Have you ever struggled to keep pace with the kids in your life?
Many children can play and play and play, long after adults need to stop to rest.
New research published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Physiology helps to explain why.
The authors of the new study compared the power output and post-exercise recovery rates of 12 prepubescent boys to those of 25 adult men, including trained endurance athletes.
The researchers asked participants to undergo a series of physical tests to learn how their bodies responded to high-intensity exercise.
They found that prepubescent boys were less susceptible to muscle fatigue and recovered more quickly after exercise compared to adult men.
“We found the children used more of their aerobic metabolism and were therefore less tired during the high-intensity physical activities,” Sébastien Ratel, PhD, the lead investigator of the study and an associate professor of exercise physiology at the Université Clermont Auvergne in France, told Healthline.
“They also recovered very quickly,” he continued, “even faster than the well-trained adult endurance athletes, as demonstrated by their faster heart-rate recovery and ability to remove blood lactate, a metabolic by-product contributing to muscle fatigue.”
While this study was limited to boys and men, Ratel said that investigators expect similar findings if they were to compare prepubescent girls to adult women.