Favorite Part of Class

My favorite part of class this term was reading Endure. It was awesome to read a book that was not a typical subject textbook. Learning about all the different obscure sports per chapters along with the most grueling stories of different endurance feats kept the book very interesting and I always wanted to keep reading. I also think it really helped us understand how the things we were learning in class connected to real life. Discussing what makes a sub-2 marathon performer I was like oh, that’s why VO2 and lactate threshold are so important! I honestly may start going to 7-11 before my runs this summer and fuel up on some slushies to see how that effects my work outs.

Psych patient’s new primary prescription

Hi guys,

I chose an article that was published 2 days ago on Science Daily. It summarized a new study that recently came out by Tomasi et. al., called “Positive Patient Response to a Structured Exercise Program Delivered to in-patient Psychiatry.” When it comes to the treatment of psychiatric patients for a wide variety of mental health and mood disorders, including anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, suicidal tendencies and acute psychotic episodes, this new study advocates for exercise, rather than psychotropic medications, as the primary prescription and method of intervention. Findings from the study reveal that physical exercise is so effective at alleviating patient symptoms that it could reduce patient’s time admitted into facilities as well as their reliance of psychotropic medications. It was so effective in fact, that Tomasi believes “it can become as fundamental as pharmacological intervention”. A gym was built exclusively for about 100 patients and 60-minute structured exercise and nutrition programs were implemented into their treatment plans. Patients reported lower levels of anger, anxiety, depression, higher self-esteem, and overall improved moods. 95 percent of patients also felt happy or very happy, as opposed to neutral or sad, after they completed the 60 minutes of exercise.

 

I thought this was a super cool article, a. because it is recent so this kinds of research is happening today, but b. because something as easy as getting moving can naturally make people with mental health problems feel better. A lot of pharmacological answers to mood disorders have other serious and harmful effects on a person’s lifestyle. Implementing something as simple as an exercise regiment can make people feel better without being dependent on medications.

 

If you want to read the actual study I will post it below!

David Tomasi, Sheri Gates, Emily Reyns. Positive Patient Response to a Structured Exercise Program Delivered in Inpatient PsychiatryGlobal Advances in Health and Medicine, 2019; 8: 216495611984865 DOI: 10.1177/2164956119848657

Presentation Topic

For my presentation, I will be focusing on “fad” diets and how they affect a person during exercise. Fad diets are diets that are popular for a certain amount of time, similar to scrunchies in the 90’s (but they are making  a comeback!) These fad diets are the “get rich quick” way to lose weight, or gain other health advantages, however most of them show no long term benefits because most people go back to their bad habits after a month to 6 weeks.

A lot of these fad diets,  such as the “Keto”, “Whole 30”, and “Paleo” diets, want you to completely cut out complex carbs, such as grains, bread, rice, pasta, etc. and your main source of carbohydrates (if any!) are from fruits and veggies. Here is the conundrum… if everyone online and in info-mercials is telling you that to lose weight you need to eat right and exercise, how are you able to exercise if one of your main fuel sources is being completely cut out?

I will admit I have tried some of these fad diets, and working out multiple days a week I did not last very long because I felt so weak when I was at the gym. And once I got home I was looking for as much carbs. as I can possibly get.

So my main question for my presentation would have to be: If you aren’t a highly trained aerobic athlete, how does cutting out carbs./a lot of calories affect your workouts? I believe the results would yield very poor exercise routines after a few days and maybe if you stuck with the fad, which most people do not, your body may acclimate to the food deficit.

 

Pro Lactate

This week I am writing on the side of lactate build up is advantageous during exercise.

The author argued for that lactic acid accumulation inside muscle fibers is not responsible for muscle fatigue. In fact, the reason that muscle fatigue occurs is due to the disturbance of any of the steps in excitation-contraction (EC) coupling in muscles. There are several types of muscle fatigue, and each one is caused by different attributes of exercise. One major type of fatigue is caused by the buildup of potassium ions in the transverse-tubular or T tubular systems. The other type of fatigue occurs by direct or indirect effects of the accumulation of metabolites, as we discussed in class earlier this week. And finally, the reduction of calcium ions released from the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) can indirectly cause muscle fatigue.

Lactate ions in the cytoplasm of muscle cells, even at high concentrations, do not impair EC coupling. Along with this, high concentrations of hydrogen ions, a by-product of the breakdown of lactate, has few, if any, harmful effects on EC coupling. This is because normal controlled calcium release is little, if at all, inhibited by low pH, which would incur with high concentrations of hydrogen ions in the body. In fact, in a single intact muscle fiber, decreasing pH from 7.1 to less than 6.7 does not cause or accelerate the onset of fatigue, but actually slows its onset! An increase in intracellular acidity can increase cytoplasmic calcium and consequent activation of contractile apparatus, because SR calcium pumps bind and requester calcium even more so at acidic pHs. This would actually reverse the  reduction of calcium ions, which as I mentioned above, is one of the causes of muscle fatigue.

Another cause I mentioned, is the accumulation of metabolites during exercise. I found an article on google scholar (did not find one I liked on pubmed,) that researched biomarkers of peripheral muscle fatigue during exercise. The article kept mentioning how their was an increase in lactic acid accumulation in increased exercise intensity and how that proved muscle fatigue, however gave no evidence to support that. Meanwhile, they were mentioning other metabolites that we spoke of earlier this week, such as ammonia, hypoxanthine and xanthine, that have been proven to disrupt EC coupling.

Lactate is helping us out people! We <3 lactate.

Source: https://bmcmusculoskeletdisord.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2474-13-218

Blog Post #1

  1. My most cherished athletic accomplishment was being able to play softball at the collegiate level. It taught me very early on in my college career how to balance school work, jobs, and a sport all at once. It was also very challenging because I never did weight training before I came to college. Lifting heavier weights each week and pushing my body to lengths I never thought possible was very rewarding for me. I believe it also helped me greatly on the field.
  2. Understanding how the body reacts to stimulus such as exercise and how much you are able to push yourself in an energetic state can give insight to what your body is made up of. A sprinter and a marathon runner can yield much different body types, and those anatomical and chemical differences can explain a lot about the make-up of people, but also different animals as well. A sprinter may have the same muscle fibers as say a rabbit, where as a couch potato may share commonalities with a sloth. It would be interesting to see what muscle fibers we are mostly comprised of. During the scavenger hunt, I found an article that discussed some exercises to see if you were mostly composed of fast-twitch or slow-oxidative fibers. A blurb of it is attached.
  3. Last term I took Animal Physiology and I feel that a lot of the same topics may overlap. Also taking classes such as orthopedic biomechanics and advanced mechanics may help me understand what is happening physically to joints, etc. where I struggle learning things that happen at the cellular level.