Detraining And Horses

The last post noted "muscle atrophy" in terms of detraining. A little googling and voila, some muscle cells. Left click to enlarge them.

Muscle atrophy refers to the shrinkage and loss of strength that occurs in the muscle cell with detraining, but merely referring to muscle atrophy leaves a lot of ground uncovered. Exactly what is it that happens?

Since RR's last exercise physiology class occurred at University of Missouri-Columbia (yes, those Missouri Tigers) Dan Devine and Al Onofrio(football coaches) circa 1974. What I still recollect from the exercise physiology texts:

In response to exercise muscle cells produce additional filaments and the filaments already in the cell grow both larger and stronger. Conversely, in detraining the filaments lose their size, strength and also when enough time elapses between training sessions, their numbers. The muscle fascia (membranes surrounding the muscle cell) grow tougher or weaker and likely a lot more happens that I've forgotten. Additionally, at some stage in the training process muscle cells multiply and grow more numerous. I'm unable to recall whether on detraining the number of muscle cells decreases. One would guess, probably so over time. Surely by now there are volumes on detraining coming out of the exercise physiology labs.

In horses perhaps we're more concerned with the muscle cells in terms of "performance". But, there's also a training-detraining effect on skeletal structure and specifically at the cellular level of the bone tissue. I'll get into this next post.

Today's training and some photos appear below.