Our bodies go through some of the
most amazing adaptations in response
to exercise and because of these adaptations or
changes, this results in improved fitness. Now,
we often think of these changes in the context
of improved strength and size of muscles,
improvements in the strength of the heart but did
you know that your blood changes in response to
exercise? This is incredible. So, in today's
video, with the help of the cadavers, we're
going to talk about these adaptations and changes
that take place in the blood, how this results in
improved fitness and some of the better exercise
choices to stimulate these types of changes within
the blood. It's going to be a fun one. So,
let's get into this anatomical awesomeness.
[Intro]
So, let's start with the pump and it's
probably not going to be a huge surprise
that the heart is going to pump blood into
the blood vessels throughout the body. Now,
there are three different types of blood
vessels, one of which is going to be very
important to our adaptation story. The first
one I'm going to mention are the arteries.
Arteries take blood away from the heart and most
often they contain oxygen-rich blood and they're
going to distribute this blood to the various
tissues and in this case, we'll talk about say
like the quads as an example. Say we're exercising
the quads, that blood would get there through this
artery that you can see here called the femoral
artery and there would be smaller arteries or
arterials that would come off of that femoral
artery and go to the individual muscles and
these arterials would eventually flow into the
second type of blood vessel called the capillary.
Now, these capillaries are what we're going to
focus on because these are amazing little exchange
vessels that exchange nutrients and waste products
with the tissues of the body in the bloodstream.
So, we might have carbohydrates, other energy
sources, and oxygen diffusing from the capillary
into the working muscle and then carbon
dioxide and other waste products or I like to
say metabolic byproducts would come out of the
muscle and into the capillary, this exchange.
Now, these metabolic byproducts and this blood
would flow out of the capillaries and into the
veins and would be in the systemic circulation
and our body has various mechanisms to deal with
these metabolic byproducts but back to the
capillaries and why they're so important to
our discussion. But one of the things or
adaptations that occurs with consistent
exercise over time is increased capillarization
or in other words, we literally increase the
number of capillaries that are going to
grow and penetrate into the muscle tissue.
Now, granted, growing more capillaries isn't
technically a change within the blood itself
but if we have an increased number of
capillaries and therefore, more tubing,
we can fill that extra tubing with more
blood and our body does that. Our body
will increase the blood volume, the total of
blood as a response to consistent exercise
and you could see that if we have more blood we
could take more nutrients to the working muscles,
have more efficient exchange within the muscles
in the cardiovascular system or the bloodstream
and take more of those metabolic byproducts
out of those working muscles. So that is one
of the important adaptations that occurs with
the blood - increase the overall amount or
volume and therefore increase the carrying
and the exchange capacity of the blood.
But there's another adaptation we need
consider and for us to understand this,
we have to look into what blood is actually made
of. Blood can be broken down into pretty much two
main components. The fluid component,
which we typically refer to as plasma,
is primarily made up of water but also has
electrolytes and plasma proteins mixed in
and how we would increase this or increase the
volume of our blood is by taking in water and
electrolytes and the liver can also help
create more plasma proteins but the other
component of the blood that we need to
consider now is the cellular component.
Yes, there will be blood cells and platelets
that are part of the blood but the cell type
that we're most concerned about
with exercise are the erythrocytes or the
red blood cells and many of you have
heard of the red blood cells and you
may know that they have one main
job in life and that is to carry oxygen.
So, if we've increased the fluid component
of our blood or the overall volume,
it would make sense to pair that with an
increase in the number of red blood cells
and our body does this by producing more
red blood cells in something known as red
bone marrow. Red bone marrow is just found
deep within your bone tissue in something
called spongy bone but let's kind
of step back and put all this together.
So, we've increased the number of capillaries
penetrating into the muscle tissue and we're
going to have extra blood filling those extra
number of capillaries. So, now, I could take more
fluid to the working muscles. I could take more
carbohydrates and fats and obviously now, I could
take more of these red blood cells and therefore,
oxygen to go into these muscles. So, now,
I can create more of the currency of our cells
which is known as Adenosine Triphosphate or ATP.
So, if my muscles have more energy to utilize,
you could see how that could improve
fitness and athletic performance and so now,
you might be curious about what types of
exercise best stimulates these adaptations
and so we definitely need to talk
about this but if you are a curious person,
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So, let's get into this discussion about
the types of exercises that are better at
stimulating these adaptations that we've
been talking about and let me start by
saying this - let's say we had somebody who is
detrained or deconditioned or just hadn't been
exercising for a long time and then they go
from say like couch to any exercise routine.
In that situation, you'd get some level of
increased capitalization, increased blood
volume for pretty much almost doing any
type of physical activity but eventually,
you're going to get to this point where
certain types of exercises do a much better
job with stimulating these adaptations and these
types of exercises tend to be endurance based.
So, think like steady state cardio from like cycling or running. Now,
if you've watched some of our videos before
or you've gotten to the endurance athlete
community ever, you've probably heard
of like the zones. I've often talked about
zone 2. Zone 2 is a level of intensity where
you could be running and you're working but
you could still hold a conversation
with the person you are running with.
Now, that doesn't mean you couldn't stimulate
these adaptations by going into like zone 3 or
zone 4, a little bit more intense endurance
type training. It's just one thing you have
to consider is zone two, you can accumulate a
lot of volume, and I'm talking exercise volume
here not blood volume in this case, you
could do a lot of exercise throughout the
week without burning out or over training and
so you get - you can get a lot of stimulus,
if you will, with zone 2. But you know,
as we continue to increase the intensity,
the further we increase the intensity, we
start tapping into more of those fast twitch
fibers and starting getting into more fast
twitch adaptations because the fast twitch
fibers don't actually utilize as much blood
and oxygen like the slow twitch fibers do.
Now, another way to stimulate the increased
blood volume and capitalization and red blood
cells is through certain types of resistance training but you'd want
to focus more on like strength endurance
or endurance strength. However you want
to use those words of whatever order and
these would be things like think push ups,
like to failure or body weight activities
like body weight squats. Things that you're
doing like 15 to 20 plus repetition and
really developing that strength endurance.
And these types of exercises that stimulate
these adaptations are also going to be
the exercises and activities that benefit
from these adaptations. Like for example,
you might be able to improve the number of push
ups you do, run for a longer distance and more
efficiently and this actually isn't foreign to
a lot of people who have done some exercising
in their lives. They tend to have a pretty good
idea that specificity is pretty important when
it comes to an exercise goal and what I mean by
that is if your main goal is to run a marathon,
you're going to spend the majority of your time
running. We're not going to have a marathon runner
spend the majority of their time doing heavy
resistance training and vice versa. Although,
we may incorporate some of this stuff in
small amounts but you might be thinking,
well, great Jonathan, I am one of those
people that likes to do strength training.
My main goal is strength or maybe you have
a sport that you play that's explosive in
nature or has a huge anaerobic component, maybe
something like basketball and again, you might
be thinking these won't really benefit from these
adaptations that you've about. Well, yes and no.
It's true that increased capitalization,
blood volume, increased red blood cells,
and oxygen isn't going to do a huge amount
for one's one rep max in that moment or even
during their heavyweight sets of like four
to six reps or a weight that's heavy enough
that they can only do four to six reps or isn't
going to do a whole bunch for a vertical jump or
a sprint down the basketball court but we know
that metabolic byproducts created in the fast
twitch fibers like lactic acid can be funneled
into the neighbor slow twitch fibers within the
same muscle and those slow twitch fibers
can process those metabolic byproducts and
the slow twitch fibers definitely benefit from the
increased capitalization, blood volume and oxygen.
So, that means that someone who's doing heavy
weight training or the basketball player could
potentially recover more quickly between working
sets or that basketball player could recover more
quickly during ball stop like say during a free
throw if they had some level of these adaptations.
So again, we're not going to have
the weightlifter or the basketball players
spend a whole bunch of time in steady state
cardio or that weightlifters spend a whole
bunch of time doing strength endurance
type activities but we could sprinkle a
little bit of these exercise choices
into their overall training plan and
they could get that benefit of increased
recovery, which is pretty freaking awesome.
Thanks for watching everyone. Hopefully you learn something
new and amazing about size adaptations.
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