Abstract
The application of molecular techniques to exercise biology has provided novel insight into the complexity and breadth of intracellular signaling networks involved in response to endurance-based exercise. Here we discuss several strategies that have high uptake by athletes and, on mechanistic grounds, have the potential to promote cellular adaptation to endurance training in skeletal muscle. Such approaches are based on the underlying premise that imposing a greater metabolic load and provoking extreme perturbations in cellular homeostasis will augment acute exercise responses that, when repeated over months and years, will amplify training adaptation.
Many of the contemporary training strategies undertaken by elite endurance athletes, such as altitude training, heat acclimatization, and periodization of fuel availability, can now be explained by the principle of enhanced cellular adaptation in skeletal muscle, induced by the increased metabolic load or greater perturbation in cellular homeostasis imposed by these practices.