RIGHT! Giroux has some great points.
For ease of searching and education, I would propose the OP search "blood lactate" and not lactic acid. lactic acid is a bit of a misnomer. understand that certain organs (heart!) can actually use lactate to produce ATP.
And to the OP, NO there has not been a good/double blind/controlled study that shows compression gear helps with athletic performance. It helps with veinous return and thus MAYBE recovery.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Giroux tha Damaja
All pretty accurate except for this. Your body can't create it's own oxygen. Your muscles burn a compound called ATP for energy. Your body has two chemical processes that allow it to do this.
The first process requires oxygen, doesn't produce any acidic byproducts (only carbon dioxide or CO2) and is far more efficient at generating energy for your body to use than the second. This is what a lot of the oxygen you're inhaling goes to. The air replenishes the oxygen your body needs to drive the process (i.e. it is where the two O's in that CO2 is coming from).
The second uses sugar (not table sugar but I forget the specific form of glucose) and some other compounds in the body to create ATP, but it is far less efficient than the use of the oxygen driven production of ATP, and produces lactic acid. When your muscles start to catch fire during hard work, you're feeling the build-up of lactic acid in the tissue because it is being generated at a rate greater than the tissue can oxidize it (oxidizing lactic acid turns it into another compound called pyruvate, which your body actually uses to fuel the anaerobic energy production process in the first place).
If you're still curious you can look up the "Kreb cycle" and just google aerobic versus anaerobic exercise, but these aren't critical to getting the general concept. Also, when I say your body "oxidizes" the lactic acid, that is not to say it bonds it with oxygen. Oxidation and reduction are kinds of reactions in chemistry where molecules or atoms gain or lose electrons.
Here is a nice link to a flash animation that out lines the differences in aerobic and anaerobic cellular production of ATP if you're that interested. http://www.svcc.edu/InfoMenu/departm...p/tenstep.html |