Endurance Sports and Metabolism

We all want to learn more about metabolism and how it affects our bodies, lives, and everyday activities. This includes what we eat, how we eat, how we exercise, and how all our daily events affect our body and how it processes energy. Gaining metabolic insights is on the rise. Thankfully, there is no shortage of books about metabolism, especially for those involved in endurance training. This is particularly important for long-distance runners or marathon runners.

Endurance training is arguably one of the most demanding physical training activities. It requires focus, discipline, and the management of multiple stress points throughout the body. From the physical to the emotional and psychological, the physiological experience involved in endurance training comes down to many factors, most importantly, the body’s metabolism and metabolic rate.

Let’s begin by understanding metabolic rate. Total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) is the sum of energy expended over a day. A significant proportion of TDEE is used to maintain the resting metabolic rate (RMR), which fuels a broad range of invisible essential bodily functions, including heart, lung, and mental functions.

If high-intensity workouts boost the body’s metabolic rate, what is the impact of high-frequency training workouts? Essentially, the briefer the interval between sessions, the greater the combined energy expenditure. Athletes seeking to increase their metabolism through frequent exercise should be careful not to allow too long a gap between sessions. Most athletes train with weights to increase their power and injury resistance but are often unaware that their increased lean muscle mass needs more feeding.

What endurance training endeavors want to know is whether this training level is significant to metabolism and can be adjusted to support this training. Although sports performance is multifactorial, muscle performance plays an essential role in endurance training. Fatigue is associated with metabolic processes in the muscle, and by manipulating these processes, exercise can be maintained for longer or power output, and speed can be enhanced. The key metabolic factors in sustaining and modulating performance and endurance in sports are ATP, phosphocreatine, lactic acid, glycogen, and carbohydrate. This leads us to believe that metabolism plays a significant role in most performances and can explain a large part of the performance in many sports, particularly endurance sports and training.

At a given body weight, someone with a higher amount of lean mass – which includes connective tissue, muscle, and bone – will burn more calories than someone with less lean mass. Think of an athlete and a non-athlete with identical body weights; the athlete with a more muscular build will have a higher metabolism.

A faster, higher metabolism is an achievable goal for endurance sports enthusiasts. Still, it can be equally beneficial for people of all ages and levels of the sports activity – you don’t have to run marathons to target a faster metabolism. Here are some tips that many experts suggest doing when mapping out your health and wellness strategy:

• Eat protein at every meal to activate the thermic effect of food, which is caused by the extra calories needed to digest, absorb and process the nutrients in your meal. Eating more protein can boost your metabolism so that you burn more calories. It can also help give you a greater sense of fullness and prevent overeating.
• Drink lots of water to help you lose weight and keep it off. It temporarily increases your metabolism and helps fill you up before meals.
• Stand up. Sitting for a long time burns a few calories and may negatively affect your health. Try standing up or taking walks regularly or investing in a standing desk.
• Get lots of sleep. Lack of sleep can decrease the calories you burn, change the way you process sugar, and disrupt your appetite-regulating hormones.

Learning about how our body functions by examining books about metabolism is an excellent use of time. The more we know, the more we can understand factors that can help us live happier, healthier lives.