Some of the top sports physiologists in the world, led by Dr Louis Burke just wrote the UCI’s position on supplements. Lead author Jamie Whitfield joins us to discuss their recommendations.
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Trevor Connor: Hello and welcome to Fast Doc, your source for the signs of endurance performance. I’m your host, Trevor Connor, here with Coach Julie Young, recently the UCI commission, many of the top exercise physiologists and nutritionists in the world, including Dr. Louise Burke, Dr. NGA Maka, Dr. Brendan Egan, and our guest today, Dr.
Jamie Whitfield, to write a series of reviews on sports nutrition and how it relates to all the different disciplines in cycling. No one is A UCI consensus on nutrition for cycling. The project is aimed at arming coaches and athletes with the newest and best science on nutrition to both aid performance and to protect the athlete’s health.
While the papers cover everything from nutritional periodization to bone health, perhaps the paper that addresses the most misunderstandings and confusion in sports nutrition is the one we’re gonna talk about today. Supplements. Thousands of supplements are marketed to cyclists as performance enhancers, and surprisingly, it’s recreational masters athletes to use ’em the most, not elite cyclists.
The potential problems with supplements that aren’t selected carefully are numerous, including whether they actually do what they claim, how the different supplements interact with one another, and the frequency with which supplements can be tainted with unclaimed and illicit substances. Here to take us through the paper is lead author Dr.
Jamie Whitfield, a professor in the Center for Human Metabolism Performance at the Australian Catholic University of Melbourne. He’ll take us through the relatively small illicit supplements that had been proven to aid performance, including creatine, beta-alanine, sodium bicarbonate, nitrates, and glycerol.
We’ll also dive into ketones, which continue to be a controversial supplement, but we’ll address the pros and cons of each. Dr. Whitfield will also talk with us about the many things we need to know that supplement advertisers often don’t tell us. Joining Dr. Whitfield will hear from Dr. Dana Liss, the founder of Summit Sports Nutrition.
We’ll talk about the values of the new UCI Nutrition project, and Angela Poey, founder of Met Pro Nutrition Coaching and his thoughts on creatine with athletes. So get ready to challenge a few nutrition claims and let’s make you fast.
[00:02:11] Chris Case: Hey, listeners, come ride with us now through March. Trevor Conner and I are hosting Zw rides every Tuesday with special guests like Neil Henderson, Brent Buckwalter, Dr.
Steven Seiler, and more. Each workout will be an easy no drop ride, so you can chat your cycling training questions to our experts and get instant answers all while enjoying a one hour workout. Register for Fast Talk Labs, zw rides on zw.com or see our guest list and register on Fast Talk labs.com/zw.
[00:02:42] Trevor Connor: Well, Dr. Whitfield, really exciting to have you on the show, your first time with us.
[00:02:47] Jamie Whitfield: Yep. Happy to be here.
[00:02:48] Trevor Connor: Yeah, this is some exciting stuff that you’ve been doing, that I know you’ve been working on. We’ve actually seen multiple of these studies. You work with Dr. Burke and several other big names in the sports nutrition world.
And you’ve been commissioned correct, to do some work for the UCI, looking at various sides of nutrition and cycling, correct?
[00:03:10] Jamie Whitfield: Yep. So I’m part of the steering committee for the UCI Sports Nutrition Project. So that’s myself, Louise Burke, heavy Gonzalez, AMI Dolan, and Indigo Mike. So we’ve as a group commissioned the overall project and tried to get people involved from various realms.
So this was something that came through the UCI and it was something that was a priority for their medical officer and he had expressed a lot of interest in that. And then as academics, we sort of took the reins from there. And so what was really interesting with this project is cycling is so widespread, there’s so many different disciplines and the.
Bioenergetic demands across those disciplines are so wide ranging that it’s a little bit different than previous consensus for sport that have been done. So this has previously been done for world athletics, for swimming, tennis recently had one as well, I believe. But those modalities tend to be quite similar, whereas with cycling, you could have something that’s 15 seconds or you could have something that’s seven hours.
And so that really made us think about how we were putting this together. And as a result, we’ve tried to get people who are embedded in sport in every single chapter. So practitioners, coaches, physiologists, as well as researchers. And so as a result, there’s, I believe, 15 chapters that are coming out. And then there will also be a consensus at the end.
And so those have been sort of rolling out and off the press over the last few weeks and starting in December.
[00:04:38] Trevor Connor: The review we’re talking about today is part of a broader series of reviews commissioned by the UCI to advance the science of cycling. Here’s Dana Liss talking about the value of this enormous project that’s already reaching practitioners like her.
[00:04:51] Dana Liis: There’s a UCI cycling consensus project. I’m on like the last chapter with a chef nutritionist. We wrote the applied chapter, but there’s like 13 or 15 chapters or sections to that project. So yeah, Jamie’s managing that UCI cycling project. I think that what they’ve done with that project is really broken down all of the really core nutrition pieces.
Like you could have one big publication or consensus on nutrition for cycling. It’s really vague. It doesn’t really give you tools to apply that information. So what they’ve done with this UCI Road cycling nutrition project, and they’ve expanded it to all cycling disciplines now is break breakout into really sort of nuanced pieces.
So one piece is periodization, but not just carbohydrate periodization, protein periodization, even supplement periodization of when. Do different supplements make sense? So I think that’s probably the one piece I really enjoyed reading about. ’cause it resonated as a practitioner like, yeah, we really do periodize.
Everything is, if we do everything all at once, it’s hard to really be consistent. You’re kind of picking out your priorities and periodizing according to your yearly training plan.
[00:06:01] Trevor Connor: I loved what you just pointed out, the fact that, for example, we’re about to talk about some of the supplements and in a few cases you.
You might have a supplement where you go for a six hour road race, this isn’t gonna do much for you, but if you’re a BMX rider or if you’re doing a four mile hill climb, it can actually have a pretty significant impact. So really looking at the different modalities and the answer’s gonna be different.
[00:06:21] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah, absolutely. That’s something particularly with the supplements that made that. Chapter, very difficult to write. One of the peer review comments was, well, could you give us every context that this could be used? And it was, well, where do you begin? And then you start getting into, well, what happens if you combine supplements and mix and match?
And it’s basically an endless combination that you could have. So it’s been very interesting trying to get into that space and make sure that we provide balance between providing enough information that it’s useful for a range of people. So whether that’s an elite athlete, a recreational athlete, a coach, a practitioner, but also not overwhelming people with just a 500 page document of, well, you could use it here, but not here and here, but not here, et cetera.
So we try to strike that balance throughout the review.
[00:07:12] Trevor Connor: Yeah, I was gonna say, if you took just the five, six main supplements you talk about here and got into every scenario and also every. Combination of the different supplements. I mean, you go from having a review paper there to that’s a whole book.
[00:07:27] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:07:28] Trevor Connor: So let’s kinda start with the broad overview and talk a little bit about the best practices for supplement use. Before we dive into some of the specifics and individual supplements, what would you say is your overall message?
[00:07:42] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah. So one of the things that I think that we’ve really tried to highlight throughout is not just the fact that it’s not just pros and elites that are using this.
It’s not just individuals on the world tour, the Olympic stage that are using supplements. The highest prevalence of use is actually in masters aged athletes, and this is something that is ubiquitous across sport there. There’s a lot of different people that are using various supplements, and sometimes that comes with an evidence base.
Sometimes it’s things that they’ve heard through training partners or coaches or on social media or whatever the case might be. So what we’ve tried to do is really highlight some of the key considerations across the board for using supplements. The ones that we focused on are what we’ve termed evidence-based.
So this is. Predominantly from the Australian Institute of Sport Supplement Framework, which classifies supplements according to their scientific evidence base. And so we picked Group A supplements primarily, which is those that do have a strong scientific support for their use in sport with the caveat that there was a few that we included, such as ketones that we felt were important to discuss because they’re so prevalent and popular within cycling and have a bit of a mystique, if you will, attached to them.
So that was the first point that we really wanted to focus on, was making sure that what we were talking about was things that were evidence-based. I mean, again, we talked about the fact that you could have any number of combinations if you start expanding this to every possible supplement that’s being pushed out there.
Again, we’re no longer looking at a single textbook, we’re looking at a series at that point. So there’s a lot of things out there, but unfortunately, most of those things don’t have strong evidence to support their use. So that was probably, I would say the main point that we started with. Something that we also tried to reiterate throughout is if you’re involved in competitive sport, regardless of what level you are technically beholden to your country’s anti-doping standards.
There’s a very recent example that’s probably topical for this podcast where the individual who won the masters, I think time trial and possibly also road race at the Grand Fondo World Championships that were held in Australia this past year, he’s since tested positive and being stripped of those titles, and that’s a Master’s H athlete.
So contamination is a real concern with any supplements. You need to make sure that you know what’s in what you’re taking and that there’s nothing else nefarious in there. And so that’s something else that we’ve tried to dedicate a significant portion of this review to is sort of some of those concerns about making sure that what you’re taking is coming from a reputable source, it’s evidence support, and then ideally is coming with something that is supported for use in sports.
So has some batch testing attached to it.
[00:10:21] Trevor Connor: I’m sure a lot of our listeners might be a little surprised by that, but that’s something that’s, that is really important. There are probably more positive results in doping tests because of people that took a supplement that they thought was benign and unfortunately it was contaminated.
I remember when I was at the National Center in Canada, we were given a whole lecture on that. Be very careful about where you buy the supplements and if you do use supplements, we were told to record the serial number for every single bottle that we bought. So if there was ever an issue, a positive test, you could actually go back and test that particular batch and see if it was contaminated.
[00:10:58] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah, absolutely. And unfortunately, for whatever reason, the supplement industry in some cases can be a bit of the Wild West and things like pre-workout and bodybuilding supplements, et cetera. There is, I think, perhaps an inherent bias that if there is something in there, you’re more likely to see an effect and that’s more likely to carry weight.
And then people are going to re recommend that supplement or continue buying it because they’re feeling a positive effect. And whether that’s simply speaking the protein that’s in there, or if there’s something else that’s in there that perhaps shouldn’t be, that’s where a lot of those contaminations come from.
And so we’ve really tried to emphasize some of that through. The review and in the consensus as well, we’re trying to incorporate a flow chart of decision making in terms of when is it appropriate to consider supplements, and what is the logic workflow that you need to be thinking through, and in terms of incorporating that for use in sport.
[00:11:54] Julie Young: I like what you did in this paper and you categorize the different levels of athletes by tiers. So tier one, recreational tier two trained, tier three, highly trained national level, tier four elite athletes competing at an international level, and tier five is world class Olympic and or world champion medalist.
So I would imagine just because we all know there’s like this physiologic gulf between an untrained or even a. Trained and an elite, the elites are such outliers. So I would imagine that was a bit challenging as well in terms of how to direct this to the audience.
[00:12:30] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah, I, I think the goal there was just to provide context.
’cause what is the limiting factor for myself when I’m racing is not necessarily going to be the limiting factor for someone who’s racing the Tour de France. We are different physiological specimens, for lack of a better term. So I think it is important to figure out what is the physiological demand of the sport or discipline that you’re doing, and then also what is the limiting factor for you, yourself or for the athletes that you’re working with.
And so that’s something that we really tried to communicate with the authors of the individual sub-disciplines, is we really wanted those chapters to focus on what are the demands. Of that discipline within cycling. So whether that’s Cyclecross Mountain Bike Track, BMX Road, obviously, whatever the case is that they’re discussing, really emphasizing what the needs are from a nutritional and a bioenergetic standpoint for that discipline.
And by providing that context, then you can start looking at the supplement chapter and say, okay, well where do these things fit? Within that discipline or within my athlete, because we’re trying to view this as a total package as opposed to just a series of standalone articles. So hopefully when the full thing is released, most of them have been last few, or as I said, coming off press.
Now. Hopefully that will be cohesive as a message throughout, because yeah, as you said, the goals shift, the demand shifts even within a discipline, and as a result, the supplement that you might reach for or try to use in that situation, that will also change.
[00:14:07] Trevor Connor: I still remember being at a race with my team that started with about an eight minute time trial.
He’ll climb time trial, and the whole team had heard about sodium bicarbonate and said, oh, we gotta try that. And they had never used it before.
[00:14:20] Angelo Poli: Oh
[00:14:20] Jamie Whitfield: dear.
[00:14:20] Trevor Connor: And so they were sitting in the team band handing it around, and I watched all them. They’re all getting bloated, they’re all getting gassy going, oh, I feel awful.
And they’re like, Trevor, you wanna try this? I’m like. No.
[00:14:32] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah, so that’s again, I mean you asked about some of the recommendations. One of the first things is obviously try these things in training in, in a low stakes environment, first, reaching for something that may have some side effects on race day is always a bad place to be because if they’re ever gonna rear their head, that’s usually when it’s gonna happen
[00:14:50] Trevor Connor: happen.
So we had Dr. Burke on the show a couple years ago. It was episode number 1 92, and we talked to her about this categorization of the supplements in the class A, B, and C. And what I found interesting is when we had that conversation with her, there were only three supplements in Class A. It was caffeine, creatine, and sodium bicarbonate.
And I noticed your class A list has really expanded. I think you’ve added four or five supplements to it. I’m assuming that’s just because more research has come out and there’s now certain supplements that we can say there. There’s enough evidence to say these are beneficial, but the expanded list, and I hope we can dive into these somewhat, is you’ve had beta alanine, sodium citrate, dietary nitrates, and glycerol.
[00:15:36] Jamie Whitfield: Yep. So sodium citrate sitting in in Category B, but the a IS framework is something that is a living document, if you will. It is evolving over time, and I think most of them were updated in 2025. So it is something that is being constantly reviewed and revised, and there are instances where supplements move in or out of categories as a result.
This sort of tried and. Tested ones have stayed the test of time. So creatine, sodium bicarbonate, and caffeine. Those are three that there’s decades and decades worth of research that have really supported their use. Sodium bicarb is an interesting example that is sort of having a bit of a renaissance, but this is something that there’s research from the eighties and before, looking at the effects of sodium bicarbonate on exercise performance.
So that’s something that has come back into vogue and has become trendy again. And I think caffeine is probably being ubiquitous and is more or less always been around, but as you said, dietary nitrate. So things like bee reduce that has moved into to category A. And there’s been a lot of work done on that over the last 10, 15 years, primarily by Andy Jones’ group, the University of Exeter, as well as others.
And then now we’re starting to look at glycerol for plasma expansion and sort of hyperhydration protocols. And that’s something particularly here in Australia, that there’s been a lot of work done on, perhaps by nature of the fact that it’s just very hot here. And hydration protocols are important, but that’s something that’s used with athletes a lot here as well.
[00:17:04] Trevor Connor: So, you know, in that past episode with her, we basically beat caffeine to death. And the message there was, there’s no doubt it helped performance. So maybe not something to go too in depth on. But what I found really interesting is, yes, creatine is a, a class A supplement, but more associated with strength sports or explosive sports.
And what I liked was your debate in this paper of how much does it actually benefit cyclists? Like maybe it’s great for BMX, but is it beneficial for road cyclists? What was your feeling on that one?
[00:17:38] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah, I think when we started to really break it down and that specific section on creatine was written by Brian Saunders, who’s got a lot of expertise in that area.
The interesting thing about cycling is it’s sort of the default testing protocol in classical exercise science study. So to that extent, life was a little bit easy for us, that there was a lot of things that we could grab that were cycling based, not necessarily always in a true competitive cyclist perspective, but at least a cycling based modality.
And it looks like creatine is pretty efficient at improving performance across distances, even upwards of 40 K time trials and one hour time trials, et cetera. So I think there is a role for creatine. I know there are athletes that I work with that are professional cyclists that look at creatine as something that’s part of their nutrition program, because at the end of the day, what it’s doing is it’s enhancing that rapid energy production that’s sprint power that you’re looking at, and.
Depending on the type of discipline that you’re looking at. I mean, road is obviously probably the most popular discipline in cycling. So by default, I tend to revert back to that a lot. But this applies for other disciplines as well. But you could have a road stage where for four hours guys are rolling around doing 150 watts, which for those individuals is basically barely even functioning.
And at the end of the day, what’s gonna matter is that final sprint. So even though we’re looking at it as an endurance event, what really matters is that final sprint on a sprint stage, or the ability to generate rapid power to establish a break, get separation on a climb, et cetera. So I think by looking at the mechanisms of action for any of these supplements, CREA team, it’s that rapid energy production.
I think there is a role that can be played in something even endurance based, like road based cycling. And again. By outlining what the physiological demands of those different disciplines are, you can start thinking about, okay, well is that gonna be really the limiting factor for performance in what I’m doing?
So if you’ve got a guy whose job is just to sit on the front and churn out five watts per kilo for however long he can, creatine’s, probably not gonna be something that he really needs to worry about. But if you’ve got somebody who’s looking to be a competitive sprinter or get into the break or do something like that, then maybe that is something that is beneficial.
And again, it could also be phase of the season dependent, something like a classic season where you’re looking at explosive efforts and things like that. The supplement profile might be very different than if you are looking at more of a traditional grant tour type or road based profile.
[00:20:20] Julie Young: In your paper, you, I believe, had suggested not a maintenance load, but a loading protocol for creatine, and there’s a water retention that comes along with that loading protocol.
And then I know a lot of sport nutritionists are recommending more of a maintenance dose for endurance athletes to kind of step around that water retention, what are your thoughts on that?
[00:20:43] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah, so the classic loading protocol is around 20 grams per day split into different doses, and that’s usually over the course of seven days, whereas.
If you take a more gradual dose for a prolonged period, so something like three grams for three to four weeks, I think is what we’ve recommended in the paper. That’s a more gradual load. What’s interesting is, so Professor Louise Burke, this was prior to me coming to Australia and working alongside her.
She did a study that actually looked at what the water retention was associated with creatine in cyclists, and it doesn’t look like it’s across the board consistent with every individual, and it looks like it. Is really just in those first few days. So again, I think with any supplement, again, thinking about what is the end goal in mind, trying to figure out, well, if my race is in three weeks, then yeah, maybe you can get away with doing a, a longer loading protocol.
If you’re looking at something where it’s like, okay, this race is actually in a fortnight, then you’re probably going to have to do a rapid loading and there may be some water retention associated with that, but that does appear to be transient and really just within the first few days. And again, it, depending on what the situation is, you know, if that’s a hot race, then maybe having a little extra water on board probably isn’t the end of the world.
[00:22:00] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:00] Jamie Whitfield: So I think it’s really, again, thinking about context specific situations and where that’s going to play a role. Chances are, if you’ve got sufficient time, that water weight is really gonna level out over the longer term with the creatine supplement.
[00:22:14] Trevor Connor: Yep. But you did bring up something that’s important is if you’re gonna get the benefits from creatine.
This is not taking one small pill a day, like when you were talking about 20 to 25 grams a day. That’s a lot.
[00:22:27] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah. So with some of these supplements, that is, again, one of the caveats is a lot of these things are not just a one-off. So beta alanine is another one where you’re looking at realistically at least four weeks of supplementation and it has quite a stable half-life that’s gonna stay in your system for quite a long time, and it gradually sort of washes out and degrades over time.
Creatine is the same thing, whereas if you’re looking at something like a caffeine, a dietary nitrate, as an example, sodium bicarb as well, those tend to be more of, you can take those acutely to an influence same day performance. And so what we’ve tried to do again in this chapter is we’ve tried to provide a simplified table that outlines all the sort of bullet points that are really important from a, if I know nothing else and don’t read the whole paper, what are the take homes?
It’s okay. What is the dose and when do I take it? How long do I need to take it for? How long will it be in my system and what are the possible side effects? We’ve tried to highlight that within the paper for all those supplements and giving some realistic goals there.
[00:23:33] Trevor Connor: Yeah, no, you had some really nice tables actually.
Particularly like the table that detailed, here’s the concerns and the things to watch for with supplements and some of the ways to mitigate that, but I think we’ll get to that in a minute.
[00:23:44] Jamie Whitfield: Yuck.
[00:23:45] Trevor Connor: Before we move on to beta-alanine, let’s hear from nutrition coach Angela Poey with his thoughts on creatine for endurance athletes.
[00:23:54] Angelo Poli: I think by and large it is one of the longest studied supplements. I take it personally, I have seen a lot of benefits across the board. I am not on the bandwagon with the, you know, needing to take extreme quantities of it, but in appropriate quantities. I see a lot of people benefiting from it. Something to be aware of is it will cause intramuscular hydration to go up, right?
So it’ll cause you to hold a little bit more water in your muscles. So during a baseline testing period, so for example, where I see issues is a lot of women hopping on board with it, which I, by the way, I think is great, but they’re trying to establish a calorie deficit and weight loss. At the same time.
They’re taking a supplement that’s actually pushing water up in their muscles and what they’re getting is faulty data if they’re tracking their weight and body mass. So time it appropriately, but I think that there’s a lot of benefits to it. Both from a muscle preservation standpoint and of course well documented for a muscle growth standpoint for people doing hypertrophic training.
[00:25:02] Trevor Connor: You brought up Beta alanine and that’s a new one on the list since we last spoke with Dr. Burke. So tell us a little bit about why that’s moved into the Class A and what the potential benefits are.
[00:25:13] Jamie Whitfield: Yep. So again, that’s a supplement that this had, I would say quite a fair bit of work. It was something that was really quite popular when I was first starting my PhD in 2012 or so, and something that I actually.
Was starting to look at is a possible PhD topic, so it’s something that’s been around for quite a while. Wim Rave in Belgium’s, done a lot of exceptional work on that and looking at some of its effects. And he’s co-authored some of the other chapters in the UCI series, so has provided his expertise there.
But beta alanine is a buffering agent, so again, trying to mitigate acidosis. So as opposed to sodium bicarb, which is. Going to exist in your blood, in your plasma and exert its buffering effects there. Beta alanine is taken up by the muscle and can act as an intracellular buffering agent. So it’s working within the muscle as opposed to outside of the muscle.
And again, really good evidence to support its use. It’s something that, as I alluded to it, you need to load beta-alanine. You need to really push that in the into the muscle. And so that means you need to take relatively high doses per day over a long period of time in order to make sure that is getting into the muscle.
And so that’s probably the major limitation there. But what it can do is it can delay fatigue. So again, it’s acting as an intracellular buffering agent to hopefully mitigate some of that acidosis that can impair your muscle’s ability to contract and produce force, which again, is going to be important for cycling.
And this is probably something that I think is relevant. Across disciplines. So this is one of the ones that I think really has a home in most events. So you know something that is going to be lasting 60 seconds. So some of the track based events, that’s a role where intracellular buffering is, is definitely going to be a potential benefit.
So something like BMX, track based cycling, et cetera. But equally for something that has a lot of repeated efforts like Cyclocross or mountain bike, where you’ve got large sections where you’re doing super maximal efforts and then followed by recovery. This is where some of these buffering agents can really play a role.
And so again, I think that’s one of the ones that is, is probably. A little bit more frequently used from athletes and practitioners that I’ve spoken to. It’s something that a lot of people are really reaching for and I was fortunate that I was able to contribute to the world athletics nutrition projects in, I think it was 2017, and my area of focus for that was middle distance running and similar thing that’s events that last anywhere from two minutes to 15 minutes for the 5K for women.
And beta alanine is something that is, is quite popular in those sorts of energy demands as well. Similar to what we were talking with creatine, traditionally, it’s not thought of for endurance based events, but you need to think about what is the actual success look like for you as an athlete or for the athlete that you’re working with, if they’re a bunch sprinter or the goal for the team is we need to get in the break today, and that’s gonna mean lots of attacks happening in in short duration that are super maximal.
Then again. Fat alanine is gonna be advantageous there. It’s not gonna sustain you over the course of steady state exercise for hours, but it’s those rapid energy production phases of cycling that’s really gonna play a role in.
[00:28:31] Julie Young: Jamie, it seems like there’s some overlap between Betaine and sodium bicarbonate.
How would you determine when to use one or the other?
[00:28:40] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah, so I don’t think it, it’s strictly speaking of one or the other, per se. There’s lots of people that are stacking those because again, they will work slightly differently. One is working within the muscle, one is working outside of the muscle, so they can be definitely synergistic.
And there is some work that has started to look at how those can sort of be combined to enhance the overall effect. I think the reason why someone might select one versus the other is really just the loading protocol. So sodium bicarbonate is something that you could be taking on the day of a race or.
Perhaps in the two to three days leading up to a race if you wanted to do a bit of a load. Whereas Beta Allen is something that you need to be taking consistently over a long period of time. And so some people don’t love that. It requires a bit more maintenance, a bit more thought process. Obviously with any of these things, there is inevitably cost associated with taking anything, particularly if it’s something that you’re taking every single day, and so that’s really, I think, where the key point of difference is if you are a professional athlete and you’ve got a nutrition support team around you, maybe that’s a non-factor and you can sort of do whatever you need to do.
But for a recreational athlete that maybe doesn’t want to be consuming something every single day or thinking backwards because who knows when I’m racing next sort of thing, then something like a sodium bicarb can definitely be more effective because it’s just something that you’re taking as a one-off or around key performances as opposed to a maintenance dose.
[00:30:12] Julie Young: Can you give an instance where you would use beta-alanine in tandem with sodium bicarbonate?
[00:30:17] Jamie Whitfield: So, yeah, so plenty of athletes, you know, here in Australia right now, it’s summer crits are in full swing. So even recreational athletes who are working full-time, nine to five jobs, there’s. The possibility that they’re racing two to three times a week because there’s crits in the evenings on where I am on Wednesday nights, and then there’s usually opportunities Saturday and Sunday mornings to race lots of athletes that are sort of in the A Grade, which would be cat one for you guys.
So. Very much the punchy end of things who are racing quite seriously. Lots of them would consider sort of stacking those two together professional athletes as well, if they’re more of a sprint based athlete on the road. So somebody who’s looking to be in that bunch Sprint finale, or maybe not necessarily the Sam Wells Fors of the world where they’re just flat out fast twitch, but somebody who’s got more of a sustained effort, that’s an individual where oftentimes they would look to be stacking those two supplements because potentially they’re trying to go a little bit longer.
That’s the last 5K break, as opposed to, I’m trying to get off a wheel with 150 meters to go. So. Again, a little bit more of a sustained energy output. That’s oftentimes where people will, will stack those doses again. It’s interesting. Recently there’s been discussion online on, on social media about the efficacy of sodium bicarbon road races.
So if you are taking something potentially two to three hours before a road race and that road race is seven hours, are you still seeing that effect? Probably not. And so that’s where, again, strategies like split dosing and, and other things start getting into play. And I think we, we’ve talked a about that a little bit within the chapter, but the opportunity to take a small dose prior to exercise as well as perhaps a dose during the race, if that’s something that’s afforded and a possibility, depending on the event road as an example, having something in your back pocket where you can just grab it and take it with some water or dropping back to a team car if you’re at that level.
Those are opportunities. Obviously, something like a cyclocross, you’re not gonna be able to do that. So again, it does tend to be context dependent and also goal dependent. If your goal is just to get up the road right from the gun, then loading before a race is probably gonna be beneficial. ’cause your intensity is going to be at the start of the race.
If you’re focusing on trying to produce your PEs power at hour three or four or five, then taking something that’s got a three hour half-life or something like that maybe isn’t your primary source of concern. Whereas something like Betaine that’s in your muscle, it’s going to exist.
[00:32:51] Julie Young: Why do you think that sodium bicarbonate has experienced this resurgence?
So they’re just determining new like applications Because in reading your paper, I do see that it does work across a range of efforts like durations, but also sustained and intermittent.
[00:33:08] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah. I don’t think it, it’s necessarily that there’s been new applications that have been found as such. Obviously there are new products that have come to market.
Morton being the primary example of that, where they’ve developed a new delivery system where you’ve got small bicarbonate capsules within a hydrogel mixture, and I believe it comes in sort of a bit of a bowl and you sort of spoon it in. I don’t know that that is necessarily any better than traditional methods of enteric coated capsules.
So capsules that have a bit of a coating on it so that it’ll be a delayed release. Obviously, Trevor’s example of taking just baking soda in the back of a van at a race that’s gonna work the same way, provided you can mitigate the bloating and the gas build up in, in your gut that’s associated with that.
Enteric capsules sort of skip that step. So I don’t think that the new delivery systems are any better than some of the existing systems that are in place. So again, those capsules, but I do think it’s something that has. Sort of captured people’s imagination, whether that’s just marketing and hype more than anything, these things tend to be a little bit cyclical.
In the early two thousands, everybody was wearing nasal strips when they were racing, and then they disappeared for 10, 15 years, and then for whatever reason, they’re back in the pro Peloton again. There’s no science that has come out in the last 20 years that says that they’re any more effective than they were 20 years ago, which is to say they’re not effective at all.
But people see it, they hear about it, they read about it, and then, oh, well, you know, PCHA is doing this, therefore. I should be doing this, ignoring the 30 hours a week of training that he’s doing in altitude camps and the unique physiology and all the rest. No, it must be this tiny little strip that’s on his nose that’s making him win grand tours.
So yeah. My, my take is that I don’t think the science has moved any further forward. Again, there’s a great evidence-based dating back decades for something like sodium bicarb. I think it’s just something that’s become re popularized in, whether that’s social media or lay media, whatever the case is, it’s just something that’s sort of come back on vogue.
In the track programs that I know of, they’ve been using this consistently. And so the idea that this is a new thing is, well, no, we’ve been using this forever, but I think it is starting to move into other spheres, and part of that is just new ways of delivering the same product
[00:35:30] Trevor Connor: with beta alanine, since it’s basically protecting you against intracellular.
So inside the cell acidosis. I would imagine something to also be aware of is it’s gonna reduce lactate concentrations. ’cause that’s your body’s natural way of dealing with hydrogen’s ion buildup in the cells. It pumps it out with a lactate molecule. So if you’re not accumulating as much hydrogen ions, you’re gonna pump out less lactate.
Correct.
[00:35:58] Jamie Whitfield: Well, so when you produce lactate, you’re also producing hydrogen S and every time you break down a TP, you’re also producing hydrogen S. So the two things are definitely tied together, but what that intracellular buffer is gonna do is it’s going to negate some of that. Acidosis. And so how that then feeds forward to some of the other energy pathways, as well as how that’s going to impact your ability to impact the contractile apparatus of the skeletal muscle as well.
Those things are all going to be sort of flow on effects to that. So having a drop in pH within your muscle, so an increase in acidosis within your muscle that can impact your ability to utilize different substrates. So below a certain pH threshold, your ability to take up fats into the mitochondria stops, and so having this intracellular buffer is going to protect that homeostasis within the muscle.
But yes, as a result, you may also have a decrease in lactate production just because other aspects of the molecular machinery are being protected and operating optimally. One of the things that sodium bicarbonate. As opposed to beta mean should do is it should actually draw that hydrogen ion out of the muscle because it’s creating a concentration gradient between your blood and the muscle.
So there’s a variety of different things that it can be doing. I don’t think I focus on lactate too much as a negative per se. I’ve just wrapped up my first year exercise physiology teaching for the year, and that’s usually the soapbox speech that I give at the start of the year, is I provide a couple of clips of commentators that the Olympics or the World Championships, and swimming’s a great one because they always have great lines about all.
You can see the lactate coming outta their eyes, things like that. And I really try and emphasize that. Lactate is not this inert waste product. It is also not a cause of fatigue, et cetera. So we haven’t really focused too much on, on lactate within the chapter. But certainly if you’re one of those individuals that is, is tracking all these various metrics and we’re using a lactate monitor daily in training, some of these supplements can play a role in terms of how your body is utilizing and producing energy.
And so that is again, something to be cognitive of, you know, you need to think about this as a whole system. So it’s not just, oh, my lactate leader says I’m at for, well, what does that mean relative to the power output that you’re holding? What does that mean relative to the sensations on the bike, et cetera.
So, you know, it’s a whole ecosystem as opposed to looking at any one thing.
[00:38:31] Trevor Connor: Well, that’s exactly where I was going, because it’s becoming increasingly popular for endurance athletes to train using a lactate monitor and to base their intervals on the lactate levels. And you just said. If you’re gonna use beta-alanine, you need to be supplementing for a long time.
So if they’re supplementing with beta-alanine and using a lactate monitor, they might need to adjust what number they’re looking for and target a slightly lower number.
[00:38:54] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah, I mean, it’s tricky because you’ve got a conflation of things there, right? You’ve got a supplement, but you’ve also potentially got four weeks of training that’s happening across things.
So taking all of these things in a bigger picture view as opposed to a single session view is really where you need to look at these things. Because again, it, there’s books and books that can be written about it, but yeah, it does start to get complex once you start saying, well, okay, well how is this interacting with this and all those different physiological systems.
But yeah, absolutely your point’s well made there that you need to think about how these are going to impact training responses as well.
[00:39:34] Trevor Connor: But I think it’s a really important message that people think about these supplements very simplistically. And there can be big downstream effects that you’re not even aware of or thinking about.
[00:39:44] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, by default, I think the thought process is race day performance. How am I going to improve whatever race I’m doing? But some of these supplements are also. Potentially going to impact training responses as well. If you are having less acidosis in the muscle during training because you’re taking something like a Betaine, perhaps you can hold a higher power output across your, you know, four minute intervals that you’re doing, and therefore you are inducing a greater strain and training response and therefore you may have greater adaptation.
So yeah, it becomes a how long is a piece of string sort of thing. Where do you begin with all of that? It can be very complex.
[00:40:26] Julie Young: What about the other side of the coin? Jamie, if an athlete is taking beta-alanine for an extended period of time, is there risk of dampening the body’s natural response and adaptation like its efficiency to respond to that stress?
[00:40:41] Jamie Whitfield: I haven’t seen anything with any of the supplements that we’ve listed in sort of that category A, that there’s any real negatives to long-term use. Again, Brian Saunders is, has really led the charge on a lot of that work with both beta alanine and creatine. He’s shown that it’s safe taking for, I think one of the studies off the top of my head was upward of 40 weeks and something like that, so it doesn’t appear like there are negative health impacts for taking this for a prolonged period of time.
Again, the caveat there being that nobody has tested this indefinitely, so nobody has the answer of, well, what about n plus one weeks? We’ve only got what the literature currently tells us, and each individual will obviously be different, but they don’t appear to be real negative effects over time. I don’t think it’s something akin to a high antioxidant dose where you’re blunting adaptations as such, if that’s what sort of your question is, because again, the idea is hopefully that you’re increasing the work that you can do and therefore it should all balance out and hopefully.
Promote a greater stimulus as opposed to something where you’re holding the same wattage or the same intensity and it’s dampening the muscle machinery responses that are invoked by that training load. So something like a, again, an antioxidant as an example, that can potentially decrease signals, cold tubs as well.
Same sort of thing. I haven’t seen anything with any of these supplements that I’m aware of that it’s going to decrease the training signals. And there is also, again, selfish plug here. There is a chapter within the overall nutrition project that is looking at training responses in response to cycling based exercise.
And that one is also published and available as well. So that gets into a little bit more detail with some of those signals and, and how those can be impacted and modified and as well as connected to recovery.
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To design your personal strategy for performance, just go to met pro.co/fast talk. That’s MET p.co/fast Talk and start training smarter today. So I know you really wanna make sure we get to talking about ketone bodies, but before we get there, I did wanna just get the couple minutes summary of the two others that have since been added to that class A.
Can you tell us quickly just a little bit about inorganic nitrate and glycerol?
[00:43:58] Jamie Whitfield: So inorganic nitrate, the most common way of consuming that is in beet root juice, and that often comes in a 70 milliliter shot or something like that. Now, that’s probably the most common method for consuming that you can get inorganic nitrate through your diet, so through Whole Foods.
But for context, that would end up being around, I think, 200 grams of raw spinach, which is quite a lot of spinach. So unless you’re Popeye and that’s your go-to food, that’s probably not gonna be the most effective way to do it. So again, similar to some other supplements, something like a bee juice shot is a concentrated version of providing the same dose.
Originally, sort of the thought process with bee root juice was that it was gonna be really beneficial for endurance performance. The classical studies with this showed that there was a decrease in VO two, so oxygen consumption for the same power output that you were holding. So if you’re holding 200 watts, and ordinarily that was say.
3.5 liters per minute. VO two, you could hold it for a little bit less. And that was at the time, a pretty major finding in exercise science because classically it’s thought that the energy output associated with work is fixed. So anywhere between 10 to 12 milliliters of oxygen per watt. And so it really sort of took off from there.
And there was some suggestion that it was improving mitochondrial efficiency, so how you actually produced energy at the mitochondrial level. And I think that’s, in my opinion, largely being debunked. Now I don’t think there, there’s very solid evidence to support that, but there is some good evidence that the A TP turnover.
Might be different. So how you’re utilizing the energy in order to contract the muscle perform movement, that has changed as a result. And so again, the classical studies really looked at endurance performance, so a one hour ride time trials, et cetera. But what was really interesting with the early work with dietary nitrate, and this was sort of in the mid 2010s, was that there seems to be a dose response based on training level.
Where if you get people who haven’t trained at all, you know, 10 outta 10 of them will have a positive effect and that their VO O2 will be lower for a given power output, which means in theory, you could hold a higher power output for the same oxygen cost, which for endurance athletes, that’s the gold standard.
That’s what you want. But as you start moving up that spectrum from sort of tier one to tier 2, 3, 4, or five, getting into world class athletes, you started getting individual responders and non-responders. And so I was a co-author on a study, and this was a middle distance runners, but I think we only had about two or three out of the 10 or so athletes that we tested.
Had a positive response to dietary nitrate. And these were national and international level middle distance runners, some of them who had been to the Olympics. And the two individuals that we had that were responders had the lowest training volume and the slowest personal best. And this has since been replicated by other studies and meta-analyses, and we’ve referenced some of those within our supplement paper.
But it looks like there is a true training response. And again, I think this gets to what you were talking about at the start of the episode, Julie, where the physiological demands, even within an event, are not always going to be the same across all people. What is the limiting factor for performance for a weekend warrior is gonna be very different than somebody who’s training 10, 20, 30 hours a week or whatever the case might be on the bike.
And so those things tend to shift. But what’s been really taking off, I’d say, in the last three or four years, is the effect of dietary nitrate on muscle contraction and. Sort of more intense exercise. So it does appear to enhance the ability to produce force within the muscle, and this is using electric stimulation of the muscle, so sort of divorcing it from your thought process of moving the muscle.
And so it’s starting to get used in more explosive disciplines now as well, as opposed to sort of traditionally the endurance on the road and the mountain bike, et cetera. And now we’re starting to see that getting applied in things like track cycling and BMX, et cetera, where perhaps having an improved ability to generate force can be beneficial for performance with dietary nitrates.
Specifically what I’d like to point out though is. Worst case scenario here is you’re getting an extra serving or two of vegetables by consuming something like bee root juice. The side effects are limited to perhaps some surprising color of your urine and maybe a bit of an unpleasant taste, but some people don’t mind it so much, but there aren’t really any negatives.
And you know, if you look at that table within the paper, you’ll see that there’s actually a gap there, that there aren’t really any side effects listed with dietary nitrate. So even if you aren’t getting a positive effect, physiologically, it is derived from a whole food source. So there are other things in it that are beneficial just for general health and wellbeing.
Same as consuming ve.
[00:48:57] Trevor Connor: So what’s the one minute on glycerol? What does it do and why is it class A?
[00:49:01] Jamie Whitfield: So what we’re looking at with glycerol is that’s typically used in hyperhydration protocols. So it’s in order to retain additional water. And so again, if we think back to what we’re talking about with creatine, where we’re looking at that being a negative side of things, where, you know, for a lot of cyclists power to weight ratio is the be all and end all.
If you’re increasing the mass and you’re not increasing the power output proportionally, that’s a bad thing. In some cases, increasing a plasma volume expansion by something like glycerol could be advantageous. If you’re racing in a hot environment, that is something that is a consideration, particularly if it’s a discipline where you perhaps are not able to fuel or hydrate as readily Something like a cyclocross, for example, you’re not taking bottles during cyclocross as readily during some mountain bike disciplines, you might not be taking bottles at all just because the nature of the discipline means that there aren’t really.
Opportunities to drink readily because of the technical nature of the course, et cetera. And so those are areas where if we think about dehydration at a certain level as inducing impairments and performance, the classically cited example is often 2% of body mass dehydration. That’s where you start seeing cognitive and performance decrements.
If you’re increasing the range in which you have before you get to that 2%, then perhaps that can be beneficial. And so that’s something that is being utilized in a lot of other sports athletics. As an example, with hot marathons, that’s something that’s used quite a lot. But I think there is growing willingness to experiment with that in a cycling based environment.
So something like gravel cycling, for example, if you’ve got, uh, seven, eight. Perhaps nine hour race, and you’re limited based on the rules of that specific race where you can’t have outside swan your hell, and you’re relying only on aid stations or what you can cover by inducing a hyperhydration protocol to begin with.
That just means that you’re not so worried about hydration during perhaps those opening hours of the race, and you’ve just given yourself a little bit of a buffering zone there for your hydration levels.
[00:51:09] Trevor Connor: So yeah. Let’s talk now about ketones. I noticed that Dr. Brendan Egan was one of the authors on your paper, and that’s a big area of research for him.
I know it’s an area of research for you. We had him on the show that was episode 2 85, and I remember him being relatively positive about supplemental ketones. I get the sense you have a different take on it.
[00:51:29] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah, I think I’m probably a little bit more skeptical. Brendan’s, I mean, he’s obviously a co-author, so he’s approved what we’ve said in the review and he and I wrote the ketone section of this review together.
But yet, so ketones are included specifically within this cycling review because, and wrote in particular, ketones are something that sort of refuses to go away. I think it sort of. Reared its head around 2016 where there was an initial study that showed that it could change fuel utilization and that perhaps, as opposed to thinking of it in a classic binary example of you’re using either carbs or fats.
Suddenly ketones could be this third fuel that entered the mix. And if you’re using ketones, then again that would suggest you’re sparing the other two, which sparing carbohydrates, sparing glycogen for endurance performance in particular is a good thing. If you can save that glycogen till later on in exercise, that potentially can be advantageous in the last sort of 10 or so years.
I think every time there’s been a mechanism proposed for ketones to enhance performance, it’s been pretty quickly knocked down, but just as soon as it’s knocked down, something else pops up and says, no. Well, what about this? So as an example, that sort of initial hypothesis that it’s. Being used as an energy source.
There’s some really nice work that was done from the University of Guelph in Canada that showed that even in isolated mitochondria. So loading this system in as pure form as possible, eliminating the gut, eliminating circulation, just giving the mitochondria ketone bodies, they don’t use them. So human skeletal muscle uses that.
In a tiny fraction compared to what it would use carbohydrate. So it’s not providing a significant energy source for muscle. Ketones are molecules that are produced by your body naturally during periods of severe energy restriction. So the way I tend to think about this is from an evolutionary perspective, why would your body be designed to use something?
More efficiently in starvation when all the other fuels that you would ordinarily not have in those situation are also on board. So carbohydrates and fats are probably going to outcompete for use in skeletal muscle compared to ketones. So if you have those other substrates, your body is more than likely going to be hardwired to use those because from an evolutionary perspective, it wasn’t designed to use ketones as a primary energy source.
Do vary, but skeletal muscle certainly doesn’t.
[00:54:01] Trevor Connor: So the one question I have for you from an evolutionary standpoint there, so it’s not just in severe caloric restriction, but also carbohydrate restriction. And if you look at societies that lived in more polar regions, there would be periods of time in the year when there would be almost no carbohydrate availability.
So while they might be getting enough calories, they would actually be in the state of ketosis for. Periods of month or longer at a time during those winter months when all they could get would be mostly just fat and protein.
[00:54:35] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah, so there are definitely other tissues that will use ketones. Cardiac tissue will certainly use ketones and your brain will use ketones as well.
Your brain lacks the ability to use free fatty acids, so it will use ketones as an alternative energy source, but at least at the ske of muscle, if we’re thinking about exercise performance, it doesn’t appear to be using it. And there’s been subsequent work from other groups that have used tracers. So actually labeling a ketone and following it through circulation and figuring out how much is being utilized, that it contributes about 4% of total energy, even at very low power outputs.
And I’m talking like 50 to a hundred watts here. And as you increase the intensity, the relative contribution decreases. So as an energy source, I think that. Has been, in my mind, put to bed. And that’s something that I’ve tried to emphasize throughout the review, where it gets in with other things. The new sort of realm that has popped up is ketones for recovery, and so there was a study showing that it could blunt the symptoms of over training.
How that is, is being interpreted I think varies there. There’s some nice data that’s recently come out from Jose Retta in the UK that has shown that it doesn’t induce a any difference in training adaptations or responses post exercise. And we have some data that is being written up right now that shows that it’s not impacting recovery in a meaningful way either.
So again, I think it’s definitely a hot topic, but in this case, my opinion is that the hype is probably outstripped what the science is saying. And I think at least early on, particularly in the pro Peloton for road cycling, it was a case that there was a few teams that had access to it. And so there was, uh, well, they’ve got it, but we don’t, why are they taking it?
And we’re not. And there was a bit of a hype and a fear of missing out almost. They’re using it, but we’re not, and they’re winning races, but we’re not that sort of thing. And I think that’s sort of come down the ranks to where you get recreational athletes that are taking it as well. And I’ve given a few lectures on this and the screen grabs from things like cycling tips, various other web-based publications, the number of articles that there are with very sort of clickbait titles of band ketones, not time trial bikes, things like that.
It’s something that is really been a major issue within the pro Peloton, to the point that the riders organizations have actually come out and issued statements about it. The UCI came out with a statement I think in November, December of 2025, outlining their perspective on it. So despite the fact that.
This is firmly classed in group B for supplements, so requires more interrogation to support its use. There’s still a lot of concern and consternation about the use of ketones and whether this exists in sort of a gray area for whatever reason. And I think part of that was one of the teams that was using it was SMA at the time.
And at the time they were the most dominant team in the pro Peloton.
[00:57:33] Trevor Connor: So it must be the ketones.
[00:57:34] Jamie Whitfield: Exactly.
[00:57:36] Trevor Connor: So I hear you on the performance side. I know that’s the focus of your review, and this is not really what this episode’s about, but I’m just interested. There’s certainly plenty of research. For example, I’m looking at a study right now in nutrients called Modulation of Cellular Biochemistry, epigenetics and Metabolomics by ketone bodies.
And it’s talking more about the health side and this review shows. A lot of research that ketones might be protective against Alzheimer’s, ischemic heart disease, it might have anti-cancer benefits. What’s your feeling on that? Do you think there is more evidence for that?
[00:58:13] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah, so there’s definitely a lot of work, again, with the major caveat that this is not my area of expertise at all, but there is definitely a lot of work on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s with ketone bodies.
And again, this is something that can cross the, the blood brain barrier. So it is used by the brain, and again, it is also utilized by the heart. In fact, some of the original research that was on ketone bodies and sort of suggested the improved energy efficiency was in an isolated rat heart model. So that’s sort of where a lot of that stems from.
So there are definitely things that ketones can do. We’ve looked specifically at some of the histone work and some of the genetic modifications, and we haven’t seen anything with ketones. This is unpublished data, but I’ve also. Taken muscle biopsies from individuals on a keto diet and look to see if they’re.
Sort of molecular machinery for using and taking up ketones is increased and there’s no change there either.
[00:59:10] Trevor Connor: Interesting.
[00:59:11] Jamie Whitfield: So it looks like from a skeletal muscle perspective, there is a limited capacity to utilize ketone bodies. And that’s my understanding of the literature currently. And again, I think for me.
Sort of connecting dots that probably make sense because if you’re in a starvation model where ketones would be up, you’re probably not thinking about how can I do my best one hour power on a time trial bike? You’re thinking about conserving energy as opposed to expending it, and so that’s sort of where I’m at with the performance side.
The recovery side is definitely evolving. There’s some work that’s been done looking at muscle protein synthesis out in McGill University in Canada, and there’s other work looking at cognition and behavior and attention span. It’s definitely evolving, but right now I haven’t seen any strong evidence to support, certainly its use within cycling to improve same day performance, and I’m very skeptical about it.
Being used to enhance subsequent in performance as a recovery modality.
[01:00:12] Trevor Connor: That makes a lot of sense. As you said, if this is more in a starvation or a low carbohydrate state, they’re gonna be prioritized for parts of the body that absolutely must survive and continue to function like brain, heart, tissues like that.
And that’s certainly where you’re seeing the benefits.
[01:00:28] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah.
[01:00:28] Trevor Connor: I bet you and Dr. Eagan had some interesting debates over this.
[01:00:31] Jamie Whitfield: We’re giving a, uh, symposia on it in July at the European Congress of Sports Science. So it’s myself, Brendan Eagan and Brianna Stubbs are doing a, an invited symposium on all things ketones.
So. Brendan will be doing performance, I’m doing recovery and adaptation. I’m Brianna, who is one of the authors on the original ketone work that that came out and is a former world championship medalist in rowing. She’s talking about it in terms of its applications for other populations, particularly aging.
So she’s at the Buck Institute now in California and is a researcher there. So I’m hopeful that will be an interesting conversation and spark some good discussions.
[01:01:12] Trevor Connor: Yeah, it sounds fascinating. So I think you’ve given a lot of thought about several different supplements that have shown evidence of having benefits for cyclists.
So to all our listeners make your decisions about these, but I think before you make those decisions, there are some concerns to be aware of and I do appreciate in the paper you talked about food first as being important that don’t just live on supplements and sports food. You do need good, healthy, natural food.
This is literally, as the name says, it is a supplement to that. It shouldn’t be the focus, but. What concerns do you have about even supplements that we know can be beneficial?
[01:01:52] Jamie Whitfield: I think for me, as both a practitioner and a researcher, I always come to what is the gap in performance? So if you’re trying to target something, why, and what is it that you’re trying to target?
Can that be dealt with? Just training? Maybe that’s the route to go, but if there is a gap, sort of figuring out what that is and then how a supplement might interact with that. So, I mean, we talked about this a little bit beforehand, but trialing supplements beforehand and making sure that you’re utilizing it out of performance environments first, making sure that you don’t have an adverse effect.
Understanding how it works for you, because everybody is a little bit different. That’s sort of the starting point of when you are incorporating supplement. In terms of the concerns, again, as you hit on there, Trevor, these are in often cases, purified ingredients, so they’re providing something very specific that it has a specific effect, but it might only do that and it’s not gonna provide all the other vitamins and minerals and other things that are important as part of your overall diet.
And that’s something again, that we’ve sort of tried to provide context of other things that might be limiting as a result that aren’t strictly speaking sports supplements, but might be vitamins and minerals and other things that are important as. That could be taken if you’re deficient. Now, in terms of the concerns, again, I think we’ve really emphasized the need to make sure that what you’re taking is batch tested and has a robust evidence base.
Again, there are testing bodies that these supplements will be clearly identified as recommended for use in sport, and there’s a variety of different bodies that do that, depending on what country you’re in. But choosing those supplements is definitely where I would start. Particularly with things like protein and other sort of pre-workouts and things like that, those are usually the highest risk supplements for containing something else.
And again, if you’re getting a, a supplement that has a mixture of things in it, that’s where you also need to sort of. Have concern of this is saying this has got nitrate and caffeine and protein and a bunch of other things in it. The question is, well, is that all that’s in it? What doses are in there? Is that actually meaningful?
Yes, nitrate is listed as a group, a supplement, but if there is a tiny sprinkle of nitrate in your 20 gram scoop of pre-workout, is that gonna be a meaningful thing for performance? Probably not. So really sort of doing your due diligence to look at the ingredients list. What is actually in this supplement that I’m taking?
Is it something that has been batch tested and is safe? And as you said, Trevor, if you’re in something that is, you’re in the testing pool and you need to be cautious about this, making sure you’re looking at what are the product numbers and the SKUs on that. Keeping a record of that because if you fill out an anti-doping form, ultimately you’re responsible for everything that’s in your body and making sure that you’ve got a tracking record of that.
I’ll never forget the first time I was a chaperone and an anti-doping. It was the first time, even though I’m in this world and know this, where it’s like, oh yeah, that, you know, that’s scary stuff, that you could just be taking a protein shake for recovery just so that you get on top of things on the car ride home from your training session and three weeks down the track.
That’s something that hits up on a, on an anti-doping screen. So that’s something that I think we’ve really tried to emphasize is that if you’re in competitive cycling, regardless of whether you’re at Masters five or the world Tour. You’re still beholden to the same anti-doping standards. So really sort of having an understanding of those principles.
And then again, as we’ve sort of talked about as we went throughout the episode today, really being aware of what those side effects are. And we’ve tried to provide it some recommendations about ways that can be mitigated. So something like a sodium bicarb, there’s potential GI upset there, but by taking enteric coated capsules as opposed to just baking soda and consuming that with a high carbohydrate meal, that can mitigate some of those GI symptoms.
And so being able to explore some of those things in a low stakes environment I think is really important. Caffeine, same example. Plenty of people are using that as just your daily cup of coffee, but being aware of the context and you know, if you’ve got a, an evening crit. Do you really wanna have an extra large Starbucks coffee and then risk not being able to sleep the next night, and all the ramifications.
I, I think it’s really important to view things with a broad lens and sort of say what is the goal of the performance? What is the goal of recovery? And how does this supplement fit in the wider framework of not only what am I doing today, but tomorrow the next day. And as part of your overall training plan.
[01:06:34] Trevor Connor: Yep. Something that was jaw dropping in your review, you looked at studies where they simply took a bunch of supplements and tested them for banned substances, and one of them found that 15% of the supplements that they tested contained undeclared banned substances.
[01:06:53] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah,
[01:06:54] Trevor Connor: that’s a real high percentage.
That 10% were inconclusive. So you’re talking a quarter of these supplements, you could put yourself at risk. And I remember a while ago. At usac, I saw a list of masters athletes who had tested positive in Colorado alone, and it was a surprisingly long list, and I didn’t, there were no details, but my guess is.
A lot of those were just honest people taking a supplement and they just didn’t know that thing was in there.
[01:07:20] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, for myself, I’m based in Australia, as is Luis Burke, who’s senior author on this review. And so some of the data that we pull is inherently biased towards Australia.
And food safety standards here are extremely strict. And even still, you still have that same issue and concern that even with extremely strict guidelines and regulations, you’ve still got issues with contamination around supplements. And for me, as a researcher, separate to that, when I’m performing research or reviewing research, particularly around supplements, if somebody has provided a supplement in a study and said that there is an effect or there is an effect, one of the main things that I always ask for is, okay, well.
Show me the levels of whatever you are purporting to give these individuals, either in in blood or in muscle. If you’re giving something and you’re saying it, it’s having an effect, show me that it actually increases in circulation. Show me that there’s bioavailability and for some of these supplements, depending on.
How they’re made up. Again, using that analogy of the sprinkle of nitrate in a mixture, that’s not gonna be the level that is going to have an effect. And so making sure that, again, not just the quality control, that there’s nothing else in there, but making sure there’s actually the amount of something that it says there is in there.
Making sure that you’ve got something that is, is repeatable. There’s some great work from some of the labs up in Queensland by Ben Desborough and others at Griffith University with caffeine in particular, showing how variable one cup of coffee even within Australia is. So providing the dose of caffeine that can be incredibly wide ranging, and that’s even potentially within the same cafe.
And so you can get the same thing with supplements. And so really sort of doing your homework, but it’s always tempting to to grab something that’s on sale or on the bottom shelf and is the cheapest because, oh, well it says it’s got the same thing, but chances are there’s a reason why that’s the cheaper product.
[01:09:18] Trevor Connor: Well, Dr. Whitfield, I hate to say it, we gotta bring a close to this, but you are new to the show, so you might not be familiar with this. Our way of finishing out is with what we call our one minute take home. So this is, we go around the room and each of us has one minute. To summarize what we think is the most important point, and I will give you the option.
We can let you go first. We can let you go last you pick, but I will warn you, everybody always picks last and then the regret it because somebody before them says exactly what they want to say.
[01:09:50] Jamie Whitfield: Well, with that warning, I guess I’ll start then.
[01:09:53] Trevor Connor: So what is the most important point you’d like the listeners to take away?
[01:09:56] Jamie Whitfield: So for me, always try and do something with an evidence base. So look at the resources that are available to you. We’ve provided some links to resources within this paper of where you can find good evidence to sort of outline not just the supplements that we’ve highlighted, but also other supplements that you might have heard of and might be thinking about taking or already taking.
And so the a IS framework’s a great example of that and it outlines. Particularly for athletes and sport. What are the context? What are the caveats? Is this supported for use or not? So always start with a strong evidence base. If you are doing something, trial it first. Outside of performance, where possible, if you can get your energy and everything else from Whole Foods, that’s probably preferable.
Then relying on gels and drinks and supplements.
[01:10:43] Trevor Connor: Good response. Julia, what’s your thoughts?
[01:10:46] Julie Young: My thoughts are, I think from experience, probably more than doing research on this subject, I’m a bit cynical, probably more than a bit cynical about supplements and feel that they most generally over promise and underdeliver.
And I think now working as a coach, I’m very cautious to recommend supplements, especially to the U 23 athletes that I work with, because I do feel it can become a distraction from what really matters in terms of them really hitting the fundamentals and doing that well first. And I think it’s a different story for those at the very tippy top of the sport.
That’s my biggest concern. But again, I’m so appreciative of this resource because such trusted experts and authors on this paper, there’s no ulterior motive, conflict of interest in terms of selling a product and using sound bites of science to kind of promote their product. So just very grateful for this as a resource for cyclists.
[01:11:44] Trevor Connor: Fantastic. I originally thought my take home was gonna be about the fact that so many of these class A supplements seem to be more for short duration events that affects the last one to 10 minutes. But what I actually found really fascinating when I was reading the whole review is what you were talking about before, which gets incredibly complex, is all the downstream effects and all the combination effects.
Like you brought up the fact that you can take sodium for increasing hydration, but if you’re also say, taking sodium bicarbonate because you have a short-term event, you’re giving yourself a big sodium load, which can have a big effect. We were just talking about with beta alanine, well, how does that affect lactate levels and what happens if you’re measuring lactate?
There’s all these complexities to it that you might forget when you think, well, I’m just taking creatine and here’s the evidence for what creatine does for me. Or Here’s the evidence of what sodium bicarbonate does for me. You forget these things interact and they have other effects that you might not be aware of.
So it gets complex, and I like that you said, don’t do this day of, you don’t know what it’s going to do to you. Even with a simple supplement, you gotta experiment a lot with it. If you’re taking a bunch, boy, you really need to see what the impact is on you.
[01:12:57] Jamie Whitfield: Yeah, I mean, as you said, it’s hard enough to isolate the effects of one supplement, particularly in endurance events where you’re looking over the course of potentially hours and so you start throwing in multiple supplements and it’s very much a case of needle in the haystack.
[01:13:13] Trevor Connor: Exactly. Well, Dr. Whitfield, thanks for coming on the show and sharing all this with us.
[01:13:17] Julie Young: Thanks, Jamie.
[01:13:18] Jamie Whitfield: Thanks very much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
[01:13:21] Trevor Connor: That was another episode of Fast Talk. Subscribe to Fast Talk wherever. Prefer to find your favorite podcast. Be sure to leave us a Radian or review.
Don’t forget, we’re now on YouTube. Give us a like and subscribe there too and help us reach new audiences. As always, remember that the thoughts and opinions express on Fast Talk are those are the individual we love your feedback. Join the conversation@forums.fast talk labs.com or join us on social media at at Fast Talk Labs for access to our endurance sports knowledge base.
Continuing education for coaches as well as our in-person and remote athletes services. Head to Fast Talk labs.com for Dr. Jamie Whitfield, Dr. Daniel Lyss, Angela Polley, and Julie Young. I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening.
