Science Homework Help

First.
Lactic acid, or lactate, is a chemical byproduct of anaerobic respiration — the process by which cells produce energy without oxygen around…lactic acid is also in our blood, where it’s deposited by muscle and red blood cells” (Whitcomb, 2020). It has long been thought that lactic acid has been the main cause of muscle soreness after intense exercise, however recent research has determined that it always in our bodies and quite harmless. During exercise, our muscles start burning more energy. the harder the workout, the more energy is required, so our bodies use their fast-twitch muscles for extra energy. “Fast-twitch muscle uses glycolysis to produce energy, but it skips harvesting energy from pyruvate, a process that takes oxygen. Instead, pyruvate gets converted into a waste product, lactic acid, and released into the bloodstream.” Or in other words, when your body needs extra energy, it converts pyruvate into lactic acid for a quick release energy source. Excess lactic acid after exercise actually gets recycled in our bodies and turns to energy that we can use later. (Whitcomb, 2020
Second

The muscles in your body use lactic acid for energy. The muscles make lactic acid from glucose and burn it off to create energy. The more intense your workout is the more successful your muscles are at adapting and absorbing the lactic acid.

“The understanding now is that muscle cells convert glucose or glycogen to lactic acid. The lactic acid is taken up and used as a fuel by mitochondria, the energy factories in muscle cells.Mitochondria even have a special transporter protein to move the substance into them, Dr. Brooks found. Intense training makes a difference, he said, because it can make double the mitochondrial mass (Kolata, 2006).”