2023 CBPA - Evolutionary insights towards patterns of energy allocation from ultra-endurance events.pdf (390.16 kB)
Patterns of energy allocation during energetic scarcity; evolutionary insights from ultra-endurance events
journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-11, 08:32 authored by Daniel LongmanDaniel Longman, Eimear Dolan, Jonathan CK Wells, Jay T StockExercise physiologists and evolutionary biologists share a research interest in determining patterns of energy allocation during times of acute or chronic energetic scarcity. Within sport and exercise science, this information has important implications for athlete health and performance. For evolutionary biologists, this would shed new light on our adaptive capabilities as a phenotypically plastic species. In recent years, evolutionary biologists have begun recruiting athletes as study participants and using contemporary sports as a model for studying evolution. This approach, known as human athletic palaeobiology, has identified ultra-endurance events as a valuable experimental model to investigate patterns of energy allocation during conditions of elevated energy demand, which are generally accompanied by an energy deficit. This energetic stress provokes detectable functional trade-offs in energy allocation between physiological processes. Early results from this modelsuggest thatlimited resources are preferentially allocated to processes which could be considered to confer the greatest immediate survival advantage (including immune and cognitive function). This aligns with evolutionary perspectives regarding energetic trade-offs during periods of acute and chronic energetic scarcity. Here, we discuss energy allocation patterns during periods of energetic stress as an area of shared interest between exercise physiology and evolutionary biology. We propose that, by addressing the ultimate “why” questions, namely why certain traits were selected for during the human evolutionary journey, an evolutionary perspective can complement the exercise physiology literature and provide a deeper insight of the reasons underpinning the body's physiological response to conditions of energetic stress.
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A : Molecular and Integrative PhysiologyVolume
281Publisher
ElsevierVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The AuthorsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2023-04-06Publication date
2023-04-07Copyright date
2023ISSN
1095-6433eISSN
1531-4332Publisher version
Language
- en