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Survival and movement currency
The energy currency in a human body is adenosine triphosphate (ATP). There are 5 ways our body can directly make this molecule available to support necessary functions for our survival and when we want to move of course.
Decades of research and discovery have helped us understand how the biochemistry behind it works. However, knowing it in detail doesn’t add a lot of value when it comes to practical takeaways to improve or feel a little better.
So let me break it down for you in understandable terms so you know enough to help you along with your performance and/or health journey!
Do you need it fast or slow?
Depending on how much currency, money or - in the energy demands of your body context - ATP you need at each instant another system from the five does the brunt of the work.
I’ll make an analogy with whipping out cash at a store.
1. You can just pull out your wallet and pay with the cash you had in there. It doesn’t get faster than this. This runs out instantly.
2. You can open your bank app and transfer to a friend who is at the store and they hand you over the equivalent in cash. This runs out fast.
3. You can run to the closest ATM machine and withdraw up to your daily limit in cash, run back and pay with the recently withdrawn bills.This is not sustainable but it is the biggest amount of cash you can come up with in under 10 minutes.
4. You can go back home and take whatever you find in your drawer and go back to the store, probably buy less items if the amount found was modest. It is a lot slower but you can probably keep this up throughout the year, just shopping with cash laying around the house.
5. You call your bank and order the exact amount in cash that you need. A few days later you pick it up, you go back to the store and you pay for the goods that were put aside for you. This was very slow in comparison to the others but if you have more time and enough money in your account, it works. You can also show up with the biggest amounts of cash.
In this analogy system one is using up the readily available ATP in the muscles, system two is the adenosine triphosphate - creatine phosphate system (ATP-CP), three is the anaerobic glycolysis system, four is the aerobic glycolysis and system five is aerobic lipolysis.
Our body is amazing in how all the organs work together to keep you alive and moving when needed.
How do we train the systems?
As with a lot of things it comes down to practice, practice and deliberate practice.
If you try to learn many things at once you will probably improve somewhat but not as much as if you focused your energy on one thing at a time. Even worse would be practicing something different from what you are trying to improve unknowingly or knowingly by accident.
Luckily we know pretty well how to improve systems 2, 3, 4 and 5. Don’t let the numbers I allocated to them here throw you off because in cardiovascular training a lot of people use zones 1 through to 5 to describe different training intensities and ranges of a person’s heart rate (in beats per minute).
ATP-CP
To train the ATP-CP system you have to go at 90 to 100% effort from 3 to 6 seconds and for well trained individuals from 3 to 10 seconds and then rest fully or move very easily for 12 to 24 times the duration of the bout. You can then repeat this for four to 16 times (if you work out the math this takes a long time). Your brain would get so tired and your creatine phosphate will probably have depleted by this point so I recommend not doing more. Those who want to do more than 16 bouts, I can definitely recommend supplementing with creatine monohydrate! An example can be a weightlifter resting 4 to 5 minutes after a set of 2 reps to reach full restoration of ATP stores.
Anaerobic glycolysis
To train this next system you should aim for 90 to 100% effort for 15 to 45 seconds and then rest fully or move very easily for 3 to 6 times the chosen duration. An example can be a soccer player going from walking to sprinting across the field in an offensive or defensive play, then positioning and jumping.
Aerobic glycolysis
To improve how well your body can turn glucose into ATP using oxygen in the muscles I recommend doing 60 to 85% efforts for 1 to 4 minutes and resting one time or double that duration preferably actively. You can swim 9 repetitions of 200m freestyle for example going one faster and two easier in an alternating fashion. With a short 15 second rest in between.
Aerobic lipolysis
In general, not being inactive, walking and moving calmly already support this system’s efficiency but if you want to improve by targeted work you can aim for bouts of 5 to 25 minutes with very short rest periods (under 90 seconds) at 45 to 65% effort. It is hard to aim for this without a wattage meter or heart rate monitor but it should feel pleasant and like you could keep going like this all day.
Conclusion
It should be noted that you will always be burning fat and carbohydrates simultaneously, just in varying proportions depending on your training intensity. But knowing that these systems are trainable and getting better at a movement can change outputs or speeds for a given intensity for you, should empower you. Getting fitter will result firstly in you burning more fat doing daily activities and help you conserve stored fast energy to perform harder and a bit longer when called upon. Secondly it will result in you cranking out significantly larger outputs when you turn up the intensity! Lastly you’ll be able to burn more calories in a similar time period without getting as tired. Doesn’t it sound fun to have improved energy systems.
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