Lactic Acid Is Not Muscles' Foe, It's Fuel

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/health/nutrition/16run.html

by ph0rque • 17 years ago

56 37 17 years ago

jimfl2• 17 years ago

Wow. This goes against everything I've ever been taught about how to manage your muscles during endurance activities (In my case hiking, cycling, and Nordic skiing), yet, jibes with my experience. And here I thought there was something seriously wrong with me.

DougBTX• 17 years ago

Eh, he does say at the end that despite not knowing the mechanism, coaches still managed to get the best performance just by looking at outcomes. There are no new exercise tips in the article.

mhb• 17 years ago

What will you do differently after reading this?

jimfl2• 17 years ago

Spend more time outside the aerobic zone without worrying that I'm damaging muscle tissue.

scotch_drinker3• 17 years ago

After doing crossfit for a year, I think I knew this semi-consciously but it's interesting to read about it being backed by science. Short, highly intense training sessions lead to very large gains in fitness because most of your training is anaerobic.

stse2• 17 years ago

I don't see how this is backed by science in this article.

fatdog7893• 17 years ago

The article briefly mentions interval training as one possible way of increasing mitochondrial mass.

mr_luc• 17 years ago

Another crossfit hacker? Wow. (The first place I saw that article linked was from crossfit.com, around the time it first came out. )

I got good results with crossfit (dropped 40 pounds, now I'm "athletic" -- I'd never have imagined I could do 20 pullups before), but I'd do it even if it was only average, because it doesn't bore me.

Running? Unpleasant and boring. Weight lifting? Boring disciplinarian bullcrap ...

Crossfit? I check the website, burst out laughing, grit my teeth, and then do something that seems almost impossible yet takes 30 minutes or less. Awesome.

scotch_drinker3• 17 years ago

It's good to hear from other CrossFiters outside the community. I spent the weekend at a level I cert and loved every minute of it. The highly intense workouts are both always interesting (and always painful) and highly results oriented.

jedc• 17 years ago

Of course, that depends on how you measure fitness. Highly anaerobic activities will not prepare you well for a marathon, for instance. But they will make you more fit in weight-lifting and anaerobic sports.

Look at the training regimes for Olympic-class athletes in any given sport... they're a pretty good guide, considering the incentives involved.

scotch_drinker3• 17 years ago

I disagree that CrossFit doesn't train you for a marathon. It might not train you to be an elite marathoner but it does train you to be an adequate one. Greg Admundsen who is a fairly well known Crossfitter did nothing by main page workouts for preparation for a 100 mile race and he finished 80 miles.

There is solid data, described in the article and found elsewhere on the web that short, intense fitness sessions where most of your work anaerobically will in fact prepare you for aerobic activities. CrossFit is the empirical proof of that.

wheels• 17 years ago

This is pretty old -- 2006 -- and has been discussed here in the past: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=586114

pradocchia2• 17 years ago

One comment does not a discussion make...

gruseom• 17 years ago

Its origins lie in a study by a Nobel laureate, Otto Meyerhof, who in the early years of the 20th century cut a frog in half and put its bottom half in a jar.

R.D. Laing once said (paraphrased): "I would hope that if someone wanted to get to know me, they would not cut me in half and put me in a jar."

sho2• 17 years ago

An excellent demonstration of how, sometimes, erroneous but entrenched beliefs take decades, generations, to overturn.

Next up in the list of stubborn myths people grew up with and find hard to set down: obesity is caused by excessive caloric intake.

tumult2• 17 years ago

So I can eat all the cheeseburgers I want now? Totally ready to start, just give me the thumbs up.

sho2• 17 years ago

Sure you can. But you can't have the buns, fries, or non-diet drink ..

electromagnetic• 17 years ago

I lost 20 lbs while eating two big macs almost everyday. It just so happened that I was probably burning near 5,000 calories a day when I happened to lose the weight.

You could sit down and eat a jar of sugar if you wanted, you'd just have to be burning that many calories.

science4sail• 17 years ago

Obesity is usually caused by excessive caloric intake of some sort; the energy used to generate the additional fat tissue has to come from somewhere.

Of course, the definition of excessive probably varies from person to person based on many factors...

pradocchia2• 17 years ago

In his defense, the composition of those calories by macronutrient, along with fiber and micronutrients, probably has a lot to do with how the body processes them. Popular and dare I say scientific understanding of the subject does seem rather simplistic.

jstevens85• 17 years ago

Can you link to any academic papers that dispute that?

ahoyhere3• 17 years ago

a) known fact: insulin spikes cause more calories to be converted to fat, even when the same amounts of calories are consumed

b) even diet soda can cause insulin spikes, causing rats and calves to gain more weight on the same # of calories as rats/calves not consuming diet soda

There are links off the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_soda

There have also been lots of books written about the insulin response and weight gain, all citing studies, all pointing out that insulin resistance/syndrome x play roles in making some people fatter even if they do not overeat. Gary Taubes' is especially good.

I don't know why nerds seem to want to persist in believing that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, despite all the evidence.

In my mind, it's like a nasty twist on "tough love" -- people want to believe it because they want to believe that fat people are bad and weak, and therefore deserve what they get. By taking a hard line approach, they can feel... virtuous.

But the body is extremely complex, and a tightly-coupled system at that, with so many variables that it is vanishingly unlikely that we can categorically say that there is one simple, clear, clean fact that rules it all.

ZeroGravitas2• 17 years ago

No, but if you ask this question on Hacker News you will get a muddled and slightly paranoid sounding synopsis of Gary Taubes' book on this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diet_Delusion

Probably best to go straight to the source. I'm hoping it's a bit more naunced than the "biology is hard, nutrition is complex, therefore theories proposed by science journalists from outwith the field are more likely to be true" type stuff that you see bandied about online.

Lactic Acid Is Not Muscles' Foe, It's Fuel

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