THE benefits of exercise don’t stop when the running shoes come off. A new peek inside the muscles of resting athletes shows that they burn fuel even when their bodies don’t need the energy.
Endurance sports such as long-distance running are known to increase the number of mitochondria, the tiny engines inside cells that convert sugars and fats into ATP molecules, the cell’s energy carriers. This boosts the capacity of muscles to consume oxygen and work at higher power during exercise.
Now Douglas Befroy and his colleagues at Yale University say that the mitochondria in the muscles of men who…
