Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 4, 2025

Assessing Energy Substrate Oxidation In Vitro with 14CO2 Trapping
Published on: March 23, 2022
Factors Influencing Substrate Oxidation During Submaximal Cycling: A Modelling Analysis
Jeffrey A Rothschild1, Andrew E Kilding2, Tom Stewart2
1Sports Performance Research Institute New Zealand (SPRINZ), Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand. Jeffrey.Rothschild@aut.ac.nz.
Exercise substrate oxidation, measured by respiratory exchange ratio (RER), is influenced by sex, diet, and exercise duration. These factors significantly impact RER, but models explain less than 60% of its variability.
Area of Science:
- Exercise Physiology
- Nutritional Biochemistry
- Sports Science
Background:
- Substrate oxidation during exercise is influenced by multiple factors, including exercise intensity, duration, sex, and diet.
- The relative impact and interplay of these factors on substrate utilization during physical activity remain unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate factors influencing the respiratory exchange ratio (RER) during continuous exercise.
- To develop multivariable regression models to identify key determinants of RER and quantify their influence.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of data from 434 studies involving continuous cycling exercise.
- Application of general linear mixed-effect models to assess relationships between RER and influencing factors (e.g., duration, intensity, diet, age, sex).
- Standardized coefficients were used to determine the relative influence of each factor.
Main Results:
- RER decreased with longer exercise duration, higher dietary fat intake, older age, increased VO2max, and higher percentage of type I muscle fibers.
- RER increased with higher exercise intensity, male sex, and carbohydrate intake before and during exercise.
- Sex, dietary intake, and exercise duration were the most influential factors on RER, with daily fat and carbohydrate intake having a greater impact than intra-exercise carbohydrate ingestion.
Conclusions:
- Current models incorporating participant, diet, and exercise characteristics explain a significant but incomplete portion of RER variability.
- Further research is needed, particularly on older individuals and females, and on additional factors to fully elucidate the determinants of substrate oxidation during exercise.
More Related Videos
10:39Using Isolated Mitochondria from Minimal Quantities of Mouse Skeletal Muscle for High throughput Microplate Respiratory Measurements
Published on: October 30, 2015
06:17Measuring Mitochondrial Substrate Flux in Recombinant Perfringolysin O-Permeabilized Cells
Published on: August 13, 2021
Related Concept Videos
Factors Affecting Activity Coefficient
The activity coefficient value for an ion is close to one when the solution has almost zero ionic strength, i.e., when the solution shows close to ideal behavior. As the ionic strength of the solution increases from 0 to 0.1 mol/L, a...
Introduction to Enzyme Kinetics
The experimenter can then plot the initial reaction rate or velocity (Vo) of a given trial against the substrate concentration ([S]) to obtain a graph of the reaction properties. For many enzymatic reactions involving a...
Factors Influencing the Rate of Chemical Reactions
Concentration and Pressure:
The more particles present within a given space, the more likely those particles are to bump into one another....
Electron Transport Chain: Complex III and IV
Introduction to Mechanisms of Enzyme Catalysis
Enzyme Kinetics
Scientists typically study enzyme kinetics with a fixed amount of enzyme in the controlled environment of a test tube. When more reactant, or substrate, is...