 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Goyki. Today we're gonna discuss muscle glycogen. So where do we begin? Muscle glycogen, what is it? So it's sugar. It's the stored form of sugar, stored form of glucose. So if there is a free little sugar molecule floating in your bloodstream, we might call that glucose. What we do is we put a highly energized phosphate group. It has a lot of negative charge. We put that on to the glucose and that allows it to be chained together. And so that's what, you know, then becomes muscle glycogen. That is as much biochemistry as we really want to talk about right now. The whole purpose of this, though, is muscle glycogen is where you get your energy for workouts and for activity. It doesn't come from the blood, you know, primarily. What are the advantages of putting it in the muscle? Well, it's right there, ready for contractions. I just have to cleave off one of those glucose 6-phosphates and then it's ready to go. It's ready to be used and it hops. Actually, it skips a step of the, it skips the first step of glycolysis and then it can just start. So it actually is a little bit faster than starting with pure glucose. The biggest deal, though, is the location. It's in the muscle and the muscle's what's demanding the ATP, demanding the energy at that point during our activities. The biggest thing then outside of that, outside of just the location of it is you kind of got a lot of muscle and you kind of have it everywhere. So there is a, you know, I get a lot of my muscle glycogen, or a lot of my glycogen, my stored energy, my stored glucose is in the muscle. The other primary place that you're going to find it is in the liver, but the muscle is just everywhere. And if your muscles are bigger, you have more muscle glycogen. So you're more susceptible to fluctuations in water weight because that glycogen is what's pulling all that water into the muscle. Granted, there's other stuff doing that, but muscle glycogen is it's it's like just dumping sugar into some a glass of water. Right. If I heat up a glass of water and I keep mixing in sugar until it can't get in the water anymore, and then it starts to just settle at the bottom. Well, if I if I do that and then I freeze or let the glass of water cool, I'm going to notice more of the sugar start to float to the bottom, especially if I keep it still spinning. That is because I can't hold any more. I've put the sugar in, it's maximized its relationship with the water, and I've run out of room. If I take some of the water out, I can't store as much sugar. And that is the whole idea that's like the inverse of the idea of water weight and muscle glycogen. Biggest thing that you need to know, though, is muscle glycogen is where we're getting most of our muscles, especially for workouts that are less than an hour and a half long. And it's it's like the quickest, longest term way for us to support our workouts.