I have been working on improving my health. I read about glucose, ATP, oxygen delivery etc. But when I am cross training and pushing myself, what is happening in my muscles? Do you grow more capillaries to deliver more oxygen to clear waste? Lactate forms, and exercising with lactate present improves muscle “tolerance” to it. But again, what is improving? Does your body produce more enzymes?
Edit: I want to differentiate the training I am talking about versus traditional “over loading” weight lifting (muscles get bigger)
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So, I’m not a specialist in physiotherapy, but I do work at an Epigenetics research lab.
I do know that exercise – both aerobic and anaerobic – induces epigenetic changes in pathways associated with energy metabolism and insulin sensitivity, contributing to healthy skeletal muscle.
This occurs through changes in Methylation (a molocule that tweaks your gene expression throughout your life) on DNA and specific RNA.
While your DNA has your body’s blueprint, or recipe book, and RNA copies down the recipes to be enacted, epigenetics determines which recipes are read, the dissemination of those instructions, and can tweak how the instructions are copied down to better suit your survival needs.
At the genetic level, regular exercise allows epigenetic markers to improve current molecular systems, and adjusts the body to *maintain* that better function in the near future, by tweaking gene expression, which then influence the rest of the body’s systems.
These epigenetic changes include reducing the speed of plaque formation in the vascular system, strengthening the heart, reducing overall inflammation, reducing mitochondrial death, regenerating muscle, slowing the development of fat tissue, and other metabolic processes. Exercise allows epigenetic markers to increase the expression of genes that suppress tumors, and reduces the expression of genes that can prompt cells to become tumors.
Given the complexity of existing literature, it’s not possible currently to give specific recommendations about the type, intensity or duration of exercise that would be beneficial for different subsets of the population. (Healthy, diseased (which disease?), trained or novice)
So I can’t say in aerobic or anaerobic would be *better* at doing this for you specifically, only that both DO this.
Early childhood development, even as far back as ‘in the womb’ can change how receptive or resistant an individual is to certain physiological changes, even at an epigenetic level. So the exercise that works very well for you won’t necessarily work for your neighbor to the same extent or effect.
Some people are epigenetically predisposed to lose weight very easily through fasting, while some are very resistant to it.
Some people build muscle very easily when exercising, while other people greatly struggle to gain muscle tissue.
While fitness bros *really* love to simplify things to ‘Calories in, Calories out’, the reality is far more complex.
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