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Understanding How Oxygen Helps Muscle Performance
When you consider these facts, it becomes very clear why flooding your body oxygen before, during and after exercise can have such a profound effect on your physical performance.
Glucose + O2 = CO2 + H2O + ATP + heat
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When your muscles use up the readily available oxygen, your muscles go into a state called "oxygen debt," where they begin to convert glucose to lactic acid and start to fatigue.
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If they have sufficient amounts of oxygen, your muscles will not produce lactic acid and therefore will not fatigue as quickly.
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Muscles store glucose as glycogen in your muscles. Typically, your muscles have more glycogen than oxygen, so oxygen becomes the limiting factor in creating ATP.
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Muscles store oxygen as well using a protein called myoglobin. By storing oxygen, myoglobin allows muscles to have more oxygen available to them than other cells in your body.
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When blood enters the muscle, some oxygen is stored by the myoglobin and some oxygen is used up immediately.
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After exercise, you body continues to breath hard and your heart rate remains high because your liver needs oxygen to provide the energy to break down the lactic acid into simple carbohydrates.
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