Hey guys I'm Dr. Jason Barker with the Natural Athlete's Clinic and today I want
to explain to you the differences between type 1 muscle fibers and type 2
muscle fibers and also stick around because I want to tell you about my top
3 nutritional supplements that I love to use in clinic to help people enhance
their muscle recovery. Ok so what are the differences between the two types of
muscle fibers? Well your type 1 are your slow twitch muscle fibers - kind of a
slower contraction, weaker contraction. These are smaller muscle fibers, they're
very dependent on oxygen so you'll see a rich capillary blood supply in and
around those muscle fibers, they're full of myoglobin which is a protein that
also stores oxygen nearby because they need a lot of energy because they're
meant to go for a very very long time so of course these are the muscle fibers
that an endurance athlete is going to need and outside of sports these are
also the muscle fibers that make up a lot of your postural muscles so holding
you up all day holding your head up all day those muscles are contracting
constantly but they don't seem to get tired right? So those are more of the
type 1. Now type 2 fibers are larger, they're more powerful, they're meant for
short quick type of contractions, very powerful bursts of energy, they're very
short-lived, you know under 10 seconds at most, they
tire out very quickly, they're kind of inefficient. Sometimes you will say
they're not dependent on oxygen, they're more dependent on ATP so they don't have
as powerful or as rich of a blood supply as the type 1 fibers do. Now in the real
world if I could give you a good example of this would be looking at
your Thanksgiving turkey. So you know there's the white meat and the dark meat
well the dark meat or the type 1 fiber is very rich in blood very rich in
myoglobin it gives it that brown or that dark appearance and then your type 2
fibers or the white ones that don't have that rich oxygen supply so you don't see
that coloring in there and so that tissue is more white. Now again in the
real world, if you look at a marathoner versus a sprinter right, two very
different body types - marathoners are lean not a whole lot of muscle mass
because they have a preponderance of those type 1 fibers that are a lot
smaller than the type 2 fibers which are a lot bigger so if you've ever seen
one of these sprinters walking down the street, you wouldn't think they're a
runner, you'd think there are linebacker right
because they're huge they've got massive muscles on them which are mainly those
type 2 fibers which are of course meant for very quick very short very powerful
movements. Now what are we made out of? So the average sedentary person is about
50/50 type 1 to type 2 fibers now genetics plays a role of training plays
a role but if you are a genetically gifted endurance athlete and you train a
lot you're gonna have about 75% of all of your muscle fibers being the type 1
type of fiber and if you are a power athlete and you train a lot again about
75% of your total muscle fibers are going to be the type 2. So those are the
kind of the main differences between the two of those. Now what happens as you age?
We start to lose muscle mass and unfortunately you start to lose more of
the type 2 fibers as we age and you actually gain more of those type 1
fibers. Now I think this is interesting because when we look at power athletes,
when you look at sprinters, the younger ones are the ones who typically start
breaking the records at an earlier age meaning you know, 25, around there. Whereas
with the endurance athletes, you tend to see older athletes setting the records
and a good example of this is Craig Alexander, who set a new world learn man
championship record in 2011 and he was age 38 at that time - and by the way he ran a
six minute and 16 seconds mile split in that marathon of that race so it's
pretty impressive for a 38 year old whereas you don't see the you know 30
something's breaking sprinting records normally so maybe that has something to
do with how the muscle fibers change as we age okay. So how do you help your
muscles recover? So the three things that I love to use are branched chain amino
acids - so you've probably heard of these. These are a special set of amino acids
that have very powerful muscle recovery properties to them. So we know that
taking branched chain amino acids over plain amino acids can stimulate that
muscle recovery process a lot better, a lot more efficiently and then
interestingly you can also use omega-3 fatty acids to help stimulate muscle
recovery. That's when you don't hear a lot about but there's actually good
studies that show that those omega-3s also stimulate that muscle repair and
recovery process. Now interestingly too is that when
you combine the omega-3s and the branched-chain amino acids, you get a
synergistic effect - so those two supplements are really excellent to use
together to help recover those muscle fibers. And the third one we like to use,
we still have to use creatine, it's probably the most studied nutritional
supplement out there. How does that work? It helps by replacing those phosphate
bonds from broken ATP ok. So ATP is your cellular energy, you break off a
phosphate and that creates a little spark of energy, those little phosphate
bonds need to get reattached to that ATP - that's what creatine does - it helps
replace those a lot quicker so those muscles can fire more rapidly. They
repair themselves a lot quicker too and they've got a rich supply of that
creatine. So the cool thing about all these, creatine takes a little bit to
kick in but the Omega 3s and the branched chain amino acids those will
kick in like that, so it's a good test to do so you go do your run or your workout
or whatever and then you try and use those two supplements together, you're
gonna recover about twice as fast as you would have had you not use them and so
that's why I love using it in the clinic because people can go home and take them
after workout and they're back on the next day so it's very impressive how
quickly it works. So hopefully all this helps you guys out with your knowledge
of type 1 and type 2 muscle fibers and how you can get your muscles to recover
quickly. If you enjoyed the video, give it a like! Of course please share this with
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