Podcast 30

Muscle Burn Is Your Friend

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SHOW NOTES

Amy Hudson and Brian Cygan explain why that feeling of your muscles burning is exactly what you want to feel every time you go to the gym. Learn why muscle burn is one of the best indications that you’re exercising at the right intensity and without it, you won’t get the fitness results you’re looking for.

• The intensity of an exercise is crucial to achieving the fitness results you want, and the feeling of muscle burn is a positive indication of that intensity.
• Effective exercise is simply a stimulus, where you stress the body in order for it to change for the better. Effective strength training needs to be intense enough to serve as that stimulus. Labored breathing, muscle burning, and a little discomfort are necessary elements of that kind of exercise.
• If you’re not experiencing some level of discomfort when exercising you are just going through the motions and aren’t putting in enough effort to see any real results.
• The fast-twitch muscle fibers are the ones that burn during exercise and they are the main focus of high-intensity exercise. The reason they burn is because they utilize the anaerobic subsystem of metabolism.
• Fast-twitch muscle fibers store sugar in the form of glycogen, and that’s what is consumed when exercising at an adequate intensity level. Muscle burn is a sign that you’re really tapping into the stored energy of your muscles, which is a good thing and you need to do to get stronger.
• Some people have more fast-twitch muscles than others and some muscle groups have more fast-twitch muscle fibers than others.
• Our natural response to the sensation of muscle burn is to be worried, but it’s okay to keep pushing through. The burn sensation is different from pain.
• As muscles fatigue near the end of a set, that’s when coaching and encouragement are vital.
• The brain is a prediction machine, and we have to intentionally override the survival mechanisms that tell us to stop exercising and preserve some energy in order to achieve the greatest results.
• People often look to muscle soreness as an indication that the workout was effective, but it doesn’t actually correlate to results later on. Muscle burn doesn’t necessarily lead to muscle soreness afterward.
• Eccentric training doesn’t burn as much as basic strength training, but it does produce more soreness later on. Delayed onset muscle soreness occurs more at the beginning of a new program and tends to reduce over time.
• The Exerbotics equipment gives Strength Coach clients an important advantage but showing progress over time instead of relying on sensations like muscle soreness.
• If your exercise isn’t delivering any changes to your body, then it’s not intense enough.

So when you go from fresh muscles to 30 seconds later, having muscles that have been fatigued to the point that your strength has been reduced by 20%, your brain’s predicting if 30 seconds did that, what is a minute and 30 seconds going to do? And where am I going to end up?

Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where you will get up -to -date information about living a strong and healthy lifestyle. I’m Amy Hudson, exercise coach franchisee, along with my co -host, CEO and co -founder of The Exercise Coach, Brian Sagan. I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Muscle burn is your friend. Did you know that muscle burn is your friend? So Brian is here to actually explain to us why muscle burn during exercise is a good thing.

And we’re going to talk all about this. So welcome, Brian.

How are you?

Doing great, Amy.

I’ve heard you say that muscle burn is our friend. And when it comes to exercise, exercising with whole effort, that intensity level of exercise that we’ve talked about in the past that we know is important for us to achieve the health outcomes that are the most important in our lives does involve some hard work. And so let’s talk about muscle burn and why it is our friend. How would you like to explain this?

I think it’s really that burning in the muscles. is an indicator that the exercise that we’re performing is being performed at a sufficient intensity level for a sufficient duration to serve as a stimulus. That’s really what exercise is, at least effective exercise. It’s simply a stimulus, which means it’s an external stress that we apply to the body in order to trigger the body to produce adaptive responses. or the results we want from exercise. In other words, we’re stressing the body.

trying to trigger it to grow stronger and change for the better in response to what it perceives as the demands of exercise. And in particular, we talk obviously a lot about strength training on this podcast and effective strength training needs to be intense enough to actually serve as a stimulus. And part of knowing whether or not that strength training is intense enough is experiencing some fatigue, some burn in the muscles. And researchers have found that labored breathing, burning in the muscle, discomfort, these things really are a necessary element of exercising in a manner that is high enough quality to stimulate the body to produce all of the results that we want.

Sure.

So if I’m new to exercise and I start to do some, let’s say a leg press exercise, and I do start to feel fatigued and I start breathing heavily. And I do feel that burn. You’re telling me that doesn’t mean that the exercise is too hard for me.

Nope. On the contrary, if you’re not experiencing some level of discomfort, that exercise is not hard enough to actually do anything. And you could go through the motions and go to the gym and make a weight stack, go up and down a bunch and not actually. apply an effective stimulus to the body, you are just going through the motions. And in particular, the muscle fibers that we’re trying to impact through strength training are known as fast twitch muscle fibers or type two muscle fibers. These are the fibers that people lose as a usual but not normal part of the aging process.

This can be prevented, this can be reversed. But these type two muscle fibers those are the fibers that actually burn when we’re doing the exercise. And those are the very muscle fibers that trying to restore to get all these amazing benefits that we can get from strength training. And the reason that they burn is that they utilize what’s known as the anaerobic subsystem of metabolism. More specifically, anaerobic glycolysis is the mechanism by which energy is produced during a strength training type activity by these muscle fibers.

And these are different than the type one fibers or slow twitch or oxidative fibers, which really burn primarily oxygen as a fuel and aren’t the fibers that fatigue significantly during exercise and give off that burning sensation.

These type two muscle fibers or fast twitch muscle fibers store sugar or glucose in the body, in the form of glycogen and that’s something that we’re burning during the strength training and using up very quickly when we perform strength training exercise and those very muscle fibers are the ones also that actually feel a little bit uncomfortable when we exercise or strength train at an adequate intensity level. Yeah, I’ve heard coaches say before that muscle burn is a sign that we’re really tapping into that stored energy in your muscles, which is a good thing, which we need to do in order for those muscles to get stronger and to adapt as a part of this exercise.

And without that, we may not be achieving the intended outcome of the exercise. That’s right. Yes. It is a sign that you’re recruiting a significant number of fast twitch muscle fibers, recruiting and fatiguing them. and therefore performing exercise that will serve as an effective stimulus. I would agree.

Burning though it does vary a little bit from person to person and that’s mainly due to the makeup of their muscles. Some people have a predominance of these fast twitch muscle fibers their muscles. these people tend to be people that are stronger, able to produce more force, but are much more fatigable during all forms of exercise. They’re not your marathon runner, they’re more your sprinter. And then there’s some people that it’s really harder to make them burn during the exercise, they need a little longer set, in many cases to start to experience that burn, they’ve got a more fiber type, in terms of slow twitch and fast switch muscle fibers.

And then even throughout the body. There are just some muscles that burn more than other muscles. Some are harder to really get to that point where you feel them burning than others, but then there’s like your quadriceps. So when people perform that leg press exercise, especially the first few times and you see their eyes get big and you know exactly what they’re thinking, they’re thinking, I can’t believe the burn I’m feeling in my thighs. And I don’t think it’s ever really been explained why you’re legs burn more than other parts of the body, except for there’s a whole lot more muscle there.

But there is a tendency for your quadriceps, your thigh muscles to burn more than other parts of your body, but shoulders and triceps and biceps also tend to burn quite a bit as well. Yeah, when you said that about the person’s eyes getting wide, it just made me think about our natural response. Their eyes are getting wide because they’re surprised and they’re, they’re thinking about this burn they feel. And I think our brains do try to tell us like, you might be in danger. Try to, you have to quit now because it hurts a little bit or it’s burning a little bit. And there is this.

Is this okay? Should I keep going? Can I keep going? And I think that is where, and as you’ve already made the case, yes, it’s great for you. Keep going. This is a good thing.

You are safely working your muscles. As you fatigue, you actually have less proclivity to injure yourself because you’re capable of exerting less force, but it’s so great for your muscles to fully deplete themselves of that stored energy. But I think that this is where coaches come in because as people naturally fatigue and feel that burn more and more towards the end of a set, that’s where they really need that encouragement of a coach.

And How likely are you to complete that to the degree you need to experience the best results without that coach there? Yeah. Yeah. The brain is a prediction machine and we possess governors in the brain of effort that are gauging the demands that are being placed on your body and predicting what this means in the near future. So when you go from fresh muscles to 30 seconds later, having muscles that have been fatigued to the point that your strength has been reduced by 20%. Your brain’s predicting if 30 seconds did that, what is a minute and 30 seconds going to do?

And where am I going to end up? I’m going to end up in a compromised situation because if the muscles of the body become so fatigued that they’re unusable, I can’t fight or flee. And so we have to intentionally override these built -in safety survival mechanisms.

And we do that through coaching and education. And our clients do that just through thinking about and understanding the goal and why they’re doing what they’re doing and pushing for the goal and utilizing that biofeedback that we give them on exerbiotics machines during the set to stay motivated and make their exercises effective as possible. Yes, always keep in mind, this is helping me get stronger. This is helping me experience the best adaptations I possibly can in my health and in my body. If I work all the way to the end of my set, giving my best effort all the way to the end, muscle burn is my friend. So let’s chat a little bit before this episode wraps up about muscle soreness.

Maybe after a workout, Brian, and it’s not the same concept, but muscle burn, sometimes we feel delayed muscle soreness after a workout and let’s watch.

talk about what that is and any thoughts you have about what that means. Yeah. And some people will look to that as an indicator of how effective the exercise session was. Research doesn’t really bear that out and research really doesn’t answer all the questions we have about soreness. We’ve been talking about muscle burn and you might think that the more a muscle burns during a workout, the more sore that it’s going to be later, but that’s not necessarily the case at all. Either you could experience deep burn in your muscles during a workout, but then not experience much soreness later.

This varies again throughout the body. One of the methods or the techniques that we use at the exercise coach to help people get great results and really manage sore burn and discomfort a little bit for people, which is a nice benefit is what’s known as eccentric training. we’re able to really effectively exercise the muscle as it works in both directions, as it shortens and as it lengthens. And working a muscle as it lengthens is known as eccentric training. And when we perform exercise that’s dominantly eccentric, it actually doesn’t burn as much as a more basic type of strength training. And yet, it also does produce more soreness.

Eccentric emphasis exercise does produce more soreness. And that soreness, I think it’s just related to at the cellular level, just what you might call damage at the cellular level and inflammation related to that exercise that is short term and is part of what triggers the body to grow stronger. So it’s safe and often part of a successful exercise program. Soreness also, as you said, delayed onset muscle soreness means that it tends to come on a couple days after an exercise. session, a strength training session, if you’re going to get it. But it’s also something that people tend to experience less and less as their program goes on.

So they experience it a little bit more in the beginning. But as time goes on, they tend to have less soreness. And I just want to really emphasize that from the research we know, that the degree of soreness you have after a workout really is not a good indicator of how effective that exercise was. The best indicators have to do really over time with how we’re progressing, how your performance is able to progress. And at the exercise coach, of course, we have a little advantage in this area using exerbotics equipment. So that each session, our coaches guide someone through, they’re able to show them, here’s what you did last time.

Here’s what you did today. Here’s how you’re progressing over time. And that’s the real key. Strength training is a stimulus that triggers the body to grow stronger. And we know from research, when we grow stronger, we get total body benefits. Improving strength changes every system of the body for the better.

So that is the most important thing to look at from session to session over time. Are we seeing strength improvements? We need to be, that’s the whole point. This exercise is a means to an end and that end is improved strength because that leads to improvement in all the systems of the body. And so if we’re not seeing that improvement, either the exercise is not intense enough, which our coaches really don’t allow to be the case. They really encourage and guide people to exercise at effective effort levels, but it’s either we’re not exercising intensely enough, or we’re not giving our bodies enough time to recover.

And that’s why we, we don’t really work out more than a couple of times a week at the exercise coach.

And in some cases, you’ve got to give your body another day to recover. And before you come back for an exercise session, I love it. Thank you for explaining and breaking down why muscle burn is our friend. It’s so true. If your exercise isn’t delivering any changes to your body, like increased strength, like body fat loss, like improved a one C levels or bone density scans, or easier time golfing or hiking energy levels, your energy levels, then it’s not, then it’s not intense enough to be triggering those changes in your body.

The type of exercise that really changes your body and moves the needle the most in your health and in your fitness is the type that is the right intensity and muscle burn is a part of right intensity exercise.

It’s a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah. Exercise is not an end in and of itself. We at the exercise coach don’t necessarily communicate that. It’s good that you did some exercise.

It is, but we’re really more focused on exercise being a means to an end and delivering coaching. that makes a difference. Coaching that inspires, motivates, and provides accountability and encouragement that enable people to put forth that right intensity, as you say, to make sure that every session is a means to an end and never a session that’s just going through the motions. Yes. If you haven’t listened to our episode on supervision about the role that a trainer plays in your exercise results, please go back and listen to that one. If you’re a person who knows that, you know what, on my own, I’m not going to desire or be able to carry out the exercise that will allow my muscles to truly work hard enough in a safe way to see meaningful change.

I encourage you to get a trainer and to

into an exercise coach near you.

It is non -intimidating. Your workout is customized exactly to your current fitness levels and your results will be measured and proven to you. And each workout’s only 20 minutes. And it’s only 20 minutes, one to two times a week, to see these amazing changes in our body that make our muscles so much better, so much healthier, stronger, and all those great things. So thank you for tuning in again to the podcast and we will see you next week. Remember strength changes everything.