What is exactly stamina? What happens when it gets trained? Do your lungs get better and more efficient at pumping air?
In: Biology
There’s two critical components:
– Your muscles have batteries that can be both used immediately (glycogen stores). This energy is just “ready to go” immediately if you need to act quickly or do something explosive, but it starts to be very noticeable as you consume these stores. The byproduct of this process can either be converted back into this explosive fuel or it can be directly consumed, but to do so, you have to used the other component…
– Combustion! You use O2 to blow up fuels and convert it to water, CO2 and energy. The more air you can get your body to uptake, the more you can output. But this part is much less stamina, per se. In theory, you can do this part more or less forever.
The two processes can work together to endlessly use and replenish your energy stores to go a bit harder for longer than you could on just could on using O2 alone. But once you cross and unsustainable threshold, you start eating into the energy stores faster than you can rebuild. Soon you start telling your muscles to just go and they just won’t! You have to really “dig deep” to activate even more muscles fibers to make up for the ones that try to work but don’t have enough fuel. Some people can or are willing to push harder than others through this, but eventually we all give out.
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