dustofnations’s BodyBlog

So there was a question in the exercise forum today asking about why a person was fatiguing so much faster than expected. This is what i told him and figured i’d post it here so it wouldn’t be lost and a lot of people can benefit from it. It’s a long post with lots of into, but i think it’s worth the read.

"your problem is actually a combination of things. Your nutrition, daily habits, and your training. I actually wouldn’t go so far as to call it a problem since it’s a normal thing for all of us.

For your nutrition, its one thing to get the calories you need, but the sources of those calories can make a difference. The large carbohydrate intake would be awesome for endurance type athletes, but since you’re lifting, you may want to up your protein intake a bit. If your serious and pretty consistent about lifting, you would want more protein to be available for gluconeogenesis which is when proteins being taken away from your muscles is broken down and essentially converted to glycogen that can go back into your muscles to supply you energy.

Normally protein doesn’t make up a large part of your energy sources during exercise, but it (as well as muscle tissue) is broken down with resistance exercise which is why you fatigue. take your weight in lbs and multiply it by 0.3. this is how much protein anyone your weight should be getting a day. But its higher for endurance or strength athletes, so go ahead and double that number. If you get close to that amount of protein, you should find that you’ll have a little bit more endurance (and won’t be sore as long). Supps will do the trick, but you dont need them. Some extra eggs or pieces of chicken each day will do wonders.

For daily habits, just make sure you’re getting enough sleep and are giving each muscle group you train at least 2 days to recover before training the same group again. Training them day after day keeps you in a perpetual catabolic state (breaking down muscle) and doesn’t give you a chance to go anabolic (building muscle)

I don’t know how long you’ve been at it, but if you’re relatively new to all of this, you’ve probably been training primarily for strength. That’s all good, but it doesn’t do much to help out with endurance. To train your endurance, lighten the weight and knock out a couple of sets of about 15-20 reps. This can be done for any exercise.After awhile, you’ll notice that you won’t fatigue as quickly. For your legs, you’re always using those a lot and if you happen to run around a lot or skate or something, then you would have already built up some more endurance in them relative to the muscles in your upper body.

I know that was A LOT of info, but i really hope that it helps you out. If you have any question about it, just shoot me a message and i’d be happy to try help clear things up"

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.