-: Now we're going to go a little bit deeper
into the blood sugar regulation.
I've been kind of telling the story a little bit
about, you know, glucose coming from the liver,
things like that.
So we're going to look a little bit more in detail
in terms of all the things that are really affecting it.
So we have the brain up here.
And so we're gonna sense the blood sugar is getting low.
And at that aspect we're going to send
that signal to the adrenals.
From the adrenals we're going to go to cortisol.
Cortisol is gonna tell the liver to release glucose.
If we do not have enough glycogen to supply that glucose
the liver will go through the gluconeogenesis,
where it is going to basically take protein amino acids
and use that to make glucose.
Now, what we need to understand
is as we go through this process,
blood sugar is low, signal to the adrenals,
make some cortisol, liver release the glucose.
If there's not glycogen,
what has to happen is this cortisol,
this stress response has to actually become higher
to significantly drive that gluconeogenesis.
So think of it this way, a small cortisol response
gets the liver to release it's glucose that it has stored.
But a larger stress response is needed
to get the liver to start doing it via gluconeogenesis
via conversion of amino acids over to glucose.
So we have that process going.
If we are training, or if we're exerting,
were we're burying energy with our muscle tissue
that blood sugar is gonna go to the muscle tissue.
If we are not, that blood sugar will likely go towards
some combination of the muscle and the fat tissue.
Muscles that are working, actually open up their doors
to be able to take up more glucose.
So when a muscle is not trained
and it's basically at homeostasis in terms of
it's energy reserve it should in a healthy situation
be running mostly on fat.
When, once that muscle starts training,
there's this cascade of events that goes on in the muscle
and it essentially opens up these GLUT-4 receptors
that essentially turn this thing into a glucose sponge.
So that glucose sponge now is going
to soak up all of this glucose.
And it's going to basically soak up so much
that none of it can go to fat
or very very little of it can go to fat.
Plus if you add in the fact that cortisol is elevated
cortisol is gonna say hey nutrients should be coming out
of fat, not being stored in fat.
So we should essentially be directing
all sorts of nutrients to the muscle tissue.
So cortisol, in it's sense here,
is a nutrient partitioning agent itself.
In the context of training, you could look at cortisol
as actually a glucose driver towards muscle tissue.
When you also look at the fact that muscle tissue under
that same condition should be taking up glucose.
So it should be opening it's doors to glucose
'cause cortisol is gonna say to fat,
fat you are now releasing nutrients not storing nutrients.
So in a way we are partitioning nutrients
to the muscle tissue.
So even though cortisol is a catabolic hormone,
we look at it as it's catabolic
because it facilitates the breakdown of the fatty acids
in the breakdown of the glycogen from the liver.
It's actually fueling the muscle tissue.
So it's actually providing fuel to the muscle tissue.
So it's not catabolic to the muscle tissue
in a healthy situation where
we're actually driving fuel there.
When we get to the point where we talk about cortisol
being chronically elevated that's a totally different story.
So let's finish this paradigm here.
So you've got this going on, right?
If the muscle stops using the glucose
the blood glucose is going to rise.
At that point in time the pancreas is going to sense
that elevation of nutrients in the blood.
The liver will actually start to take some glucose back up.
Insulin will be released.
And now blood sugar is going to start being stored.
Now, insulin is not biased,
so it's going to store it in muscle,
it's going to store it in fat,
it's going to store it in other tissues as well.
But the individual health of all those tissues
could bias which of those tissues
are the most insulin sensitive
and most likely to take up
those carbohydrates or that glucose.
And then we are back at homeostasis.
Now that's in the context of we sensed blood sugar is low.
Now what you have to understand is there's multiple reasons
that blood sugar could be low.
Blood sugar can be low simply
because we haven't eaten anything.
So that would be like a good illustration
for where we started like,
OK, we just haven't had any carbohydrates
and blood sugar is low so what would happen
is that would release just enough glucose
to stabilize that blood sugar,
if we weren't training it wouldn't be enough to say,
really go to the muscle tissue, fat tissue.
It would be just enough to keep things homeostasis
so that the brain can function.
It has enough glucose so the red blood cells can function
in between meals or in between feedings
where we're getting our carbohydrates.
In the context of training, this low blood sugar
is actually gonna start here.
It's gonna start by the muscle tissue taking up the glucose
and that being the factor that drives the glucose down.
So the muscle starts taking up the glucose,
the blood glucose gets low
and now we have a communication between the nervous system
and the liver and the adrenals to start that cascade
of cortisol being elevated and glucose being released
from the liver and, or being synthesized to the liver
from amino acids and we do that.
That's very important because the lower your glycogen level
in this muscle, the more it's going to put a demand
on the rest of the systems to support that.
And this is one of the reasons why if you're doing
a training system that requires a lot of glucose
that you should probably do it where you're feeding
that muscle tissue glucose.
Because if it's glycogen levels are really low
that workout program that you're doing for a stimulus
in this muscle tissue now becomes very dependent
on the rest of the system.
And actually puts quite a stress on the system.
So if you were to compare that same workout
and you had one person that had high glycogen levels
and one person that had lower glycogen levels here,
what you're going to see is the high glycogen level person
is going to require less cortisol.
Less work from the liver to support blood sugar
because more glucose was there.
So it doesn't need such an aggressive stress response.
Whereas somebody that's doing that type of program
and they have very low glycogen all of a sudden
they're gonna be like whoa,
let's pull all the blood sugar out
and now we're gonna need a much higher stress response
And usually if I'm not having carbohydrates,
it's not just the muscles that don't have glycogen.
What else doesn't have glycogen?
The liver, if the liver doesn't have glycogen
how is it going to make the glucose to fuel
the starving muscle tissue?
Well it's gonna have to do it from protein, right?
So that's gonna require an even greater stress response
and that's where we get into
this becomes way more catabolic,
way more inflammatory.
And so if we're trying to train
and we're focusing on muscle growth
or we're focusing on body composition
or whatever it may be,
we're now creating a quite stressful situation here.
It's really going to tax my liver and my muscle tissue
greater than they needed to be.
Likely not going to achieve any significant stimulus
because I can't fuel that performance very well.
But I am going to drastically stress out my system.
So same program, two different conditions,
one of those is stressing out my liver
and my nervous system requiring way more cortisol,
way more catecholamines.
And the other is I'm getting higher performance
with minimal stress on the rest of the body.
So when we look at glucose and blood sugar balance
it's very important to understand the relationship between
the glycogen that's stored in the muscle tissue
verses the liver tissue
and the amount of stress response that's going to happen.
So that would be what I would say is one of the main ways
where we kick off that situation where we get into
that insulin cortisol seesaw.
So in this case if I have to drive
that stress response way up
and then what's gonna happen is when I stop training
I have this huge high circulating amount
of stress hormones.
Guess what?
It takes an even higher amount of insulin
to counteract those super high levels of stress hormones.
So insulin jumps up too high.
And if insulin jumps up too high,
we talked about it,
blood sugar is going to be driven back down.
It goes from being too high now to too low.
Well is it's too low then this cascade starts again.
And if we know that the liver is low on glycogen
guess what, that stress response
is going to have to be even higher
to rebalance that blood sugar.
So what we end up with is over expression of cortisol,
over expressions of insulin.
And it goes back and forth, back and forth
and back and forth.
And one of the ways that you kickstart that process
is you demand a lot from your system by training,
doing a glycolytic like workout
without properly nutritionally supporting that.
And drastically putting a huge stress
on your adrenals, on your stress hormones, on your liver.
So if we want to make blood sugar really easy to balance
we want to make sure we're properly fueling
the training that we're doing to get the performance aspect,
we get the metabolic benefits that are happening
here without unnecessarily stressing this.
There are times and there are reasons
that maybe we would want to lower liver glycogen
or maybe we want to lower muscle glycogen.
But we would not do so with a training system
that put an unnecessary stress on this
because what it's going to do is my sleep is going to suck,
my body composition is going to fail,
my energy is going to be poor,
because I'm in this hormone dysregulation.
My nervous system it's gonna be agitated from like,
now we're stressed and now we're not,
now we're stressed and now we're not.
So, that's the ultimate goal, is to make sure
that for proper blood sugar balance is
that we're doing the proper nutrition
with the proper training program
and we're facilitating the health
of these tissues to be able
to use glucose properly and not wastefully.