Here is the first part of the thread, hope this helps ya:
Muscle power is generated by conversion of the chemical energy of a compound in your muscle cells called ATP. But your store of ATP is very limited. During exercise it must be rengerated continuously. The principle way your body does this is by conversion of muscle stores of fat and sugar (glycogen).
We need to dip into a bit of biochem to understand how this happens, but dont worry I will keep it simple. Understanding this will help realize why some supps work and others are mearly hype.
The conversion of fat to sugar to energy occur by oxidation. Pairs of hydrogen atoms (H2) fire off from fat and sugar like guided missles, and hit oxygen (O) to form water. For 95% of your bodily consumption, the conversion is pretty clean and does not produce many free radicals.
Though it involves only 5% of your oxygen to use, this pathway is very dirty. That is every time you exercise, it produces million of superoxide free radicals which act like sharp razors, damaging every muscle they contact. The damage they cause is the MAJOR source of continued muscle soreness and weakness you feel days after heavy exercise.
There are over 100 studies that supprt this discovery. I will touch on a fraction of them but if you feel the need ot review them all then read, Oxy-radicals in Molecular Biology and Pathology.
Whenever you push in training, the secario gets worse. Athletes in top gear use 12 to 20 times more oxygen than sedentary folk. Thats a ton of free radical potential.
The sheer volume of oxygen is not the only reason that exercise overwhelms your muscles with free radicals. The vital chemical cytpchrome C also gets used up. Cytochrome C is the catalyst in the chain reaction that regenrates ATP, so your muscles can continue working. With an intensity of exercise beyond wimp level, cytochrome C activity can drop by 50% or more.
When cytochrome C activity falls, another nutrient yourve heard about, coenzyme Q, comes to the rescue. But in regenerating ATP, CoQ itself may produce some free radicals. Despite the oxidation of CoQ itself, you need high muscle levels if you want to excel.
The free radicals attack caused by exercise doesnt stop when you stop exercising. The radicals continue to injure you long afterwards. Free radicals react with your fats inside your muscle cell membranes and make them go rancid, a process called lipid perioxidation.
The rancid cells themselves become free radicals, which in turn do more damage and spwan even more free radicals. With every bout of exercise, you literally get an inflammatory chain reaction that lasts up to 20 hours.
The combined muslce damage caused by free radicals produced during exercise, plus the hydyroxy chain reaction after exercise, is not the end of the story. The damage itself iniiates another free radical sequence that goes on for days.
It happens this way. As with any bodily injury, as soon as free radical damage occurs your immune system becomes active to combat it. The ground troops called neutrophils, move in to mop up the dead and decaying muscle cells. But in doing so they realse more free radicals. The net effect is a free radical circus which leaves you stiff and sore for up to 5 days.
I'll write another thread about what you can do to stop the madness, lol. I apologize for the length of this post but its important to understand and dispell the misconceptions of soreness.
