Muscle Recovery Reducing Muscle and Immune Stress

There are four components of muscle recovery: restoring fluid and electrolytes, replenishing glycogen, reducing muscle and immune stress, and rebuilding muscle protein.

Reducing Muscle and Immune Stress

In the long-term, sports training strengthens muscles and the immune system. However, individual workouts damage muscles and can temporarily suppress immune system function.

Every athlete has experienced muscles soreness after training and, especially, competing. There are no fewer than three known causes of post-exercise muscle soreness. The primary cause is mechanical stress, which is an accumulation of microscopic tears to muscle fiber membranes and protein filaments that happen as a consequence of repetitive, intense muscle contractions. The body’s efforts to repair such damage entail increased blood flow to the area, and with increased blood flow comes inflammation, and with inflammation comes soreness.

A second cause of post-exercise muscle soreness is oxidative stress, also known as free radical damage. Oxygen is a highly reactive type of molecule. During intense exercise, an athlete’s rate of oxygen consumption increases dramatically. Many of the individual oxygen molecules consumed during exercise lose an electron and become freed radicals inside the body. These molecules are extremely unstable and must regain stability by pilfering an electron from a muscle cell membrane, thereby damage the muscle cell.

The hormone cortisol has also been linked to muscle cell damage. Cortisol is a hormone released by the adrenal glands in response to all forms of stress. Its main function is to release amino acids from muscle proteins and transport them to the liver for use as an energy source. The release of cortisol tends to occur in the latter portion of long workouts, when the preferred glycogen energy source has been depleted.

BioGenix Optimal Recovery not only help to replenish energy stores and fluids lost during exercise, but  optimizes protein synthesis (the process of increasing the protein content of muscle cells, preventing muscle breakdown and increasing muscle size) to help soft tissue (muscles, tendons, ligaments) repair and the removal of chemicals that build up as a result of cell activity during exercise.

By doing so, athletes maintain higher levels of blood glucose, which slows the use of muscle glycogen and delays the need for the use of protein as an energy source.

BioGenix Sports Optimization….Who is Fueling Your Game

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Tags: adventure racing, Endurance Racing, endurance runners, Reducing Muscle and Immune Stress

This entry was posted on March 17, 2013 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Burn Rate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.