Chris,
No, I am not kidding, are you? If you pass out unconscious your muscles definitely won't help you in any way. Your brain can't work without sugar like your muscles can. After you finished working out, you are not even in a fight or flight situation, you are recovering, and gluconeogenesis is not done for the benefit of muscles, as I explained. I am not sure why you would ever think otherwise. Again, insulin is important to switch away from this mode when protein and carbs are finally digested, resolving the state of energy shortage and low urgency that drives muscles catabolic and limiting their uptake and use of sugar.
Have you ever done a metabolic conditioning workout where the intensity is high enough where you can't think well?
No?
Definitely. Heck, you can even faint / pass out if you are not careful or if your blood glucose level gets too low.
This (hypoglicemia to this level) is much more common for people with metabolic problems like diabetes, because normally the body tries its best to avoid it, especially -AFTER- you finished a workout and are resting (sitting down for example, so we don't confuse hypoglycemia with a circulation-induced lightheaded state), which is the situation we are discussing.
As I said the point I am making is that in such a post-exercise situation, with minimal glucose in the bloodstream and muscles in a catabolic state, muscles are not trying to uptake as much glucose as they can from the bloodstream, rather they are doing the opposite, staying catabolic and using other metabolic pathways so they don't compete for sugar and are not interfering with the needed gluconeogenesis. When you finally get some post-workout nutrition, it's the insulin that alerts all these systems to switch mode and allows muscles to quickly uptake glucose quickly to restore glycogen stores and switch to anabolic mode.
required inflammation step (perceived as soreness)
No one is arguing there's not inflammation.
Soreness is not always present.................
There's no other way to state it.
I agree with this.
As I stated before:
You can have muscle growth through other mechanisms that I would argue are less desirable because they are less permanent and less effective. You can increase vascularization for example, retain more energy and water, etc, synthesize more proteins, all without actually increasing the number of nuclei and organelles (which is much more permanent and also helps produce proteins faster and in higher amounts).
And you might have some limited muscle growth through an inflammatory mechanism that is low enough to be beyond a detectable level of soreness, which is better than nothing but not optimal.
Now, that's for pure muscle growth. We agree that if you are just going for purely performance factors like strength or endurance you might want to take muscle growth and soreness out of the picture so you can train more frequently, but if you accidentally get muscle growth and soreness associated with it that's still a good thing.
