This article is designed to educate the wider football community about the body’s energy systems, energy sources, dietary factors, and the key points to help you lose weight the right way so you can perform better.
Whether you are coming into pre-season, heading towards Round 1 or entering finals football, people ask me, “Why is it so difficult to shed a few kilos?”, even though footballers typically train three to four times a week, often accumulating eight to 12 hours of high intensity sessions.
The first step to losing weight is understanding the body’s three metabolic pathways (energy systems) which enable us to exert physical activity. The ATP-PC system, anaerobic system (glycolysis), and the aerobic system are utilized at different intensities of exercise and at different times during activity.
Our ATP-PC system is utilized to initiate activity for the first 10-30 seconds, as the body needs immediate energy to initiate a movement pattern following rest. The second system is the anaerobic system, which is initiated from about 30 seconds up to 2 minutes. At a cellular level, for every molecule of glucose, two ATP (energy) molecules are produced, allowing us to exert immediate bursts of high intensity efforts. This amount of energy expenditure comes at a cost, as a byproduct of this energy pathway, if repeated, begins to produce ‘lactate’ to slow the body down as a protective measure.
For example, if you tried to sprint the length of a soccer pitch twice, your legs would produce a buildup of lactic acid, which would slow you down with ‘heavy legs’ because you cannot perform at this high intensity for prolonged periods of time – your anaerobic threshold has been reached.
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Exercise physiology and increasing performance for footballers
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The last system is the aerobic system which uses blood glucose, glycogen, and then fats as fuels to produce energy expenditure, which is initiated between 90 seconds and two minutes at a moderate intensity. This system produces 36 molecules of energy (ATP) for every glucose molecule, producing the highest amount of energy, but requires the longest time to initiate.
Therefore, if you jogged for 10 minutes during a game, after the 2 minute mark your aerobic system would initiate and your body would stabilize to this intensity, hence you begin to feel comfortable at this pace.
A typical football game consists of repetitive bouts of high intensity efforts, predominantly at your 80-90% Vo2 max, so the anaerobic system is predominantly used and the main source of energy is carbohydrates, not fats. Carbohydrates are our main source of energy (60% throughout a normal day) and are broken down easily, whereas fats are utilised once carbohydrates are depleted and take a longer period of time to break down. So in summary, a footballer will predominantly utilize carbohydrate stores to exercise, hence why fat isn’t burned, which means weight is not lost. In terms of dietary intake, it is important to be aware that we are primates, and we have evolved over the centuries as homosapiens to survive through ‘natural selection’.
Our survival is based on ‘to hunt or be hunted’ behaviour, eating large meaty meals. As as a result of having to wait for prolonged periods (often days) until the next meal (successful kill), our body adapted to store our nutrients by converting carbohydrates into fats, allowing us to remain alive. This means if we adapt to small regular meals throughout the day, our metabolism speeds up, and we ‘trick’ our brain to believe we will eat again shortly, so there is no need to convert our food into fats to survive, therefore we begin to store less fat, which leads to fat loss.
Weight loss is a result of habit, and half a kilo a week is the approximate amount that is lost if done correctly with a balanced diet and exercise regime. Please note that detoxes, weight loss shakes and pills are only short term fixes, which result in you falling back into the same eating habits and lifestyle, putting the same weight on in a short period of time. There are no quick fixes for weight loss.
In summary, an Exercise Physiologist can help tailor an exercise program intervention to facilitate weight loss, increase your aerobic\anaerobic threshold, take into account your normal training regime, and can provide you with useful dietary information to facilitate this.
For more information visit www.facebook.com/walkingtallexercisephysiology/ or the Instagram page ‘Walkingtallexercisephysiology’, and schedule an appointment today.