Fatigue recovery factors
Intense anaerobic training without taking into account ample recovery time will most likely result in muscle damage. High-intensity exercise must also be followed by a more sufficient recovery routine. Soreness and pain notwithstanding, damaged muscles disrupt blood glucose transport, leaving your glycogen stores low, affecting your muscle performance overall.
Phosphocreatine (PCr)
It is an energy sourced stored in the skeletal muscle. It fuels intense muscle contracting exercises such as powerlifting or sprinting, and is quite limited; by 10 seconds it is completely exhausted, leading to the depletion of glucose, a primary substrate for glycogen. This means that recovery will have to take into account restoring these provisions before the next fitness session, to avoid affecting performance.
Anaerobic exercise can also cause Cellular Acidosis. Lactic acid and protons gather in the cells that can hinder ATP restoration. This acid buildup also affects your body’s pH, encumbers muscle contraction and impairs PCr replenishment. To put it simply, you need to neutralize the excess acid through recovery, hydration and nutrition. Our bodies tend to adapt to certain stressors in order to meet demand. The body’s response to hormetic stressors – exercise in this case – comes in three stages defined by Selye as General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS).
- Alarm/Reaction: the stiffness and fatigue after a training session. High blood pressure and heart rate.
- Resistance: body adapts to stress and is therefore less sore with tolerance and performance at a greater level than the stressor demands, causing supercompensation
- Exhaustion: organism is exposed to a stressor for longer than it can adapt, resulting in lowered performance
In other words, our readiness to exercise is the direct result of the relationship between our fitness and fatigue levels. To get the best results and efficiently get the body to adapt to exercise, tweaking the volume and intensity are necessary. A good health and fitness plan leaves space for recovery; it is a sensible way of achieving manageable goals and avoiding unwanted injuries.
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