

However, hydrogen ions your body produces while using carbs for energy are the reason for the burn, not “lactic acid” as you may have heard.Įventually, the hydrogen ion buildup makes your muscles acidic, which limits the energy your glycolytic-lactate system can contribute.Īfter you exhaust your glycolytic-lactate system, your body requires 6-8 minutes of rest to make a full recovery.

It’s also associated with “the burn” you probably know from prolonged, intense exercise (and either love or hate).

One reason the standard keto diet doesn’t work well for athletes is because the lack of carbs blunts the effectiveness of the glycolytic-lactate system and reduces exercise performance.Īnd when your muscles use glucose for energy, they create lactate in your bloodstream, which your muscles can also use as fuel, and which your liver recycles back into glucose to reuse as fuel. The adenosine triphosphate-creatine phosphate energy system (ATP-CP for short) fuels short, powerful bursts of movement lasting 10 seconds or less.Įssentially, ATP-CP generates the majority of the energy your body uses for high-intensity but short-lived activities - like sprinting 100 meters or a max-effort set in the gym.Īnd even as your muscles break down ATP during all-out efforts, a related energy molecule called phosphocreatine also helps create more high-energy ATP.
REST TIME FOR MUSCULAR ENDURANCE PLUS
Keep reading to learn how each energy system relates to various fitness qualities, plus other helpful insights! The ATP-CP System Your energy systems are metabolic processes that fuel your cells with the energy needed to lift weights or perform other activities.Īnd the type of activity, duration, and intensity all help to determine which energy systems your body uses during exercise.Īdditionally, each of the 3 primary energy systems requires a specific amount of time to recover, which is one reason why rest periods are an essential consideration for your fitness results. Your Body’s Energy Systems and What They Do

This allows the body to restore phosphagen levels in the muscle. Research shows that when training for strength and power the optimal rest period is between 3 and 5 minutes. Well, you made up your mind that your goal is to become strong and powerful, so what’s next? How do we adjust rest periods in order to achieve these goals? Once you have figured out your goal you can begin to adjust variables to suit your needs. What are your goals? Do you want to be stronger and more powerful? Do you want to increase the size of your muscles? Or are you more concerned with the endurance of your muscles? The first thing you have to do when creating a program is to decide what you want to accomplish. Successful manipulation of rest intervals can mean the difference between achieving your goals or not. The last variable, rest intervals, is one that many athletes and coaches either do not understand or do not think is as important as the others. Exercise selection, sets and reps are written about ad nauseam and are very important variables to understand. The first three variables are pretty well understood by athletes and coaches. The variables we have to work with when making our training program are exercise selection, sets, reps, and rest intervals. The whole idea of periodization is very simply the manipulation of variables in order to achieve certain goals.
