
numbing ice bath, and others prefer a soak in a hot tub — although 
little scientific evidence supports either remedy. Ice will 
effectively block the swelling associated with a serious injury, such 
as a sprain, but has not been proven to speed the healing of muscle 
tissue stressed by a workout. In a study published last year in the 
British Journal of Sports Medicine, people treated with ice after 
strenuous exercise later reported more pain upon standing than people 
immersed in tepid water. The study's authors bluntly concluded that 
their research "challenges the wide use of [icing] as a recovery 
strategy by athletes." Similarly, a study published in March in the 
European Journal of Applied Physiology found that, when it came to 
muscle recovery, a hot bath was little better than merely sitting 
quietly for a while.

So where does that leave you, the athlete who has just worked out so 
diligently? Mixing a smoothie or glass of chocolate milk, the one 
recovery strategy that satisfies both your inner physiologist and 
inner child. 

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Jamie Carruthers
Wakefield, UK