The Power Plants of Your Muscles

All the cells in your body need energy, and just as combustion engines need fuel, your cells need adenosine triphosphate, or ATP for short, a molecule that can be split easily and that releases energy wherever it’s needed in the body. When you work hard, your muscle cells need a lot of energy.

ATP is produced by the mitochondria, the so-called power plants of the cell. These organelles convert food and oxygen into the energy your cells need. The more mitochondria in your muscle cells, the more mechanical energy they can produce and the faster you can row. That’s why you need to do everything you can to ensure that your body produces and plants the most mitochondria in your muscles.

How can you achieve this? The best way is aerobic exercise—uninterrupted exercise for at least five minutes during which you consume oxygen. The effect on the mitochondria depends on how long and intensely you exercise. Low-intensity training increases the number of mitochondria, and high-intensity training increases the size of mitochondria. That’s why you should train both ways.

Improvement stems from longer training sets at low intensity, and it can take three to four weeks of consistent training to see the first significant increases in your mitochondria. That’s why it’s essential, if you want to perform at a high level in rowing, to prepare for long periods and to continue training for many years.

Several studies of the oxygen uptake of top rowers show that to achieve peak performance—to generate a large amount of power over a long period of time—you must achieve a high maximum oxygen uptake. Maximum oxygen uptake varies from person to person and is influenced by genes, size, and muscle mass.

You can improve your performance without increasing your maximum oxygen uptake by training in a manner that enables you to exercise at a high level without producing lactate. This means boosting your aerobic and anaerobic thresholds, which requires building more mitochondria or increasing the size of the mitochondria you already have.

If your muscle cells have a lot of mitochondria already, it’s more difficult to make or build new and larger ATP producers. Which is why elite athletes must resort to other methods to achieve continual performance gains, such as better training, a balanced diet, more sleep, relaxation, and exposure to sunlight, and nutritional supplements that support mitochondrial growth. Consult your doctor and have your blood tested.

Regular exercise and a healthy lifestyle are critical as we age. The progressive loss of mitochondrial function accelerates cell degeneration and death. Study after study has pointed to the broad benefits of aerobic exercise, and one of the best forms, because it recruits so many muscles, is rowing.

Volker Nolte, an internationally recognized expert on the biomechanics of rowing, is the author of Rowing Science, Rowing Faster, and Masters Rowing. He’s a retired professor of biomechanics at the University of Western Ontario, where he coached the men’s rowing team to three Canadian national titles.

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