1. Pretend for the moment that you are an insulin responsive glucose transporter, GLUT4, who lives in skeletal muscle. Provide a detailed description of what happens to you starting from the moment that insulin binds to its receptor at the plasma membrane, how the insulin signal gets to you, what you do in response to the insulin signal (i.e., where, how and why do you move) and what happens to you following the removal of insulin from the receptor.
2. You recently received your supplement of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise (MSSE) which contains all of the abstracts for the upcoming ACSM convention. One of the free communication sessions on carbohydrate metabolism has a presentation entitled, “Exercise, obesity and insulin-resistant skeletal muscle: A questionable relationship”. As you read the abstract you find that the speaker will be indicating that obesity/high fat diet does not lead to skeletal muscle insulin-resistance and will also be presenting that exercise training does not have any positive effects on improving skeletal muscle insulin-resistance. Moreover, you have learned that the full manuscript of this presentation will be published in an upcoming issue of MSSE. What are you going to do?
Here’s an idea. Why don’t you prepare a letter to the editor of this journal to voice your opinion. Your letter should be well organized and persuasive in order to convince the editor to not publish this article. Be sure to include in the body of your letter (but not necessarily in this order): 1) how exercise training improves insulin action in skeletal muscle, and 2) the relationship/cause of obesity/high fat feeding to skeletal muscle insulin-resistance
3. Resistance training results in a substantial remodeling of skeletal muscle.
Provide a description of the regulation of gene expression that occurs in response to resistance training that results in skeletal muscle hypertrophy and discuss how you believe that resistance training should be performed to optimize this process of gene expression.
