Welcome to the podium. The podcast about optimal health and high performance. I'm dr. Kevin Sprouse. This discussion was created as a resource for the patients in my practice, where I have the pleasure of working with a very small group of professional athletes and high performing individuals from around the world. So why podium? Well, it represents the pinnacle. The winner of any race takes their place to top of the podium. Much as any expert in their field is often asked to share the wisdom and present from the podium. For me, it represents the intersection of athletic and cognitive performance. Our podcast dissects the principles of performance for my patients, and then disseminates, pertinent, actionable information with them in mind, if you happen to have found us and or not a patient, that's great. I hope you enjoy. Please understand if you're not a current patient, any information contained here and is not meant for you to take as medical advice, you need to speak with your doctor before implementing any change in your health and fitness regimen. There is no doctor patient relationship established via this podcast for my patients. Of course, that relationship already exists. Season. One of the podium is sponsored by the feed. The team at the feed is where I sent all my athletes, whether they're pros racing, the tour de France, recreational athletes, looking for better health,
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Speaker 2:Hello, and welcome to another episode of the podium. I am Patrick Morris, and I'm here with dr. Kevin Sprouse. Although today we are going to be talking about a supplement known as creatine. It's one of the most common used supplements, the most well researched supplements. And I think there's a lot that we can kind of get into the benefits, uh, dosage and a lot of different things to talk about on this topic. Yeah. Creatine is one that's been around as far as supplements go for ever. And probably I feel pretty confident saying that is the most research probably has the most data behind it. Um, I can't say that with certainty, having looked at numbers, but I've gotta believe there's nothing out there in the sports performance supplement category that has the breadth of literature behind it. The creatine does. Absolutely. And I mean, it's, it's been well researched well used. Um, there's just lots that you can talk about with it because it's been used for such a long amount of time, and that's why it's kind of a really useful supplement and also something that's really misunderstood. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a GoTo supplement and I think some of the misunderstanding comes in two places. One because with anything, it starts off Rocky, everything starts off with just a few studies behind it and a limited understanding, uh, and it grows from there and some of those misconceptions they persist and then it also has been around so long that it's come through some of the doping scandals. And there's been probably a lot of correlation with people who use creatine, also using things that are less savory, um, endless legal to be quite honest. I mean, creating to be upfront here is a dietary supplement it's recognized as safe. It probably has more safety literature behind it than most, most other supplements that are out there. And it's entirely legal in sports, but, but I think there's still a bit of a perception that it's, you know, part of a cocktail that a strength athlete would use almost kind of under the table. So, well, we'll get rid of that at the outset. This is entirely legal and safe. Um, and we can, we can leave that misconception to the side and dig into the more interesting stuff. Absolutely. And we'll definitely get more into making sure that you have a safe form of it. And a lot of ways that it can be a tricky supplement when it's kind of branded and added in with a different products. So we'll get more into that a little bit later, but to start off, we'll kind of talk about what creatine actually is to naturally naturally occurring compound in the body. It's found in meat and fish and is readily available in the environment. They just found a way to synthesize it and created a supplement about it so that you can take in a larger amount of it than you would be able to. If you were just eating a lot of steak, which would have irate of other health defects that we do not want to happen. So the idea behind it is that your body uses creatine as an immediate energy source in the form of phospocreatine. So the concept behind the supplement is that if you add more creatine and exogenously, then you'll be able to store more, phospocreatine allowing you to have more readily available energy stores. Yeah. So the way this works is a lot of people have heard of ATP ATP being the energy currency of the body. It's the little unit of energy that the body creates and utilizes to, uh, to, to kind of foster cellular processes. And that can be neurologic. That can be muscular function, all sorts of things, but it's what has to be around ATP. When you, when you use it, you take one of the phosphates away. The T is for try the PS for phosphate. So you take one of the three phosphates and you're left with a DP diphosphate and you've got to get back to ATP so that it can again be a unit of energy. That addition of another phosphate on to ADP to make ATP is where creatine creatine monophosphate is. What we're talking about here is hugely important for reconstituting that energy molecule. Yeah. So the idea is that in that kind of initial supply of energy, when you're creating that transaction, you're generating ATP from ADP, you have that phosphocreatine stored inside the body. Well, they've kind of figured out that if you have an abundance of that, there's a variety of benefits. And that's kind of where the idea of supplementing with creatine came in. Um, what kind of started a lot of the like creatine supplementation, uh, I mean, how it got first started academically. I honestly couldn't tell you, um, where it finds its initial, uh, initial origins, but, you know, it was decades ago that it became recognized probably within looking at this whole ADP to ATP cycle and recycle being a limiter in energy production, especially in those, those, uh, short bursts of high intensity, uh, athletic performance in recognizing that surely they said, well, you know, here's, here's a step that we can augment. Um, typically you would think that diets are going to be fairly sufficient in providing this. Um, but like with many things, if you have a high utilization of it, uh, or low intake, then an insufficiency can lead to decreased performance. And I think over the years, as this was recognized, more and more studies were done looking at athletic performance and it just became, I just became more and more obvious that supplementation to a point was helpful. Um, again, like with most supplements, if you are, if you have a sufficient amount to really support all the processes that are happening, you don't need more. I mean more, more is not always better, but if you've got a high utilization, which athletes do, and you're trying to perform at your optimum, then it, it can be beneficial to make sure that that store has always topped off. And that's what we'll talk about when we get into dosing later. So alongside with creatine and supplementation is cause it's been widely used. There's, there's been a lot of things that have come up where people have shied away from it, especially those in the endurance world and things outside of your strength and power sports. So what would you say are some of those biggest misconceptions that people have about it that would keep them from considering this? Yeah, so I remember when I was in high school, which, um, back in the late nineties, I mean, I played baseball and weight training was a big part of baseball and any sport in high school, um, and creating was a big thing. And the typical, uh, dosing strategy was this loading phase of 20 to 25 grams a day. And then you would back it down. And I remember hearing, you would read in magazines, you would hear from some coaches you would hear from parents that, uh, it's going to cause dehydration it's going to cause muscle tears. It's going to cause kidney failure. Uh, it'll lead to cramps, all sorts of things that surrounded the use of creating some had, uh, some reason for those things to, to be concerns. Um, and a lot of it didn't, they were just misconceptions on how the whole process worked. So, but I think those were the main ones, uh, water retention and weight gain being one, um, somewhat ironically dehydration being another, um, cramps. And then, uh, this idea of, of kidney damage from taking it in which the vast majority of those are not true. Yeah. I was always really skeptical about, especially creatine monohydrate starting out, which I think a lot of it was from clever marketing from different forms of creatine that we'll kind of talk about in a little bit, but you always saw things like the Celltech that was just this massive 10 gram dose and all these carbohydrates, and then you always heard, Oh, there's stomach distress and bloating and different things like that. And you're going to look saw really a lot of that is just over-hyped and not really completely true. Yeah. And to some of it's a little bit true, which is how these things get started. You know, if you do take a massive dose for loading, you'll probably get stomach cramps. Um, with normal dosing, sometimes there is a, a small shift in, in water into the muscle cell, which isn't bad, um, can even be beneficial with regard to the function of the cell storage of glycogen, all sorts of stuff. So oftentimes with these things, there's a kernel of truth and then it gets blown out of proportion, fake news. Exactly. So, uh, outside of the misconceptions, let's get into like some of the benefits. So what would you say the main benefits of supplementing with creatine would be without a doubt, the main benefit is increased, uh, power output in short time duration. So, you know, a sprint powerlifting things that really challenged this system of regenerating ADP into ATP. So you use energy and then quickly needed again. Um, when that quick need becomes a limiting factor, then creating supplementation can be helpful. And so those scenarios, you know, it's a hundred meter sprint it's repeated efforts at, you know, dead lift or bench press, um, is short, high intensity efforts where the creatine energy system is taxed. Uh, and that's well established. I mean, paper after paper after paper, um, when I was looking up some stuff on this prior to having our talk, there were easily 80 to a hundred papers on this one topic that were, you know, well-researched peer reviewed, um, you know, easy go to references that address this. So this is one that is a benefit that just, there's no doubt on this now it's not, it's not the be all end all for these things. Um, like we were saying earlier, if you're already sufficient in your creating stores, just adding more and more and more, doesn't make you faster and stronger. Um, but it can certainly have a beneficial effect. That seems similar to how obviously we've talked about your body uses carbohydrates as energy, but if you continue to add carbohydrates, you're not just going to infinitely have more energy that you want to use through your sport. So yeah, that's a great analogy, very similar. So outside of your increase in, uh, just your general power output, what are some of the things we can look for or other maybe not quite as evident or as, uh, obvious effects that create tests? So, uh, there's been a lot of, uh, I'd say there's been more talk about than research into this idea of muscle gain was creating. The research that's been done is not overwhelmingly supportive of creating, being a, uh, a supplement that leads directly to muscle gain. However, there's a trend in that direction, but quite honestly, it's probably just the fact that if, if you're supporting this short term energy turnover system and able to do maybe one or two more reps of a given exercise or sprint or whatever else, then you're going to get stronger. You're probably going to get a little bit bigger simply because you're able to do more during the workout. So it's kind of a secondary effect. I think, um, endurance performance is one that has been looked at, and while there's not specifically evidence of like improved long duration activity, um, it does impact endurance athletes in a couple ways. One, there is kind of this in between anaerobic longer anaerobic effort. Um, so something even like a 5k where you're well above lactate threshold, and you're going at a pretty intense effort, it's not a hundred meters, you know, it's, uh, it, it's more toward the endurance side of things, but you do have a need for kind of some energy turnover. Um, and within that same 5k or within a hundred mile bike ride, you're going to hit Hills, you're going to hit, uh, have efforts in a race where you've got to cover an attack. Um, so there there's all sorts of ways where this energy system comes into play in a longer event. Um, and it can have an, uh, uh, an effect on the overall outcome. So again, a secondary effect, but one that is, is real and pertinent in the real world. I think there's an interesting takeaway from that as well. A lot of endurance athletes have certainly been afraid of taking something like a creatine because they expect that I'm going to be bulky. I know a lot of women are afraid of supplementing with something like this, cause they're the same thing. They want to stay away from the excessive weight gain or adding all of this extra bulk. And it doesn't necessarily directly lead to that. It's how your training's going to be structured. It's how your rep schemes are. If you're lifting with a purpose, chances are you're going to continue to work towards that purpose. And you're not going to accidentally gain a lot of muscle. If there was a product that made you accidentally gain a lot of muscle, it it'd be sold out everywhere. Exactly. Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's such a good point. I hear this frequently from people as well. I don't want to do that. I don't want to, I don't want to bulk up if it was so easy to bulk up with a given product or workout routine or anything else, everyone would be doing it. So it's, while you may see a little bit of a increase in weight, probably due to the fluid shift, it's going to be a shift that is overall likely to be beneficial, as opposed to problematic. We're not talking, putting on pounds of water, weight, you may put on a half pound or a pound, it's going to fluctuate a little bit. Um, and in the long run, it's more likely to be helpful. Certainly. So outside of the strength and endurance field, I know there's been a lot of talk with creatine as far as it relates to your mental performance lately. So it was kind of an insight into that. Yeah. This is one that really caught my attention recently and has changed how I've thought about creating in general. Um, you know, it's something I've used in the past. I'm certainly not a strength athlete. Um, it's something that I've had, uh, athletes used in the past, but typically in that more standard, you know, high intensity or even a little bit of the anaerobic, uh, uh, contribution that we just talked about, but recently what's been shown in a few studies and, and to be fair, this is not like overwhelming evidence here. This is kind of the cutting edge of creating research is that there's a cognitive improvement from creatine utilization and, or creating supplementation. Sorry. Um, where this comes from is I mentioned earlier that this ADP to ATP, uh, cycle that creatine promotes this reconstitution of the energy molecules is pertinent for every cell in the body. Well, that includes the neurons in the brain, um, neurons when active go through this, you know, utilization of energy and the need to reconstitute that energy and use it again, the more active the neurons are, you know, the harder you're thinking the heart of the cognitive tasks are the more prolonged the cognitive task. Then the greater demand there is on this system. Um, there is mounting evidence that supplementation with creatine allows this to happen more efficiently and effectively in the brain and in neurons and allows for less cognitive fatigue and greater kind of, uh, mental capacity in this regard. Um, again, it's not a slam dunk in the literature, but we've established, the creatine is safe with decades of use decades of study. Um, we've established that it's effective in this particular manner in terms of taking ADP to ATP as an energy source. Um, and we know that that happens in the brain. So where I find this really interesting is athletes who otherwise are going to be burning through their creating stores to support their training, might be robbing a little bit from that cognitive, uh, reservoir, so to speak. So if, if you've got a really hard workout and a lot of us have experienced this, you do a really hard workout. You've almost got some brain fog later right now. It's not directly attributable necessarily. There's other things in play in other words. Um, but if your hard workout steals from the creatine reservoir, that's gonna support your cognitive function later in the day. Then you're kind of submarining that, that cognitive effort that you've got to put forth later. So if you can supplement that with supplemental creating intake and perform better cognitively later in the day, it makes a lot of sense to me to do that. And so I've started personally taking it and recommending it to a lot of our patients for that even athletes who are, uh, like golfers, you know, some of our PGA guys, I'm not particularly a high, intense high intensity sport where you're going to burn through creating, but perhaps a rational place to put it in your supplement regimen for this, uh, cognitive function and delaying cognitive fatigue. Excellent. I mean, it seems kind of like a, like a, win-win across a lot of different sports, so it's not a lot of downsides, but before we kind of go full gas and to docent up on some creatine, what are some big safety things that we need to keep in mind on this? So again, typically, um, I think it's recognized that creatine is probably one of the safest supplements out there. That doesn't mean that it's uniformly safe for everyone to take in any dose they want. Right. But it has some of the greatest amount of research behind it. And with that, we recognize one of the, one of the safest profiles of, of any supplement. Um, if you take too much. So we talked about these loading routines that are much less common now, but like, um, 20 to 25 grams a day for a week prior to dropping that down used to be a fairly common regimen. Uh, and one of the things we would see is diarrhea, cramping, nausea. So you get these GI side effects, basically not dangerous necessarily, but not anything anybody wants to put up with. So, um, I would consider that a safety issue, uh, especially if you've got a big meeting or air travel and you've got diarrhea. Um, so that's one thing to consider. The one thing that comes up repeatedly is this idea of impairing kidney function and where this is rooted. When, when we, as doctors look at kidney function in a patient, one of the tests, primarily that we look at it in the blood is called Creotine, I'm sorry. Creatanine and that's easily confused with creating. Um, now, I mean, one is kind of a byproduct of the other, uh, but even just in looking at it, you think, Oh, well, if I take, you know, w when we look at this test, lower creatanine means better kidney function, all of the things being equal, so higher create name, we typically associate with decreased or, or worsen kidney function. Well, if you take creatine as a supplement, your creatinine levels in the blood go up, but it has nothing to do with the fact that your kidneys are functioning better, worse, different. It's just a matter of the fact that you're putting more in the system. So as doctors, we look at this creatanine marker as a measure of how efficiently that the kidneys are filtering, and if they start to filter and do their job less efficiently than creatanine builds up in the system, right? So it's kind of a proxy of kidney function. It's not a direct indication. And if you're putting more creatine in the system and downstream, you're getting more, creatanine irrespective of how the kidneys functioning, you may misinterpret that, right? So the chances that it causes kidney function decline are pretty much zero. However, if you already have poor kidney function or you have, you've been warned that your kidneys, for whatever reason, don't work optimally, then there's probably reason to be suspicious here. Um, by the same token, you know, we've talked about the fact that supplements can interfere with medications they can interfere with or interact with people's medical conditions. They may have, um, it's reasonable to expect that if, you know, if you're taking one medication that may hinder kidney function, and then you're taking creatine on top of that, you could have a downstream additive effect that is undesired, right. So I truly would recommend anybody. Who's going to start taking this, talk to your doctor about it first. Um, but talk to a doctor who's knowledgeable about creatine and what's going on. Um, the risks are low. They're not zero and everybody's risk profile looks a little differently, but in general, it's a very safe thing to take you remember, when I was a, uh, a younger high school athlete, I was experimenting with some creatine and protein as anyone would. And, uh, I went to get my blood panel drawn. He mentioned adenine was, it was a touch high. And I was immediately just like, Oh, is that, is that this out of the other thing? And my mom was immediately upset with me for taking any sort of supplementation and that sort of thing, but it's nice to kind of arm yourself with a little bit education, talk to your doctor, understand what's going on. And then working with someone who kind of has a mind toward, okay, your goal is to gain some strength. You're trying to play rugby or whatever it was for me. And then how are we going to best do that while minimizing the risks? Right? Yeah. And to be clear, you know, that the reason I say talk to a doctor that understands this, that's not to, to kind of disrespect the doctors who don't your, your general pediatrician or internist or family doc, they don't have any reason to necessarily understand that whole interplay, um, of an, of a specific athletic supplement and how it impacts a person. It'd be great if they did. And a lot of them probably do, but my point is, it's not really in their wheelhouse. Um, there's a lot of things they do that I would
Speaker 1:fail miserably at. So it's, it's not pointing the finger. It's just saying, make sure that you've kind of got some good guidance on that. Thanks again, to the feed, our sponsor for season one of the podium today, they have an incredible offer on creating. As we've discussed today, creating is most widely studied performance supplement on the market. And for good reason, if you want to try adding creates into your daily regimen, the feed is offering you a discount. All listeners will receive 15% off clean athlete, thorn research. One of my favorites and Blahniks creatine products use code Creotine 15 at checkout. Excellent.
Speaker 2:So since I have a doctor here who this is his wheelhouse, how should I go about kind of dosing this out for myself? If I were to start a creatine supplementation regimen. So we we've alluded to the fact or not alluded. We've been very upfront about the fact that we used to do loading phases on this. And, and I'm not a big fan of that. So I think you can, and evidence would suggest you can skip the loading phase. What we're really trying to do is maintain a given level of stores. So in the short term, there may be benefit to a loading phase. Um, but it's also a short term benefit and I'm not a big short term guy. So I, I, I think the downsides and potential downsides and cramps and all that just there is no use to do that. Just start out with a daily dose, um, the body you don't, most people or most studies would say that you can't absorb more than a certain amount, and it's going to change based on the person's body size and whatever, but somewhere around two and a half to, I'd say two to five grams in a serving, the good thing is you get most of the benefits at about that same dose, somewhere between two to five grams in a day. And it's going to vary depending on your utilization of it. So somebody who's an Olympic weightlifter, um, and is training like an Olympic weightlifter. I don't mean just training with Olympic weight lifting techniques, but like going to the Olympics, um, that person's going to have a really high turnover and may require more during the day. So they may be looking at a dose of somewhere between two and a half to five grams at a time, two, three times a day, right? That's the high end, probably for most of our patients. So we're looking at two and a half grams in a serving and one or two a day. Um, so for someone who's got a relatively average utilization, um, go back to me for instance, you know, I'm going to maybe be in combination between riding my bike, running, going to the gym. I may have eight, 10 hours of, of quote unquote training exercise activity in a week two and a half grams is probably all I need. Um, and that can be taken kind of any time during the day. Again, we're not looking for a time dependent dosing. We're just trying to keep levels where they need to be throughout the day or throughout a given week or month. Right. So it's just making sure that you get it in, um, for someone who's got a higher intake or even has a period of I'm sorry, higher utilization, or even has a period of high utilization. So somebody who for six weeks is going to do a really intense training program in the gym, or is switching to the coming off of an off season. Um, maybe a cyclist coming off of an off season. They've gone through their, uh, kind of endurance training. And they're starting to really get into some interval training, heel repeats. Uh, we may bump them up to five grams a day, um, again in two, typically in, in two doses. So one in the morning, one in the afternoon. Um, and that's, I mean, I rarely will have anybody do more than that. Um, so two and a half to five grams a day, once or twice a day, it seems like the, the biggest trick to is to stay really consistent with it. I know there's a lot of products that, that say you need to take it in pre-workout post-workout. Do you think there's any benefit to the timing of it outside of just morning and night or taking it around the activity? I've not seen any evidence to really support the timing, is that, um, that important? Uh, it's more like you said consistency. So I would rather somebody find a time, like, for instance, I take it in my coffee in the morning. Um, there's some thought that maybe a warm liquid helps it absorb better, not great studies there. Um, there's some evidence that caffeine may decrease absorption. So maybe KA coffee's not the greatest place, but you know what I remember to take it right as part of the ritual, the routine. Um, so I can put half a scoop, a full scoop of the one I have is five grams of it, half a scoop of my coffee. Um, I'm done like easy to remember happens every day. I would much rather that than worry about making sure that I remember to take it, uh, you know, take it with me, put it in a bottle, take it. Pre-workout, I'd probably have much worse compliance if that was the case for very minimal, if any gain whatsoever. Um, so just like you said, just being consistent, it's going to be the most important thing and I'll, uh, I'll totally defend your you're taking it with coffee in the morning. You see a lot of pre-workout supplements, that'll be loaded with 300 to 400 even grams of caffeine alongside that five grams of creatine monohydrate and they can kind of combat each other. Whereas your average cups or coffee is maybe like 80 at best. Yeah. And I do half calf, so I'm even better, but no, that's a great point. I hadn't even thought of that, but yeah, for all, for all those companies saying, you got to take it right before your workout, and then they pumped their product full of caffeine. It's kind of, doesn't make a lot of sense. And one other just small caveat is, is when you mix it with liquid, the creatine is going to kind of change its stability throughout the day. So you don't see many liquid supplement forms of it. There's a couple of companies out there that try to advertise it and sell it and they can, or things like that. But if you're going to mix it up with whatever beverage it is, you need to consume that in a fairly timely manner. Otherwise, if you wait until the end of the day, it can kind of start to change a little bit and not quite be that same dose. Interesting. I didn't know that, but that makes a lot of sense because I know one of the reasons creatine monohydrate as become kind of a GoTo form is because of its stability. There are some other ones that, that quickly break down, uh, and when they break down, basically that phosphate, the problem is that is that phosphate becomes, uh, inaccessible to ADP, then turning over to a TP. So you've got an in there it's just, now they've separated, one's bound and it's not going to do its job. So it makes a lot of sense. That's a good point. Yeah. So for all intensive purposes, our conversation up to this point has talked about creatine. Monohydrate, um, there's a lot of different forms that have come out, uh, different ways that it's been processed, marketed, and things like that. A lot of it, and see some people even say that they have a lean creatine, which pretty much, I mean, yeah, exactly. Um, a lot of the different products have come out to try to Mark it as, Oh, it's a no blow creatine. It's a fast digesting creatine. It's to kind of take a lot of these misconceptions that I imagine the manufacturer knows aren't necessarily true and then market it in a different way. So what are some of those different versions of creatine that are out there and kind of what's your opinion on a lot of them? So, I mean, even going beyond my opinion, what, what science shows is the vast majority of studies are done with creatine monohydrate, which is cheap, easy to find known to be effective based on the studies. And it's kind of the gold standard scientifically that doesn't mean it's the absolute best. It means it's the one that all the others are compared to. Right. Um, there is there numerous forms creating citrate[inaudible], there's a magnesium key late there's there's buffered forms. There's all sorts of types out there. Um, none of them are more effective than creatine monohydrate. Most of them are as effective, right? I don't, I don't mean to downplay them, but none of them outperform creatine monohydrate in terms of effectiveness in this whole energy system that said there may be a role for people who just don't tolerate creatine. Well, even at these doses, there may be a role then to try like a buffered version or something like that. But any other version is typically going to be more expensive. Um, so if you're spending the money for, for a different type and it's not more effective than you need to look for one of those other benefits specific to you, and if it's not there and just go with the creatine, monohydrate excellent. It's always nice when something is a cheap and effective. Yeah. So I guess wrapping it all up, what are kind of some, some biggest actionable steps that you would give someone who came to you and was like, Hey, thinking about taking creative team, what do I do? Yeah. So, I mean, first and foremost, we would look at their complete medical history, any medications they're on supplements, make sure that it's a good choice for them in that regard, but assuming we clear that hurdle, um, you know, it's nice to know again, that it's so well researched, so safe and, and known to be effective in, in certain situations. Um, if that person I'm sitting down talking to is a tested athlete, which means, you know, are they tested by USADA WADA anti-doping controls. Then the first thing that I, I insist upon is that if they're going to take one, it has to be from a manufacturer that has a certificate of being pure and free of banned substances. So like NSF for sport, or, you know, one of these Oregon, your third parties that certifies supplements. Um, and that's a non negotiable for me for those athletes. Right. I kinda like that across the board because even though like you and I aren't tested, I want to know that what I'm getting is, is pure and what's in it is what I think is in it. And so using something that also has that same certification for sport, I think has rationale beyond just test athletes, but that's just me. Um, we would want to look at the presumed benefit of it. So, you know, are you a power athlete? Are you a sprinter? Are you an endurance athlete who just wants to make sure that they're supporting the intervals and the anaerobic work appropriately. Um, and that can be, you know, even a tour de France rider spends time in the gym and you want that person, who's a very aerobic athlete to have an efficient gym workout. So, you know, there'd be a discussion on, on what they're trying to get out of it. Um, because that's going to inform our dosing, you know, whether we're doing two a day and all sorts of things. Um, and then we talked a little bit about the mental alertness to, is it a, you know, quote unquote corporate athlete, one of the, one of these people who it's an Ironman in the morning and night, um, but then has a high power job during the day. And we want to make sure that we're supporting all of those things. Um, so, so presumed utilization and benefit is important. Um, and then I think honestly for most people, it's, it's worth a try. It's worth a, you know, assuming you've cleared that safety hurdle, which is a low hurdle for creating, um, it's worth trying and seeing what you think there's, if you can get athletic benefit from it, um, that makes your workouts more efficient. If you can get cognitive benefit that makes your work more efficient, uh, and you can get both of that from the same supplement and it's cheap. Well-researched effective to me. I have a hard time seeing why you wouldn't use it. Um, so for me, I think it's a, uh, a low barrier to entry, so to speak to at least try it and see what you think. And you may try it and have no noticeable benefit and want to move on. And that's perfectly fine, but it seems like one that is worth trying for lots of folks. Absolutely. Now one last thing on the try it, and none of those will benefit. I know there's, there's been the term like, or you're a responder and a nonresponder to create a team. How would you kind of break that down? As far as if say someone does try it and they, they don't notice a difference at all. And then you have some people that try, they're like, wow, I feel a massive difference in my strength workouts. Yeah. So throughout, uh, supplement literature and really throughout sports science, there's this idea of responders and non-responders, um, and I don't think it's that binary, to be honest, I think there's just individual variances with multiple variables that play in as to whether somebody will benefit from one intervention or not, um, increasing, it may be that you have plenty in your diet, right. And then, so you take it, you don't notice anything great. If you're getting it from your diet sufficiently, get rid of the supplement. I mean, there's, I'd much rather you get it from the diet, um, with a high utilization that becomes less and less likely, but not impossible. So I think on one hand, you've got the very real issue of, uh, individual responses. Um, there's a subjective part to that and an objective. So it's the kind of thing where you could pretty easily, I mean, not a hundred percent scientifically, but set up what we call an index workout. What is something a sprint, a Hill climb, a session in the gym, something that you do, that's, that's either timed or a weight that you lift or something that's very objective and you set the bar before starting your supplementation, give it a couple of weeks, test it again. Did you do better? Um, you know, so that can augment kind of that subjective feel. Um, and then again, I think, I think ultimately that subjective opinion can be due to something like placebo effect. And then you have to say, okay, well maybe it's worth whatever, 10 bucks, 30 bucks a jar for a placebo effect, um, with a safe supplement, if you're a competitive athlete or a competitive, uh, cognitive performer. Um, no, there's, there's trade offs on both ends, but I think, I think testing it to the degree you can is worthwhile and, uh, paying attention to subjective feels is totally legitimate. Also. Excellent. Well, I am, uh, satisfied with our discussion on grade team. I think I'm ready to go take my, my afternoon dose. Nice, nice. Well, thanks. I think this is a good one. And, um, for those of you all listening patients in particular, uh, I anticipate there will be some questions on this one. So give us a call. I'm happy to talk through any aspect of it with you and whether you want to
Speaker 1:add it to your regimen or, or change the dose or whatnot. So look forward to hearing from you. I think Patrick, the content of this podcast is meant for general informational and educational purposes. Only all listeners should speak with their doctor or medical practitioner before implementing any change in their health care regimen. If you're currently a patient at podium and you have an established doctor, patient relationship with me, and I'm happy to discuss this with, if you're not currently a patient at podium, nothing in this recording establishes a doctor patient relationship between us, nor does it constitute the practice of medicine or the dissemination of medical advice. Should you implement any information contained here in without consulting your own physician? You do so at your own risk. Thanks for listening to the podium, to hear more, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on Instagram and Strava until next time. Thanks for joining us.