Chockstone Forum

      Sponsored By
      ROCK
   HARDWARE

Chockstone Photography

Australian Landscape Prints

Chockstone Forum - General Discussion

General Climbing Discussion

Topic Date User

Refueling after training 1-Jul-2010 At 3:35:12 PM cruze

Message

On 1/07/2010 Hugh wrote:
>cruz, it's a derivative, sounds like you know that.. Come on then mate,
>give us a rundown of both glucose and fat metabolism, with emphisis on
>the final atp production..
In all honesty I don't think that posts on a climbing forum can do such an amazingly elegant and complex system justice. What I would say is that we have developed an amazing ability to extract energy from a wide range of foodstuffs. Some types we are able to use more readily than others. But we all know that.

You are right that muscle contraction is predicated largely on the availability of ATP. In turn that ATP (which we use at the alarming rate of up to 0.5 kg per minute during strenuous exertion) must be regenerated from ADP.

So how can we get back from ADP to ATP? If I could summarise, foodstuffs are broken down into acetyl CoA. Under what is known as the citric acid cycle, the acetyl moiety is oxidised which has the net effect of producing CO2 and providing for the regeneration of ATP from ADP enabling us to do more work with our muscles.

So the crux of this question comes down to how we get acetyl CoA from all of our foodstuffs. That's a pretty big topic and I will try to answer it later, got a teleconference now.