-: The next system that we're gonna go through
is gonna be the endocrine system.
This basically, is where all of our hormones fall under.
The endocrine system manages the hormones
in terms of their creation, their release from the organs
and a lot of the downstream messengers and stuff,
receptor sites and all those things.
We can look at that system as a whole,
the management of those hormones.
Everything from creation to actually sensing out,
then carrying out the action of those hormones.
There's many hormones that are down-streamed
from the nervous system.
So I was saying the nervous system kind of functions
on this higher hierarchy, so certain
neuro-transmitters will effect certain hormones.
We'll get into that when we talk about the nervous system.
In one of the later modules here,
we actually go through the neurological phase.
We'll go into all the neuro-transmitters.
Then there are hormones that have ways of
communicating with the body in a closed loop,
but the main thing I would say with hormones,
is that they're metabolic messengers.
If you had to think of one thing that they were
communicating, the majority of it is metabolic status,
from the entire body, like testosterone, cortisol,
insulin, glucagon, growth hormone.
All of the main hormones hormones that we're
thinking about in terms of training, you can think of
in some way, shape, or form, those things are
manipulating how we use resources,
how we use nutrients, or where we're
shuttling those nutrients, or what things
are not allowed to have certain nutrients.
The hormones are basically causing a shift
of nutrients throughout the body.
It's a way of basically having long-distance
communication between different tissues in the body,
in terms of nutritional status, resource demand,
and basically being able to say,
hey, from the calf over here to the liver,
I'm burning through a lot of glucose,
we're gonna need more blood glucose, right?
There's gonna need to be a hormonal response.
There's gonna need to be a cascade
from the brain saying to the adrenals,
hey, we need to release cortisol to alleviate
fatty acids, and to increase blood sugar.
Long-distance communication to effect metabolic things
going on in the body to effect metabolic processes,
to effect where nutrients is and where it's being used.
If we look at our hormones, and we just kind of
cover these very, very briefly,
we have insulin which basically is the hormone
that says we have excess amounts of fuel.
Specifically carbohydrates.
Other fuels can contribute to insulin being released
as well, so as a blanket statement, we'll say for sure,
always it's an excess of fuel,
that's availability to burn and store.
So when insulin is there, it says, hey, we have
plenty of carbohydrates, so cells can burn carbohydrates,
so the cells are switch over to using more carbohydrates
for fuel, and then we're gonna go into a fat storing method,
whereas cortisol is going to be the opposite.
It's gonna say, we need more fuel, right?
Enough cortisol basically says, shit's about to hit the fan.
So, not only do we need more fuel, but it's like,
we need a lot of fuel fast when it gets to a certain level.
So these two are opposing.
Insulin is saying we have a bunch of fuel,
we can burn carbs and we can store fat.
Cortisol is the opposite saying, hey, we're about to
expend a bunch of stuff, so we need actual fuel
being dumped into the blood to be used,
so it's gonna say, okay, let's actually start pulling
fatty acids out, and let's get glucose into the blood
so that can be sending nutrients to tissues
for activity, sensing that the muscle tissue
is about to demand a lot of nutrition.
And a big portion of that cortisol release
comes from the nervous system,
and the other aspect of it is we can release that
in response to the blood sugar being lower
because the muscles are using the glucose in the blood.
We'll look at thyroid.
Thyroid is essentially my low-threat hormone.
It's like an "all systems go".
When thyroid level is up, that says, I have permission
to do all of the metabolic things that I need to do.
Everything is good.
It's a bright, beautiful, sunny day outside.
Like everything is amazing.
Go ahead, every cell, do what you need to do.
That's why thyroid hormone has such a good impact
on metabolism, 'cause it's saying,
it's okay to run all of the metabolic processes.
When we look at actual thyroid hormone receptors,
we see that every cell has thyroid receptors.
It's essentially saying that the threat level is low,
so everything is good, everybody go about your business,
to all of the cells in the body.
When we look at epinephrine/norepinephrine,
our catechola means, our high-level stress hormones.
These are higher up in terms of hierarchy than
cortisol even, so they're more stressful
stress hormones than cortisol,
if I can say more stressful stress hormones.
In that case, now it's a high-threat level, right?
What that means is pretty much disable any
non-essential things, all weapons are hot.
We've got this, like, all right, let's lower
our defenses, let everybody go about their day,
everything is fine.
We get Catecholamines, or we get epinephrine norepinephrine,
it's like, all right, anybody that not defending
the community, run into your houses,
lock your doors, nobody goes anywhere, nobody does
anything, except the military.
That's what's happening here.
This is the fight or flight type hormones.
This is the, okay, I'm going to constrict
the blood vessels, shove all the blood where
I need it to go, shove all the nutrients
where I need it to go, anything that could be
consuming energy that isn't for our
immediate survival, needs to stop.
It's going to push, like heart-rate's going to get elevated,
the muscles are going to get lots more blood flow,
the nervous system is gonna get amped up
all because it's sensing
that high-threat level
in terms of your body's stress reaction.
It's like, okay, we don't care about
detoxification because we need to deal with
this immediate problem right now.
We may not even live to detoxify tomorrow,
so don't spend any nutrients detoxifying,
focus on the task at hand, which is some sort
of physical exertion, whether that was biologically wired
to fighting for survival, fighting for catching
food or running from prey, or running from a predator.
Hopefully we didn't run from prey.
Whatever needs be, that was that survival mechanism
to deal with the problem immediately,
and deal with that initial threat level.
The next two are going to be growth hormone and androgens.
As you see how I'm pairing this,
is like two opposing things, so you can understand
the synergy from which these hormones work.
Growth hormone is my nutrient partitioning
hormone, and what its main job for nutrient
partitioning, is it saves glucose.
When we look at growth hormone, its job is to tell
the body which tissues can continue using glucose,
and which ones need to not use glucose,
and just run on fat.
And really, that's the brain that gets the glucose,
and everything else gets the fat.
That's one of the reasons we release growth hormone
at night, 'cause we don't our other tissue to be
sucking up blood glucose at night when we're not eating,
when we're not consuming anything.
We lower our blood sugar, and we drastically
tax the liver to make more blood sugar.
What we do, is we have this nice surge of
growth hormone a couple hours into sleep
that shifts our cellular metabolism over to
fat dominant for any tissue that can survive on fat
and doesn't need glucose.
That way, the brain can be the only thing needing glucose,
so the glucose demand over-night is really, really low,
so I need very little stress hormones to manage blood sugar.
It's really, really easy to get a nice, good recovery,
and my body's running on the most efficient fuel source
in terms of waste production and whatnot,
in terms of fatty acids.
Fat is sufficient, it's just not fast in terms of
producing energy, which is fine if I'm sleeping,
'cause I don't need a lot of energy fast,
I just need enough energy, nice, slow and controlled.
Androgens, like testosterone, for example,
use glucose in nutrients, and they basically
shove it into tissues.
Not in the way insulin does directly,
but what they do is they basically help drive
more nutrients to specific tissues, the tissues
with those androgen receptors.
Androgens are nutrient partitioning to tissues that are
sensitive, or that have those androgen receptors.
That's going to be things like muscle tissue.
That's why having healthy levels of testosterone
aids in recovery, because it's going to help drive
the metabolic and anabolic processes of those tissues.
It's going to help drive nutrients to them,
and by doing so, by driving nutrients into those tissues,
allows for more anabolic activities to occur
within those tissues, because if you're giving them
excess nutrients, those tissues are like, cool,
we have all these nutrients, we can do stuff,
We can build things, we can replicate,
we can do all the anabolic activities, right?
Totally opposite, whereas growth hormone,
even though it's called growth hormone,
is really like, hey, everybody chill out, go into
rest mode, we're sleeping now, we're gonna run off fat,
we're not going to do anything crazy, we're gonna
conserve glucose, and then testosterone's gonna be like,
cool, take all the nutrients, give it to this guy,
go forth, grow, do things.
So two totally different messages that
we're getting with those two hormones.
The next system is going to be the muscular system.
Obviously this is where we transfer that
neurological impulse into the contractile work,
which is ultimately going to lead to
biochemical energy creating kinetic energy.
So, us taking food and then actually
converting it into mechanical motion.
That's the very short version, but ultimately
we're going through this process where we're using
a chemical reaction to create movement, so that we can
actually move around, we can do the things we need to do.
The muscular system's where all that's going to happen.
We have multiple functions in the muscular system
outside of just creating movement,
one of them being as an energy store.
We store glycogen in muscle tissue.
We do store a little bit of fat, but mainly
muscle is a glucose storage thing.
And it's selfish.
Muscles are selfish.
They store glycogen, but they store it for themselves.
It's like having a toddler with a piggy bank.
That's their money, it's not the house's money,
that's their money, right?
So the muscles store glycogen, they store it for themselves.
They are selfish in that aspect, and that glycogen
is not going to be used by the brain or the red
blood cells or anybody else that needs glucose
when they need it, unless we're in a severe starvation mode.
So you're gonna get some fatty acids in there
but same result, what the muscles store
tends to be for the muscles themselves.
But because they do store it there, what that does
is that when those muscles need energy,
it creates less of a burden on the system.
Otherwise, every time you exercise, you would put
a tremendous burden on the rest of your system to fuel
all those muscles if they didn't have their own reserves.