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Immunity, Lifestyle, Longevity
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Chelsea De Beer
March 9, 2022
Chelsea De Beer
Are you searching for a way to maximize your performance both mentally and physically? Reaching peak performance and staying there is both a formidable challenge and an empowering achievement.
Whether we’re talking about winning gold at the Boston Marathon or passing the BAR, the body needs to be running at optimal efficiency to transcend your personal best.
In this article, we delve a little deeper into the science behind physical and mental mastery and show you how to prime your body and brain for excellence.
Physical Performance in Ketosis
Information about what effect the ketogenic lifestyle has on the human body’s physical performance is not hard to find, but often very hard to validate.
This takes a hard look at what being in ketosis means for fitness, strength, muscle-building, and endurance while debunking some common work-out myths about keto.
For this all to make sense, we first need to draw a quick distinction between aerobic and anaerobic exercise and how the body responds to them in ketosis.
Anaerobic vs Aerobic Exercise
Aerobic Exercise
Commonly referred to as “cardio”, aerobic activity any movement that gets the heart muscle to engage for some time. The word “aerobic” can be broken down to the concept “with/using oxygen.” Your heart-rate and intensity of aspiration go up during these aerobic activities.
When you are already using fats for fuel in ketosis, doing cardio can assist in training your body to burn fat and encourage the utilization of stored fat in the body.
A study by Daniel G Carey at the University of St Thomas suggests that one’s maximum fat-oxidation point sits in between 60.2% and 80.0% of the maximal heart rate, or 150 BMP on average.
Anaerobic Exercise
When you exercise anaerobically (meaning “without oxygen”), your body relies on glycogen stored in the muscles and liver. Anaerobic exercise is an activity that required short, immediate bursts of energy, like heavy weight-lifting or competitive sprints.
When doing these sorts of exercises, your metabolism doesn’t have enough time to oxidize fat to create energy, but it needs spur-of-the-moment energy to get the most initial power and acceleration.
If you work out anaerobically at a high intensity, your body wants to oxidize glycogen in your muscles and liver for fuel. Although this implies a dip in performance prima facie, the reality is a little more complicated.
Building Muscle on Ketosis
A study published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition investigated the impact that a ketogenic diet can have on skeletal muscle.
What they found highlighted the exciting potential of ketosis as a muscle-mass building tool. In this study, the ketogenic diet resulted in a 2.1 kg greater lean body mass increase in a sample of 26 resistance-trained males when compared to the standard high-carb food-pyramid diet.
The Verdict: If you love jogging, cycling, higher-rep lighter weight training, hiking, long-distance running, walking, dancing, swimming laps or rowing, ketones are a great source of fuel for your work out.
You may find that the natural ketone salts in your Keto BHBoost exogenous ketone supplements give you that extra performance boost on top of it all.
Mental Performance on Keto
There are a number of factors that determine how energized you feel throughout the day. One big one is your blood-glucose levels, that is, if you are still eating carbs.
While eating keto practically eliminates the dramatic spikes and dips in blood-sugar and thereby doing away with this source of fatigue, ketosis has far more to offer than that alone.
After investigations into fasting’s reduction of epileptic seizures reached its critical point, attention was diverted to the miraculous molecule that made it all possible – the ketone.
Prescribing the Keto Diet for Epilepsy
Medical science has been investigating the therapeutic powers of ketone bodies since the early 20th century. Harvard scientist, Dr. William Lennox, published several ground-breaking studies about the effect of carbohydrate restriction in patients with epilepsy.
After a professional lifetime of learning, testing and corroborating, he resolved that it had to be a change in metabolism is helping his epilepsy patients get relief.
Mental Sharpness, Cognition and Keto
GABA and Glutamate
GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) and glutamate are neurotransmitters in the brain that are responsible for concentration and relaxation, respectively. For the brain to work properly, it necessitates a good balance between the two neurotransmitters.
Having too much glutamate is usually the culprit for an imbalance in these neurotransmitters. The imbalance has been associated with pathologies like ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), several types of epilepsy as well as mood disorders in humans.
People with too much glutamate and not enough GABA levels often exhibit issues like “brain-fog”, anxiety and sleep disturbances.
Chronically high levels of glutamate cause inflammation as the glutamate continually overstimulates the brain cells. The over-spill of glutamate should be transformed into GABA to help balance neural processes if your body is healthy.
However, studies have shown that living a ketogenic lifestyle has could help facilitate this change (Maalouf, Rho & Mattson, 2009). The resulting effects are lessened anxiety and an improved ability to focus.
Reduced Oxidative Stress
Too much oxidative stress causes inflammation and limits the amount of energy your mitochondria provides cells. Your brain is highly dependent on abundant, healthy mitochondria, it is the first to feel the negative effects of elevated oxidative stress levels.
Oxidative stress can be described as a natural byproduct of mitochondria’s energy-making process. Using ketones for fuel has been revealed to lower levels of oxidative stress when compared to glucose metabolism.
This effectively lowers inflammation and supports healthy mitochondrial activity (Greco, et al. 2015). Ultimately, this results in improved energy production.
A degenerative process called demyelination can occur on nerve cells, where the fatty protective coating over neurons is damaged or diminished.
Neurodegenerative illnesses like MS (multiple sclerosis), are considered very sensitive to chronic inflammation, which makes switching to keto therapeutic to a further degree.
Mitochondrial Biogenesis
In order to move, repair, grow and flourish, cells in the body need consistent energy. ATP (adenosine triphosphate) is the fuel that that cell organelles called mitochondria produce to power everything you do.
Cells in certain parts of the body have a higher number of mitochondria in their tissues than others in comparison, demonstrating, in turn, the amount of energy they need to function properly.
The brain is one of the most important areas of the body that needs lots of energy to function. If we increase the number and energy output of the mitochondria in your brain, which studies have shown is possible through ketone oxidization, it receives more energy (Wallace, et al. 2010).
Conclusion
In order to move, repair, grow and flourish, cells in the body need consistent energy. ATP (adenosine triphosphate) is the fuel that that cell organelles called mitochondria produce to power everything you do.
Cells in certain parts of the body have a higher number of mitochondria in their tissues than others in comparison, demonstrating, in turn, the amount of energy they need to function properly.
The brain is one of the most important areas of the body that needs lots of energy to function. If we increase the number and energy output of the mitochondria in your brain, which studies have shown is possible through ketone oxidization, it receives more energy (Wallace, et al. 2010).
References
Carey, D G. “Quantifying differences in the “fat-burning” zone and the aerobic zone: implications for training.” J Strength Cond Res. (2009). Oct;23(7):2090-5 https://www.doi.org/10.1519/JSC.0b013e3181bac5c5
D’Andrea, Meira, et. al. Ketogenic Diet and Epilepsy: What We Know So Far. Front Neurosci. (2019). 13: 5. Published online 2019 Jan 29. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6361831/
Freeman JM, Vining EPG. Seizures Decrease Rapidly After Fasting: Preliminary Studies of the Ketogenic Diet. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 1999;153(9):946–949. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/347740
Greco, T., Glenn, T. C., Hovda, D. A., & Prins, M. L. (2015). Ketogenic diet decreases oxidative stress and improves mitochondrial respiratory complex activity. Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism: Official Journal of the International Society of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, 1-11. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26661201
Kossoff, E. H., & Rho, J. M. (2009). Ketogenic Diets: Evidence for Short- and Long-term Efficacy. Neurotherapeutics, 6(2), 406–414. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19332337
Maalouf, M., Rho, J. M., & Mattson, M. P. (2009). The neuroprotective properties of calorie restriction, the ketogenic diet, and ketone bodies. Brain Research Reviews. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18845187
Sampaio, Letícia Pereira de Brito. (2016). Ketogenic diet for epilepsy treatment. Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria, 74(10), 842-848. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/0004-282X20160116
Wallace, D. C., Fan, W., & Procaccio, V. (2010). Mitochondrial Energetics and Therapeutics. Annual Review of Pathology: Mechanisms of Disease, 5(1), 297–348. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20078222
Author
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