My favorite aspect of exercise physiology was learning how the muscles work and fuel consumption. I thought the muscle aspect was cool because when you are exercising you really don’t think much about how your muscles are working you jut know they do. I found it interesting to learn the details about how they work and all the different things that contribute to a muscle contraction. I like learning about fuel consumption because I always thought of “carb loading before a big game” was the way to go. It was cool to see why people actually do that and think that can help. I liked learning about what type of fuel sources were used when and how crossover takes place based on intensity and duration. I never really thought that changing your diet to be carb or fat based could really make that much of a difference on endurance. The other part of the course I liked was the Endure book. At first I wasn’t really looking forward to having to read it because reading is not one of my favorite past times, but I don’t think that anymore. Once I actually sat down and read it I couldn’t stop. I actually really enjoyed reading it and learning about the different ways our body works and how it can affect our endurance. My favorite part is the slushy part to cool down your body. I wish I knew that before I was a washed up narp because maybe I would have added it to the game day routines.

This article was published in US News on 5/20/19 about what the best exercises for brain health are. There was a study done by Columbia University and the University of Miami. The studied compared two different sets of results taken 5 years apart of 876 senior citizens. The tests performed were brain scans and tests to test memory and thinking skills. The study showed that there was a greater mental decline for those people who performed low-activity exercises compared to high activity exercises. Low activity exercises can include walking and doing yoga. On the other hand, high activity exercises can include running and other cardio workouts. The results showed that there was a difference of 10 years of brain aging for those that completes high activity exercises. Researches did also take into account factors outside of exercise that can influence brain health before coming up with the 10 year aging difference. Lastly, they found that even performing daily jogs or other aerobic exercise can help spark the growth of new brain cells.

I think this article was really cool because most people (including myself) may think that you have to do mentally challenging things like puzzles or other mind strenuous activities to sharpen your brain. I think it is cool that exercise can have that affect on sharpening your brain and keeping it young. What also was interesting to me is that there was a difference on what type of exercise can influence your brain health whether it is low or high activity. The article did touch on what future next steps could be to further gather information about this topic, but I think if they could narrow down what exercises specifically could be performed to enhance brain health that would be cool. Overall, I think it was interesting to read and how they did they study was fascinating to me. This is relatable to our class because it talks about different intensity exercises and we know from class that these intensity differences can affect a lot of different biological factors in our body. Lastly, it is significant to us today because as we age and as people’s life expectancies start to increase it is helpful to have this information of how to keep our minds sharp as we get older.

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2019-05-20/the-best-exercises-for-brain-health

My presentation topic is the affects of hydration of exercise. As we know it is important for you to stay hydrated whether you’re exercising or not. One thing that I was thinking about it how big of a roll does hydration play in outcomes of exercise. The other side of this that I was curious about is different ways to stay hydrated whether it is drinking water or sports drinks. A lot of the time you’ll see people drinking water, but then you watch a game on tv and after a big win they dump a bucket of gatorade on someone’s head. Another thing that interests me about this topic is the concept of salt pills for endurance to prevent dehydration during running or other exercise. It interests me that there are different ways besides just water to keep your body hydrated throughout a workout. I am not entirely sure if I am going to pick one of these topics to research or maybe touch a bit on all of them. Another interest I have relating to this topic is the concept of over hydration. There are times you can hear of over consumption trying to hydrate and that is just interesting to me. I never really thought you could drink too much water when trying to hydrate yourself.

I hope to find how these different ways of hydration affect the body and see if there may be one option that is better than another. I really don’t know if drinking a sports drink or water during, before, or after sports is better for you. I hope to find this out through my research of the topic. I also don’t entirely know how drinking water and other hydration factors affect your body so I hope to find that out too.

This is an interesting topic that people may be interested in because a lot of people work out and are athletes so they may want to know what is better to drink during exercise. Everybody drinks water on a daily basis so this topic can be an interest of everybody’s to learn more about hydration and the role it plays in your body function both during exercise and your daily life. If anybody has any suggestions on the topic or any additional things I should keep in mind while researching let me know!

There is a lot of debate especially since the early 2000s on whether or not lactate accumulation is an advantage or disadvantage to skeletal muscles. Lactate can effect the release of Ca+ in a muscle in a negative way. Lactate can cause an impairment on the release of Ca+ release channels on the sarcoplasmic reticulum [1]. This is a problem because Ca+ plays a major role in muscle contraction. If Ca+ channels cannot release calcium ions properly it can effect muscle contraction. When you are working out and develop a build up of lactate, your muscles do not contract as well and can lead to a fatigued feeling. This build up of lactate and H+ ions can decline the force your muscles can exert [2]. An experiment was performed to test if lactate build up is related to muscle fatigue. Subjects had to perform an arm workout and follow it with a leg workout [1]. When doing the leg exercise after the arm workout there was evidence of a shorter time until muscle fatigue set in compared to subjects who did not perform an arm workout prior [1]. There was a lower pH and lactate release from the leg exercise, meaning the muscles have been fatigued faster. The lower pH in muscles is shown to decrease overall muscle performance [2]. When muscles can’t perform at their best they start to tire and result in eventual fatigue. The lower pH and decrease in Ca+ release can cause muscles to fatigue faster than those that have higher pH levels and normal Ca+ release.

[1] Burnley, Mark, et al. “Lactic Acid Accumulation Is an Advantage/Disadvantage during Muscle Activity.” Journal of Applied Physiology, vol. 101, no. 2, 2006, pp. 683–683.

[2] Cairns, Simeon P. “Lactic Acid and Exercise Performance.” Sports Medicine, vol. 36, no. 4, 2006, pp. 279–291.

1. My favorite athletic accomplishment is when I was ranked as #1 across the country for d3 shots blocked per game. Playing basketball in college was always a goal I had growing up. Not only getting to be on a collegiate team, but actually being a contributor on the team was really exciting. I’ve always been one of the taller kids on the court. That in combinations with my long arms help me be good at blocking shots. It was never a goal to be really good at blocking shots, it was always kind of an added bonus when you did.I honestly didn’t even know that shots blocked per game was a stat tracked that prominently. Making it to the top of the NCAA rankings was pretty cool and something I never thought would happen. .
2. Exercise physiology can serve as a paradigm for understanding biology in many ways. Learning about exercise physiology and different biological systems of the body gives you a broader understanding of biology. Learning about how energy is produced or how different muscles work/are used or how breathing plays works all boils down to biological concepts. Understanding the make up of a muscle with the different tissues and fibers is a small scale picture for learning biology. When you put all the muscle cells together it can create a muscle fiber and as you add more information together it leads to learning about how muscles contract or fatigue and ultimately, you can relate that to exercise. Relating it to exercise can be linking the muscle movements to how different muscles are activated for different exercises.
3. Some previous upper level courses I’ve had that can contribute to exercise physiology are Topics in Physiology and Orthopedic Biomechanics. Topics in Physiology is kind of self explanatory as to how it relates. It was the foundation and introduction to physiology learning about how some of the biological body systems work. Learning about the make up of muscles and how they work can be applied to exercise physiology when we learn about skeletal muscles. In Orthopedic Biomechanics we learned all about the different muscles in the body. We talked about different joints in the body and the muscles, tendons and ligaments that are in that area. We also talked about different injuries that can occur to those areas. This information can help contribute to exercise physiology discussions when learning again about muscles, but also when talking about exercise as a whole since you can do different exercises to activate different muscles. I also think it helped with the first weeks lab when we were in Alumni trying to figure out what muscles we had to location our machines on the scavenger hunt.