Energy Systems 101

Kettlebell Drenge, the battle for the title of North American Champion draws nearer and the spoils are beginning to emerge through the mist. Morpheus training has entered the fray as a new sponsor of the 2023 WKSF Open North American Championship. There will be three M7 heart rate monitors added to the Horde. Register today for your chance to stake your claim. Registration is available now for only $100, with raffle prizes for all competitors and the opportunity to win cash prizes for top performers. We'll be back at the Athlete Lab in Little Canada, Minnesota on Saturday, October 14th and accepting video submissions for online competitors. Go to TwinCitiesKettlebellClub.com to register today. Come and answer the call of battle, join us and fight for your clan, fight for yourself, claim your spoils and your glory. Sign up now and may your name forever ring out in the hall of champions. Sign up today at TwinCitiesKettlebellClub.com Welcome to the platform podcast where we talk to coaches, athletes, experts and real people to learn about their approaches to training, nutrition, mindset and much more. I am your host, Jordan Kundeewright, founder and head coach of the TwinCitiesKettlebellClub, and our mission is to become our best selves through sport. This episode is presented by Morpheus Training. They're a new sponsor of the 2023 WKSF Open North American Championship and I am incredibly excited to have them as a partner. Now, we are eight weeks out from competition day and that's apropos because I first learned of the Morpheus Training system while taking my conditioning coach certification from eight weeks out, which is a certification by Joel Jamison, who is one of the world's pre-eminent MMA conditioning coaches and also happens to be the person behind the Morpheus Training system. And most of what I'm going to be discussing on today's episode comes from what I learned in that certification. A lot of it I knew from before but he really put it together in a very cogent and applicable way with the system behind it that I am incredibly proud of and that I really, really enjoy using. So it was a very, very valuable certification and I really love this system. Now, what makes the Morpheus Training system different from other heart rate based training systems is that it adjusts your daily heart rate training zones based on your HRV test that you take every morning, which helps you better train in accordance with your readiness on a given day. And with so many athletes in kettlebell sport doing a lot of other adjunct training, it's really important that we balance our daily stress, our training stress with our daily recovery level. So I really love this approach and additionally, if your coach is on the Morpheus coaching platform like I am, you can grant your coach access so that they can see your data and see your longitudinal trends on HRV, sleep, training intensity steps and many more other data points and how that correlates to their prescriptions of your program as well as your performance within those systems. There's way more to it than I can articulate in this brief intro, but it really is an excellent tool to add to your toolbox to help you progress with data driven insights and a system of thinking that takes into account your training stress and your recovery could not give it a higher recommendation. And if you want your chance to win a Morpheus M7 heart rate monitor, register today for the World Kettlebell Sport Federation Open North American Championship on October 14th. And as a reminder, it is also an AKU Qualifier event for Team USA so you can come compete for the North American Championship and qualify for the opportunity to represent your country in Poland in 2024. I hope to see you there. And of course, I am incredibly grateful you listened to this podcast. The best way you could support me is to go sign up for the WKSF North American Championship. Tell a friend or two, bring your team, share it on social media, all of that good stuff. Just go to our website TwinCitiesKettlebellClub.com for more details. And if you haven't already, be sure to leave a rating and review of the platform podcast, click the like and subscribe button, share it with friends, and of course support our sponsors whose affiliate links you'll find in the episode notes. And last but not least, if you want help reaching your goals without wasting time, please fill out the coaching interest form linked in the show notes. I help athletes of all levels seeking to become their best selves using my integrated coaching approach. You can follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube at TwinCitiesKettlebellClub or email me at TwinCitiesKettlebellClub at gmail.com. Now let's step on to the platform for energy systems 101. All right, welcome in to this week's episode of the platform podcast. I am your host, Jordan Kundey Wright coming back to you for another episode. We are now eight weeks out from the WKSF North American Championships here in Little Canada, Minnesota. So obviously I'm recording this on a Saturday. It's probably going to be seven weeks out by the time this episode is released. But trying to take advantage of a little bit of quiet time at the house with my wife and kids up at grandma and grandpa's enjoying some lake time. Soaking up that end of summer gloriousness here in Minnesota, and I am in quarantine because of my COVID exposure. After Riddle struck, which I alluded to on what I didn't allude to, I explicitly called it out on the last episode we released. So still recovering. I'm feeling much better today than I was, but still not allowed to interact with other humans yet. And yeah, didn't want to expose the kids or the grandparents to the COVID. So here we are. And I decided on this episode because we are eight weeks out, I'm going to get into energy systems. The eight weeks out certification, eight weeks out from Joel Jamison, the certified conditioning certification or certified conditioning coach certification is honestly one of the best certifications I've probably ever taken. And it has changed my approach to how I coach how I coach kettlebell sport probably more than anything else. And I think it's a big credit to Joel Jamison and his system, his approach to systems thinking here and understanding how these systems apply. And the great thing is the reason I didn't make this title specific to kettlebell sport is energy systems apply to any sport. Understanding how your body creates and utilizes energy is really important to understand because depending on what sport you're playing, you will need to make different training recommendations or different training choices, you know, from the perspective of an athlete recommendations from the perspective of a coach. You'll need to make different decisions based on the demands of the particular sport, but in order to understand how to apply that to a particular sport, first need to understand the basics of what the energy systems are. So this is really energy systems 101, right? This is just the intro to energy systems. I'm going to try and keep this not super sciency because I know I can, I know I can go down the rabbit hole of kinesiology and down the rabbit hole of the scientific terminology and everything. And you can start, you can lose people, right, when you start talking about substrates and, you know, the Krebs cycle and glycolysis and all of, you know, all of the things, which those are all important things for me as a coach to understand. But for a lifter or just, you know, my, you know, general audience, they may or may not care about the specific science behind it. So I'm going to try and keep it fairly high level with the caveat that you can go much, much deeper. And I reserve the right to go much deeper and nerd out on later episodes where we can go in a little bit more detail on each of these energy systems and maybe talk a little bit more about the implications of how you apply this knowledge to, to kettlebell sport and to other and to other sports. But first, let's, let's start with, let's start with just the basics of energy systems. So what is energy, I guess is probably the first, the first thing energy is the metabolic function when we're talking about the energy systems, these are the systems within your body that are responsible for the breakdown and transfer. Transfer of energy from one source to the source systems within your body, right? So if you remember what the first, the first law of thermodynamics, I think, energy is neither created nor destroyed. It simply changes forms, right? The energy systems of our body is how we transform energy from its source to be able to utilize it within our own systems within our own body. So the body requires energy at all times in order to maintain function, right? In order to keep functioning, your body requires energy. That energy comes from the foods and beverages that we ingest, obviously food as our primary source of energy. But you can also obviously get calories from drinks as well. So we ingest food and drinks and we measure energy in units of kilo calories, typically. That is the most common unit of measurement is kind of the standard unit of measurement, thankfully, across all cultures. We don't have the metric system versus imperial system for measuring calories. Thankfully, this is one thing we've kind of agreed on as a standardized measure is calories. And those calories are composed of macros and microbes, right? So protein, fat and carbohydrates, alcohol is technically a macro, but we can't use it. So we keep that one out. And then micronutrients are your vitamins, minerals, right? That your body needs in order to have healthy metabolic function, right? And those macros and microbes come from the foods and beverages that you eat and your body breaks those down into fuel sources that your body can use for tissue building repair, repair hormones, etc. And so what those various macros are broken down into depends on the macro, right? But, you know, like carbohydrates, all carbohydrates are broken down into saccharides. They're broken down into sugars. They're broken down into simple sugars. Proteins are broken down into amino acids, fats are broken down into glycerides. So they're all broken down into smaller, you know, we start with calories, calories are comprised of macros, the macros are then broken down into their, you know, atomic units that make up those sources, right? But the body has basically three choices on what to do with anything that we ingest for energy. It can utilize it immediately in the bloodstream. And like the best example I can think of of this as it pertains to what we do, like if you've ever been done with a kettlebell sports set or just a really intense workout and your hands are shaking, right? You're like, you know, you can't stop shaking because your body has utilized a lot of glycogen and it's very low on glycogen. And so your hands will keep shaking until you ingest something. And typically what works best to stop the shakes is is taking in some type of carbohydrate, right? And your body takes that carbohydrate gets it into the bloodstream and utilizes it immediately because you because your hands are shaking because you are out of almost, well, not out, but almost out of the available glycogen in your body, right? So you've burned through a lot of available glycogen. Your body needs more. As soon as you replenish it, it is immediately used in the bloodstream, right? And then your hands stop shaking miraculously, right? This is this is one of the three options. The second that most of us are familiar with is it can be stored for future use. And then the other option, besides from storing storing it as glycogen, is we can store things as body fat. And that is like I said, something we're all very familiar with and a lot of people hate that their body stores excess energy as body fat, but it is very useful and it can come in handy, especially in the event of famine, which is why our body does it. So energy can be stored for future use. And then the other option that a lot of people don't remember to include is it can also be excreted. You know, if you think about when you go way over your average caloric intake, there's a reason that you don't just immediately gain a whole bunch of body fat from one over indulgence. Your body will generally just excrete the extra. It will take what it needs for sure. And mostly it will just excrete the extra. So you're going to take a nice healthy poop. You'll take a maybe a couple extra poops, you know, the day after Thanksgiving or whatever and assuming that you return back to your normal caloric intake, you shouldn't really see any excess fat gain from one time indulgences or infrequent indulgences where you go over your typical caloric intake. Your body will use some of the extra. Maybe it will store a little bit of it, but for the most part it excretes the extra. So your body breaks food down into the fuel sources. It uses it in the bloodstream immediately. If it's needed, it stores any excess for future use and the rest it excretes. So that's generally just the basics of how the energy cycle begins, right, is we intake our food. It's broken down into fuels that can be used and then stored or excreted depending on what your body needs at that given time. Now, we talked about the unit of measurement for energy is is a calorie, but the atomic unit of energy at the cellular level is a denocene triphosphate. Now, that is the nerdiest thing I'm going to say on this podcast, a denocene triphosphate is also known as ATP. You've probably heard the term ATP because a denocene triphosphate is a mouthful. So I won't continue saying it. We're just going to refer to it as ATP, but if you want to look it up, that's what we're talking about. So your body breaks down all macros into ATP because that is what your body uses at the cellular level as an energy unit. So that is how we define energy at the most microscopic unit possible. That's what the atomic unit is. The smallest possible increment is ATP. So when we think about ATP, your body has basically two pathways that it can use to break food nutrients down food and beverage units into ATP. One is with oxygen, and that you'll typically heard referred to as aerobically, and the second is without oxygen, and that is what you hear referred to as anaerobically, the anaerobic system. Now, there is a misconception out there that the energy systems basically function like a light switch, or you toggle, you do a state transition where you go from, I'm using the aerobic system, now I switch over to the anaerobic system. There's no more, we just toggle between those, like we go either it's anaerobic, or when we can't breathe, or when we don't have enough oxygen, or it's aerobic when we can't breathe, and we just flip back and forth between the true. That is a misconception. There is the concept of the anaerobic threshold, which is the point at which your body switches over to the anaerobic system. To the anaerobic system, in absence of oxygen required to keep up with the energy demand, but it doesn't mean that you are no longer using your aerobic system, it simply means that your body has now flipped over to using the anaerobic system in addition to the aerobic system. You are always using your aerobic system, we'll say that again, you are always using your aerobic system. So long as you are breathing, you are using your aerobic energy system, you are not always using your anaerobic energy system. If, like hopefully right now, as I'm sitting here in a relatively low intensity state of living, recording this podcast, I am not using my anaerobic energy system. I could be using it in a very small proportion, and that's really the way that we should think of it, is that the energy demands of the system come from a mix of the aerobic and anaerobic pathways. There are actually three primary energy systems, and they're used in different proportion, depending on a number of factors. So the composition of that mix is mediated by a few factors, the first of which is exercise intensity or activity intensity, if we're setting a side intentional exercise. So the intensity of the activity, and this can be seen graphically on what we call the force fatigue ability curve, and the force fatigue ability curve is essentially a graphical representation of the correlation between the need for maximum force and power across the time dimension of sustainability. So if you put time on the x-axis going out to infinity and power need on the y-axis going vertically, the higher the need for power, the less duration you'll be able to sustain it, the lower the need for power, the longer duration you'll be able to sustain it. So that is called the force fatigue ability curve, and the higher that that requirement is, the less time we can sustain it, the more it needs to be fueled and supported by anaerobic pathways, the longer the duration is, the higher the percentage of aerobic energy system that needs to be leveraged. So the lower intensity it is, the more you're going to be able to sustain it, that's going to be fueled by aerobic capability, the shorter the duration but the higher the power need, the more it's going to need to be fueled anaerobically. So that is one component of the mix, is exercise intensity. Another is fuel availability, and I alluded to this a little bit earlier when I was talking about the example of you eat some simple carbs after an intense training session because it makes your hands stop shaking. Your body will always choose the path of least resistance first, so that means it chooses the simplest fuel source it can use first when there isn't increased energy demand. So it's going to first immediately utilize whatever is available in the bloodstream, and that is usually sugar. So when there is sugar in the bloodstream, it will use that first. This is why the first five minutes of exercising is almost always the the shittiest part of it, because even if you're doing something relatively low intensity, your body's going to use blood sugar available blood sugar first. So it usually goes sugars, simple sugars, then more complex sugars like carbohydrates are the next preferred fuel source, because it still prefers sugar is the primary energy source, but it has to break it down a little bit if it's a more complex carbohydrate. But it can use it, then fats are the preferred source, because those take a little bit more energy to break down, but they're also a very sustainable fuel, and when you're doing aerobic training, a lot of what you're utilizing is actually fat. That's why you'll have people talking about low intensity exercise is fat burning, fat burning exercise. Because the the that is a true statement because the preferred fuel source is fat. Now that doesn't mean that lower intensity exercise is better for body composition change than higher intensity exercise. It can actually be quite the opposite sometimes, but it does mean that while you're training at lower intensities, the body's preferred fuel source is fat. So, but it will first use the available carbohydrates, but if the exercise intensity is low enough, it will switch to a greater mix of the carbohydrate or excuse me of the fat based energy over carbohydrates, but it goes sugar carbs fat protein. And then I guess you could also put you could also put ketones right ketone bodies are also in there as a as another fuel. So, you know, this relates to the metabolic flexibility that you may or may not possess. And if you're not familiar with the term metabolic flexibility, what that means is your body's ability to utilize different macro nutrients to create energy. Right. So, this is where long term and I emphasize long term long term elimination or restriction of a particular macro nutrient may change your body's ability to effectively break. So, if you look down a certain type of food, so if you don't consistently, if you consistently eliminate carbs, your body will struggle to leverage carbs as an effective fuel source. Right. So, eliminate fat, you know, you go on the high carb low fat diet that was super popular in the 90s, this is going to make it really challenging for your body to leverage fat as a fuel source. Right. So, this metabolic flexibility can be tuned by dietary choices like going keto, for example, you can choose to go keto for a period of time to improve your metabolic flexibility to improve your body's ability to use fat as its primary fuel source. Right. And it will convert fat into those ketone bodies in absence of carbohydrate energy so that your body can use that in the brain. Because that is still your body's preferred brain fuel is carbohydrate energy, sugar energy. So, those sacrides that carbohydrates break down into is still the preferred source of energy for the brain. Which is why you'll hear the term of brain fog within people that try and go keto and it takes a while for the body to adapt to the absence of carbohydrates and one of the common things is brain fog. You'll also hear the keto flu. Right. This is your body needing long term elimination of a particular macronutrient to force adaptation. It can really suck and it can be really hard and it's not necessarily always desirable. But there are periods, there are times when it might be beneficial to you to eliminate carbohydrates really improve your body's sensitivity to carbohydrates but also improve its ability to use fat as its primary source of fuel. But again, that metabolic flexibility is mediated and can be tuned by dietary choices particularly in the long term. Now fuel availability is where we start talking about performance nutrition. Right. And this is a much more short term type of application of understanding what your body needs in order to fuel its workouts. So, this is one of the reasons I advocate for my athletes to not go low carb is because in order to perform at this sport, we need carbohydrate energy and I'll get into the reasons why in the second half of the episode here. But performance nutrition is about timing your nutrition intake to make sure that you have the fuels available necessary at the times that you need them to be available and understanding what your body's preferred fuel is and understanding what the fuel source needed for the intensity of the exercise that you're trying to perform is. So, this is where performance nutrition comes in. So, metabolic flexibility is done longitudinally and can be tweaked longitudinally by dietary choices. Performance is more short term and can be leveraged. So, you can leverage short term choices to affect your performance based on to make the right nutrients available based on what you need for what you're trying to do. So, the last factor that I called out is within the composition of the mix is individual variance and I mean that from the musculature that a person has because I think that's probably the strongest indicator of what type of fuel that your body will prefer is based on what type of muscle tissues that you have. If you tend to be a less explosive athlete who has better endurance, you're probably going to prefer fat as a your body and I mean this at the cellular level. If you look at the mix of what is actually being utilized by your body, those people probably actually use body fat fairly well or they use dietary fat fairly well as a fuel source and therefore they can do aerobic endurance activities fairly well. People that are more explosive have larger muscle mass typically need more carbohydrate energy and their body burns through a lot more carbohydrate energy as a result big muscles use a lot of carbs. They can store a lot of carbs is where you again glycogen goes into your muscle bodies and into your liver right so this is where your body this is where big muscles tend to prefer carbohydrates so you'll need more carbohydrates. This is why bodybuilders don't go low carb until they're really close to their to their stepping on stage because it actually helps them build muscles and keep their muscles large when they use carbohydrates and then it's when they go low carb later to help reveal the muscles that they have by eliminating some body fat taking away the body's preferred fuel source making it burn fat instead. Then they get that peeled shredded look that they want for on stage but I digress this is not a bodybuilding podcast so take a quick break and when I come back we are going to talk about the three energy systems. Keto Bell Drenge the Gods have smiled upon us we have been honored by the American Keto Bell lifters union to host the WKSF North American championships for the next three years honorable warriors of the steel will travel from far and wide to battle for the title of champion and you can earn your place to represent the USA team at the WKSF World Championships. Registration is available now for only one hundred dollars with raffle prizes available for all competitors and the opportunity to win cash prizes for the top performers. We'll be back at the athlete lab in middle Canada Minnesota on Saturday October 14th and accepting video submissions for online competitors. Let's go to Twin Cities Keto Bell Club dot com to register today. Come answer the call of battle join us and fight for your plan fight for yourself claim your spoils and your glory. Sign up now and lay your name forever ring out in the hall of champions. Sign up today at Twin Cities Keto Bell Club dot com. So now that we've kind of given an overview of the energy cycle and a high level overview of the energy systems. Let's talk about the three energy systems leveraged in training. So the first energy system is the aerobic energy system now. Don't confuse these energy systems with the two pathways that I talked about because you can create ATP aerobically and anaerobically but there are three energy systems one of which does happen to be the aerobic energy system because it requires oxygen. Now it has the lowest power output but it has the longest duration and it makes it the most sustainable the majority of energy production for anything that lasts more than 60 seconds is the aerobic energy system. So I'll say that again the majority of all required energy for anything that lasts more than 60 seconds is the aerobic energy system. It's the most flexible system because it can use carbs fats and proteins to create energy and it also creates the least cellular byproducts. Again I'm not going to go into the very nerdy science of all of the substrates and sell your byproducts and the crib cycle and all of that at least not on this episode but just know that the aerobic energy system is the one that creates the least amount of cellular byproduct because your body is able to process the byproducts that are being created. Now there are always byproducts being created because of the process of ATP conversion but there are also other processes to recycle those byproducts and reuse them. The rate at which those things are produced is what predicates whether or not you can continue on with your exercise. The inability to continue on is usually dictated by the body's inability to keep up with the rate at which byproducts are being produced. That's when you reach that threshold towards the top of your capability that your options are pass out or puke. If you've ever pushed to that point that's when you're in so much oxygen debt. Your CO2 tolerance will largely dictate how far you can push or how close to that you can push but when you're in that oxygen debt and there's more byproduct being created than your body can recycle, that's when you start reaching that pass out or puke threshold, that's your lactate threshold. We'll get into that another time but the aerobic energy system creates the least cellular byproduct and it does so at a rate that your body is able to recycle it. That's why you can do these things for extended periods of time. That's where if you're well controlled on your pacing, you can do a 100 mile run non-stop which is still crazy to me. It requires a high level of training of this system but there are human beings that are capable of that because the aerobic energy system allows them to keep doing so because it's not creating a high level of cellular byproduct or at least not creating it at a rate at which you can do it. That's when you're at a rate at which that it cannot recycle it. That is an important thing to understand about this energy system. It's the reason that I started with it because it is the foundation upon which all other energy systems sit. So even when we go over our aerobic threshold, the minute that we stop, whatever exercise it is that put us over threshold, the minute that we stop, the mix of aerobic goes back up again and your body is cycling those byproducts. And how strong and well developed your aerobic energy system is what allows you to process the byproduct from the other systems and from the aerobic system but from the other systems that allows you to catch up. So that's where if you're doing interval training for example like when we do our lovely favorite one minute on one minute off right you do one minute on one minute off the reason the reason you can do that is because as soon as you stop right the reason those those workouts don't suck as much as the other ones is that as soon as you stop and you get to put the bells down your aerobic energy system spins back up to a higher proportion and it starts helping you process that byproduct that has come from going over threshold right so that's why it's not until later when you're start getting into minutes 12 13 14 15 whatever 20 25 depending on how fit you are but it's not until you get into those higher interval numbers that your body is no longer able to keep up with the byproduct that's being produced in those over thresholds. Over threshold intervals but it's that aerobic system kicking in in those rest intervals to process all of that byproduct now the second system is the anaerobic glycolysis energy system. So I lied I said identity triphosphate was going to be the nerdy's thing I was going to say but I can't help with the name of the energy system is it's called the anaerobic glycolysis energy system you'll also sometimes here referred to as the glycolytic energy system or the sugar system depending on how simplified we're talking about it but anytime you hear the word glycolysis that is the break down of. Carbohydrates into those saccharides breaking breaking it down into into glycogen right so this is where we have higher power output moderate duration and by moderate I mean that you can sustain a high level of power output for 30 to 90 seconds. So equating this to kettlebell sport think of those last that last minute and a half in a long cycle set where you know that you can sprint because you've maintained your pace well enough in the first you know the first eight minutes that you know that you can sprint to the finish well in that sprint to the finish you're going to rely pretty heavily on this anaerobic glycolysis system and you know you know that if you tried to push at the at that pace earlier that you would not be able to sustain it because you would you would produce too much byproduct right that that's the reason you can't sustain it your muscles would produce too much cellular byproduct that your anaerobic that your aerobic system wouldn't be able to process fast enough and you would you would crash out right you hit that threshold and you wouldn't be able to keep going right but you know really good lifters save this for that final push now if you come out too early and you push too hard and you get over this this threshold too much this is where you can have those death minutes you know minute seven minute eight where if you're sustaining a pace that push you outside of your normal aerobic capacity and now you're producing too much cellular byproduct you end up crashing because you can't keep up you can't do this for more than 90 seconds right that's that's typically the the end range that you can do it right now again if you decrease your intensity your aerobic system can spin back up and create a higher proportion or account for a higher proportion of the output necessary right but as we know heart rate doesn't come down as quickly while you're still moving so this is where if you come out too hot in a kettlebell sports set and your pace is too high you have to either put the bells down because you crash or you have to slow way down and you'll see people sometimes will do what I call like a rescue break in the middle of a set where they'll be doing they'll be cruising at eight or nine rpm's and then they'll get to a certain point at like seven or eight minutes when they realize they can't keep going or they're going to bonk and so they either slow way down or they completely stop doing reps and they just rack and that is giving their aerobic energy system a chance to clear some of that byproduct and they're hoping that their heart rate is going to come down or at least it's going to stop going up that gives their energy system a chance their aerobic energy system a chance to catch up with the cellular byproducts that are being produced by this anaerobic glycolysis glycolysis excuse me energy system right so that's kind of how this applies now this system is not as metabolically flexible it requires carbohydrates right it burns sugar hence the name glycolysis right it requires carbs to do this so it uses available glycogen as the source and it creates byproducts and it creates more cellular byproducts than the aerobic system but it produces less cellular byproduct than our last energy system which is the phospho creatine system also known as the ATPCP system right that is identity triphosphate creatine phosphate pathway right so that's where it's the phospho creatine system is because it's using creatine phosphate so I like to think of this this is like you know going back to the old fast and the furious movies right this is when they hit the right and you've only got a little bit of it but it's that little fucking extra boost that makes you shoot over the you know shoot over the train through the open window of a helicopter and land on the back of a of a flatbed truck right right I haven't watched a fast and the furious movies since like the third one I think but you get my point it is the highest power output so if you're thinking Olympic weightlifting when you see somebody going for a one rep PR world record right Lasha is gonna you know snatch 300 kilos he's leaning heavily on this phospho creatine system because it is it produces the highest power output for the lowest duration it can only sustain output of 10 to 15 seconds before it needs a break to reboot right and that reboot time is in the order of minutes right so it's like 4 to 10 minutes to regenerate enough ATPCP to to be able to go again right so this is this is where if you're doing if you're doing maximal output training especially on really explosive movements like Olympic weightlifting this is why if you're short changing your rest intervals you're fucking yourself over from a performance standpoint because your system needs time to regenerate the energy required to move that weight at that explosive pace now this system is not metabolically flexible at all there is nothing you can use other than ATPCP for this system right it it generates the highest rate of fatigue right again think of maximal output effort right there's a reason you can't do you know ten sets of five at max for power cleans right you do three sets of one to three reps right and if you're doing if you're doing three reps you're not doing your max you're doing a percentage of your max right but if you're doing max you're doing like three to five sets maybe at one rep max and you're taking like I said 4 to 10 minutes break between each of those efforts you're truly trying to get max right and that's and that's because it produces the highest rate of fatigue has the greatest level of cellular byproduct so if you continue pushing at that duration and you don't take those rest intervals you're going to hit that lactate threshold much much faster and that's where you're not your performance will degrade and your risk of injury will go up significantly right so this is why it's important that you understand how the demands of what you're trying to do go into into the sport that you're that you're trying to perform so in summary we have a constant need for energy the foods and beverages that we choose to consume are broken down and we utilize it immediately in the blood stream for future use or excrete it we break that food down into ATP either with oxygen or without and depending on the intensity and duration of the chosen sport will dictate which of the three energy systems we use the aerobic is the most sustainable longest lasting energy system it accounts for the highest proportion of the energy that we use the anaerobic glycolysis energy system is the next it's the moderate intensity that can sustain us for 30 to 90 seconds and it accounts for our explosive movements within our more sustained efforts and then there was the phosphocreatine system which is for our very short highest intensity highest power output efforts so that is a basic summary of the energy systems I hope it wasn't too sciencey I hope I gave you some nuggets on how you can apply it but I also hope I didn't go too too in depth in this episode because I really just wanted to give you an overview of the energy systems but please hit me up with questions if you find this useful maybe we'll do a deep dive on each of these energy systems and how they can be applied or how they can be developed and trained because and what percentage of your training time you want to allocate to training these different systems because there's only so much training time that you have available and making the appropriate choice based on your sport based on your need is very very important so we'll get into that maybe on another subsequent episode where we go a little bit more nerdy on the strength and conditioning side I hope you found the episode useful please hit me up let me know if you have any questions share it with a friend and if you didn't find it useful you found it boring also share that with me because I want to hear that feedback as well but thank you very much we will see you next time on the platform podcast and I hope to see you on the platform at the WKSF open North American Championship coming up in eight weeks until next time be well thank you for listening to this episode of the platform podcast we'll be back with a new episode soon please be sure to leave a rating and review of the platform podcast in your app of choice support our work by supporting our affiliates and of course if you have questions or you want help reaching your goals reach out to me until next time thanks for listening