Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff marks dot com where smart happens. Hi, I'm muscle brain with today's question why can a trained athlete run a marathon but a couch potato can't run half a mile? If you're out of shape, you know it. Even climbing a flight of stairs can leave you out of breath if you haven't been exercising regularly. Even a little exercise like going up
the steps can put a strain on your body. Your body responds to exercise with a coordinated effort that involves many systems, including your muscles, your heart, your lungs, your blood vessels, your skin, your brain, and several others. When you do exercise, all those systems are working together. For example, the muscles provide the strength, power and endurance to do the exercise. Enzymes within those muscles mobile wise various fuels to provide a t P to meet the energy demands
of the working muscle. The heart and blood vessels increase the blood flow to deliver more oxygen to the working muscle. The lungs increase the rate of breathing to deliver more oxygen to the muscle. All of these systems can be improved by training. Lack of training causes them to atrophy. Let's compare the couch potato with the trained athlete. The couch potato has several different problems. First, there are weakened
or atropheed muscles. Second, there's weakened or atropheed heart muscles. Third, there's decreased metabolic enzymes in the muscles. Fourth, there's diminished lung capacity, and fifth there are the wrong metabolic fuels. If muscles aren't used regularly, their mass decreases, and so does their ability to store energy. The muscle proteins and fibers that develop the force diminished. Therefore, the couch potato simply can't generate the force required for the physical activity
involved in running a marathon. The heart is a muscle, just like skeletal muscle. It also adapts to a less active state by losing muscle mass. While this doesn't affect the couch potatoes ability to pump blood to his or her tissues, it limits the ability to increase the blood flow during exercise. The heart will not be able to stretch as far or develop the pressure required to increase
the cardiac output. That's why doctors tell you that you need to exercise regularly to keep your heart in shape. The enzymes involved in anaerobic which means without oxygen, and aerobic, which means with oxygen metabolism help provide the energy to working muscle. In the couch potato, however, the level of these enzymes goes down, so the inactive person's body can't
metabolize fuel as well as an athlete's body can. The fuels used in the body during exercise mainly come from carbohydrates, glucose, muscle glycogen, and some fat. However, the couch potato has mostly fat and probably little glycogen available in the muscles. It takes longer to metabolize fat as a fuel than it takes to metabolize glycogen. That means that the breakdown of fat can't keep pace with the energy demands of working muscle. All of these different factors combined to limit
the ability of the couch potato to exercise. The good news is that with a moderate exercise program, the couch potato or anyone else, can improve their fitness and their bodies response to exercise at least enough to do a ten k run. Be sure to check out our new video podcast Stuff from the future. Join House to Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The House to Works I Find app has a Rye Dowlet. It today on iTunes