Discord Student Questions from the Fall of 2023

Discord Questions from August – these are questions that my students posed to me out of interest that were related tot he courses I was teaching.

1. I have a question regarding the number of muscle fibers in the organs on the GI tract. Would say someone who eats 50% less than me have less muscle in their GI tract organs compared to my organs? Is there also a way to increase your muscle count and mass in organs in our body?

Actually, this does happen in training with weight changes. When people are on caloric restriction they decrease the size of their GI to a certain degree (not a 5+ lbs. swing), but still they decrease the lean mass in their trunk through slight atrophy of their GI. The same thing happens when people are bulking and literally have more calories to digest and the GI increases in size to compensate for it.

• Are different periodization models better/more effective for different body types?

              They body type thing isn’t a real thing. Instead think of it as their training status. Someone who is a rank beginner will do better with simple linear periodization until that no longer works then you either reset or start playing with an approach like undulating or wave periodization.

• I know that different people with different activity levels and body types, will use different amounts of energy through daily life, but would a patient receiving cancer treatments such as chemo and radiation use more ATP/energy in their day-to-day tasks because their bodies are trying to recover from the treatments and heal their bodies from the trauma caused? Also, would those patients use more ATP/energy because their immune system is having to fight so hard to rid their body of the cancerous cells?

Likely they would use less energy due to the fatigue and brutal reality of radiation and chemo therapy. This does give some increased demands, but people undergoing chemo typically don’t work out. So the demands of the repair needed to the body might be increased, but overall activity is way lower.

• On Monday we mentioned heat and core body temperature. The more tissue and muscle we have it increases the rate at while our body will heat up. Is there a certain equation or rate that our body is quicker to heat up to per 1 lbs of muscle or tissue? I ask because I’m significantly more warmer than my roommates who don’t work out or have a lot of adipose tissue. They always want our apartment to be warmer when I will sweat all night if I did. Thank you

So in this situation muscle is a lot more metabolically active which in turn increases the amount of heat that they produce but only when being used. Fat is insulative, but doesn’t really generate much heat itself. You are also looking at things like resting metabolic rates and muscle tone that are complicating this matter even more so.

• Is it possible for people to adapt to different energy systems depending on the type of exercise they do most often? For example, would a marathoner have a better oxidative system than someone who throws shotput? Or are both energy systems functioning in the same way?

You will improve the energy systems in the cells you are using with the energy system you are utilizing. So the each system works in the same way, but you will increase the amount of enzymes in that energy system, mitochondria if we are talking about aerobic systems, and storages of the nutrients used in that energy system. That is how the cells improve. We also can increase the ability to deliver nutrients and deal with waste products (for lack of a better term) as well of the energy systems we are using.

• Do mental health issues (anxiety, depression, etc.) influence the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems in athletes? If so, how great of a role does this have in performance?

Yes, anxiety being more of a sympathetic state which can not only cause poor play, but poor recovery due to not being able to relax very well. With depression you are looking at more of parasympathetic state which makes it hard to get excited for high intensity work due to being more rate limited. If you aren’t feeling your best for whatever reason, you won’t be performing or recovering at your best is the simple way to think of it.