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Katabolism and Anabolism
Katabolism and anabolism are the processes that respectively lead to weight loss or muscle mass gain. When you train your muscles with sufficient intensity and consume the right nutrients, anabolic processes ensure the creation of new muscle tissue. This is called the anabolic process. When the opposite happens, we refer to it as catabolic processes, where muscles are broken down. This occurs when you have insufficient proteins available, lack adequate rest, or experience too much stress.
Katabolism and anabolism are the processes that respectively lead to weight loss or muscle mass gain. Your body breaks down muscle cells and uses them for energy supply. Both processes are important if you want to be aware of how your body works concerning strength training and muscle growth. In this article, we delve deeper into the relationship between katabolism and stress, explore which supplements can combat cortisol levels, and offer you a few tips to reduce stress.
Katabolism
As a strength athlete, you constantly try to find the balance between both processes. During the so-called bulking phase, where you are mainly focused on gaining as much muscle mass as possible, you will try to avoid the catabolic state as much as possible because even muscle cells can be broken down for this. Therefore, it often doesn’t make sense to train too long. Your nutrients from food are depleted, so your body breaks down your muscle proteins into amino acids to provide you with energy to grow your muscles in mass. This is like breaking down a tower from the bottom to build another floor on top, and it doesn’t work.
During the so-called cutting phase, where you are focused on losing as much body fat as possible, this is precisely the process that enables this. By deliberately creating a calorie deficit, your body is forced to break down, among other things, fat to provide energy. Since both processes have both opposing and unwanted effects (extra fat when aiming for more muscle mass and loss of muscle mass when aiming for fat loss), it is very important to know exactly how many calories you need to eat to know which process this brings your body into, but also with which nutrients you end up on this number of calories.
Katabolism and Stress
Even when you have consumed enough proteins, you can still end up in a catabolism and break down muscles. The main cause of the onset of this phase is stress. A leading role in causing stress is cortisol. The so-called stress hormone cortisol changes some priorities in the body to cope with stress. This occurs mainly through gluconeogenesis, the process of creating new glucose, one of the main suppliers of energy. However, this comes at the expense of your muscle mass because protein in the muscle cells is broken down for this. Moreover, the increase in glucose leads to an increase in insulin. This can lead to a different distribution of body fat, causing it to accumulate in the abdomen.
When you engage in strength training, every workout is a form of stress, to which the body responds by activating its survival mechanism. Cortisol is released. In addition, we experience daily stress situations at work and at home, which can also result in high cortisol levels. Ironically, every form of training results in a form of catabolism.
Lowering Cortisol with Nutrition
You can reduce stress by relaxing and distancing yourself from the things that cause stress. A vacation, yoga, and even music or prolonged cardio training can help lower your cortisol levels back to normal.
In addition to this form of cortisol reduction, it is also possible to lower your cortisol through nutrition. Foods like fruit provide enough vitamin C, which has a cortisol-lowering effect. In addition to fruit, other vitamins and minerals are also recommended.
Unsaturated fats also have a favorable effect on the cortisol hormone. Avocados and nuts are natural sources of unsaturated fats. Animal sources include fatty fish such as tuna and salmon.
Reducing Stress
Ultimately, stress and the accompanying hormones have a major influence on how your body functions. To tackle the cause at the source, simply lowering your cortisol is not enough; you need to banish stress from your life. How can you do that? A few tips:
- Sleep enough
- Don’t skip breakfast
- Engage in strength training
- Stay away from screens
- Eat enough and prevent hunger
- Yoga, breathing, and relaxation exercises
Anabolism
For an increase in muscle mass and strength, it is important to continuously provide your body with the necessary nutrients needed for building and repairing cells, as well as for (the energy for) all the activities your body needs to perform.
However, it is important to note that all surplus, unused nutrients can be converted and stored as fat. For this reason, it is important to know which nutrients are needed for both processes. For example, some (simple) carbohydrates are absorbed and processed very quickly, making the energy available, while this takes much longer for other (complex) carbohydrates. Eating a lot of fast carbohydrates before bedtime means that the energy released at night is not used and can be converted into body fat, which you can see as the energy storage room of your body. Conversely, you need immediate energy before and after an intensive training session. If you use slow carbohydrates for this, your body may lack energy during the training session because all the energy from the slow carbohydrates is not yet available. As a reaction, your body may then switch to the catabolic phase to provide energy more quickly. The same amount of calories can lead to both catabolism and anabolism due to differences in the type of nutrients and timing of meals.
Conclusion
Metabolism is thus a constant process that ensures two seemingly opposite functions: anabolism that uses energy to create molecules and catabolism that breaks down molecules to create energy. Knowing how they work allows you to make them work for you, whether it’s for extra mass or to lose weight.
