A Little Known Secret to Help Athletes Achieve Higher Endurance, Agility
Scientists have found that “brain carbohydrate-loading” can make the difference between an ordinary workout session and an extraordinary, sustained workout program.
Athletes for example, who perform prolonged rigorous exercises, rapidly become hypoglycemic, depleting circulating blood glucose levels and glycogen stores in the muscles and brain; these changes are linked to early fatigue. If an athlete were to simply load up on a small, healthy dose of carbs, in between workouts that person would perform at a higher cognitive level, achieving longer endurance, and agility.
In part 1 of a new experiment, published last year in The Journal of Physiology, scientists revealed just how counter-productive depleted brain glycogen stores are to persons who engage in strenuous exercises for a living. Problems such as muscle injury, early fatigue, and reduced cognitive functions are detrimental terms to athletes.
Brain glycogen, the storage form of glucose that feeds neurons in the brain during exhaustive exercises, is a critical energy source for sports competitors “when the glucose supply from the blood is inadequate.”
By “using [their] clever glycogen detection methods, they [scientists] discovered that prolonged exercise significantly lowered the brain’s stores of energy, and that the losses were especially noticeable in certain areas of the brain, like the frontal cortex and the hippocampus, that are involved in thinking and memory, as well as in the mechanics of moving.”
The good news is that part 2 follow-up experiment, showed that after a bout of exhaustive exercise, rest, then feeding, brain levels of glycogen in lab mice, surpassed its normal storage level by as much as 60 percent. This “overcompensation” resulted in a kind of brain carbo-loading, specific to areas of the brain responsible for higher learning and movement. The study appears in this month’s issue of The Journal of Physiology.
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