Taking a Week Off? Sudden 7-Day Exercise Cessation Perceived as a Strain by Highly Trained Athletes. Overtraining is the Culprit!

Did you ever decide to take a week off and felt like hell? Did you feel how the gym, a place of which, only two days before, you thought you would be happy not to see for at least a month, suddenly seemed to draw you in as a giant magnet? Yes? Then you are either an exercise addict or just a highly trained athlete (probably you are both), of whom a recent study (Zeller. 2011) published in the Israel Medical Journal reports that

exercise deprivation is associated with change in non-articular tenderness threshold and reduction in quality of life scores. 

I already hear the exercise junkie within you jubilating: "24/7, 365 days a year! That's the way to go. That's my way." Before you do fall for this misunderstanding, you'd better thing about possible underlying reasons for the sudden tenderness and the decrease in perceived overall health (-4pts out of 100) the 26 asymptomatic healthy athletes who regularly exercise 6.75 ± 3.65 hours a week reported after the 7 days intervention.
In fact, the scientists conclude that it is not the resting that fatigued them, but rather the constant exercise that prevented them from feeling their ever-increasing level of fatigue (keyword: overtraining):

[...] healthy individuals who have hypoactive function of the biological stress response systems unknowingly exercise regularly to augment the function of these systems. 

Aside from falling victim to the mainstream believe in the "more helps more"-principle, this almost pathological behavior, i.e. to blunt exhaustion by exhausting oneself even more, is unquestionably the central mechanism behind the commonly observed tendency of athletes, who are already severly overtrained, to 'naturally' ramp up training volume and/or intensity in order to achieve the short term satisfaction the increased nervous system stimulus provides. In the long run, however, this will inevitably lead to performance declines, total exhaustion, susceptibility to infections and injuries, and so on.

Bottom line: Take a week or two off every now and then. If you crash badly, you know it was about time ;-)

Exhaustive Aerobic Exercise Increases Serum Calcium Levels and Dietary Requirements

You probably have heard of the fundamental importance of calcium as a structural component of bones. Yet, calcium is way more than the building block of our bone structure and the concrete the of the hopefully non-existent plaque in your arteries. It is also one of the major players in muscle contraction. Thus, it is not very surprising that a group of Iranian Scientists (Pourvaghar. 2011) found major effects of pro-longed (15min) high intensity aerobic exercise on serum calcium levels of 12 randomly selected student athletes (22.36y; 75kg @ 1.76m):

[…] the participants' mean of serum calcium concentration in the first stage and before Balke exhausting aerobic exercise was measured 98.38 ng/mic L. In the second stage, i.e. after the exhausting aerobic activity, it increased to 114.96 ng/mic L. Research results indicated that the difference in serum calcium concentration between the first and second stages is significant (P= 0.0001).

With the calcium that is appearing in the blood of the athletes being leeched from bones, organs to fulfill the increased calcium needs of active muscle tissue. Due to calcium “consumption” and urinary losses, the scientists speculate, the overall result to be a negative calcium balance.

Figure 1: Serum Calcium levels of athletes before, immediately after and 24h after exhaustive aerobic exercise. (Pourvaghar. 2011)

In view of the fact that, in the 24h after exercise, there is no sudden falloff (only -9.13%) of blood calcium, I would yet advice against extensive calcium supplementation. Previous works from other researchers have conclusively shown that a nutritionally dense, calorically adequate, diverse, calcium-rich diet satisfies the needs of both, the average gymrat and the hard training endurance athletes.

For athletes on a weight-reduction diet, or active gym-goers who – due to whatever other reasons – consume a diet that is low (<1.000mg/d) in calcium supplementing with a bio-available form of calcium, like calcium citrate, could yet be a viable strategy to prevent bone loss and sustain exercise performance.

3g BCAA + Arginine + Carbs Pre-Workout Modulates Hormonal Response to Single Bout of Treadmill Running to Exhaustion

BCAAs + Arginine + Carbohydrates before workout!? Sounds familiar, doesn't it? In fact many of the first generation preworkout products were either formulated like that or consumers were advised to stack them with a branched amino acid (BCAA) product of the same company. Studies which investigated the combined ergogenic effect of these nutrients are yet scarce. So, I thought that it would be worth posting the results of a recent study from China (Hsu. 2011).

Before they started exercising on a treadmill, the subjects, 14 male physical active college students, received a beverage containing either 3g of BCAA (2:1:1) + 0.5g Arginine + 12.1g carbohydrates or placebo. Blood samples of each subject were collected before exercise, 0, 10, 20, 40, 60, 120 min and 24 h after exercise and the procedure was repeated after two weeks (cross-over design). The results were as follows:

No significant differences in the levels of lactate, ammonia, creatine kinase and glycerol between the two groups were observed at any of the time points. However, the levels of glucose and insulin were significantly higher in the BA trial as compared to those in the PL trial at the 40 and 60 min recovery points. Furthermore, the testosterone to cortisol ratio at the 120 min recovery point was significantly higher in the BA trial as compared to that in the PL trial.

While higher glucose and insulin levels are hardly surprising in view of the fact that the placebo contained no calories whatsoever, the improved hormonal recovery (measured as testosterone / cortisol ratio) in the supplemented group appears to be pretty interesting.

A closer look at the exact data does yet reveal that the supplemented group had a higher testosterone / cortisol ratio to begin with. So, if we calculate the relative changes in the T/C ratio 120min after exercising to exhaustion, these are +13.2% in the placebo group and only +6.8% in the supplemented group.
Does that mean that the money you are spending on preworkout products is wasted? From a hormonal perspective, maybe. From a psychological perspective, we do yet still have another result of the study: "Fatigue score increased immediately at exhaustion in both groups, but the decrease in the fatigue score at 120 min recovery point was significant only in BA trial." Consequently, even if it does not improve the hormonal milieu in the early recovery period, supplementation with branched chain amino acids, arginine and carbohydrates could provide the psychological edge you need to drag yourself to the gym regularly ;-)

On a side note: It would have been interesting to see T/C levels measured beyond the 120 minutes post exhaustion. Based on the fact that the recovery of the T/C levels of the supplemented group sped up from T=60min to T=120min, one may well hypothesize that there would be measurable (hormonal) advantages for the BA group at T=180min and beyond.