KoopCast
Coach Jason Koop covers training, nutrition and recent happenings in the ultramarathon world.
KoopCast
High Carbohydrate Intake for Ultrarunners #237
Aitor Virbay is a Researcher in Exercise Physiologist and Metabolism and the Head of the nutrition and physiology department for the WT INEOS Grenadiers cycling team. He is also a scientific advisor to elite athletes and various companies as well as the Founder and Director of Glut4Science, a platform for scientific outreach.
Glut4Science: https://glut4science.com
Aitor’s X Account: https://x.com/mvaitor
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Trail and ultra runners. What is going on? Welcome to another episode of the coop cast. As always, I am your humble host, coach jason coop, and this episode of the podcast tackles one of the most talked about aspects of ultramarathon performance over this entire year, and that is high carbohydrate intakes, how we might implement them and, very specifically, how they might actually affect exercise-induced muscle damage. I want to welcome on the podcast today for the very first time Itor Verbe, who produced a really cool paper that we actually reviewed in our Research Essentials for Ultra Running newsletter, the title of which is the effects of 120 grams of carbohydrates per hour intake during a mountain marathon on exercise-induced muscle damage in elite runners. But since Itor is both on the research side as well as a practitioner advising both cycling athletes as well as ultra marathon athletes, I really wanted to get his perspective on the trainability of this aspect and how we can go about training athletes to incorporate higher and higher rates of carbohydrate intake. So I encourage you listeners to wait for that towards the end of this podcast and we go through some very practical, very practical sequence of steps that athletes can undertake. If you happen to have a history of GI distress and or you want to see if some of these higher carbohydrate intakes are actually tolerable for you, turns out that, just like any other aspect of training, there's progressive overload that we need to apply, there's individualization that we need to apply and there's also situational awareness that we need to apply when we're looking at all of these different solutions for athletes. All right, folks, with that out of the way, I am getting right out of the way.
Speaker 1:Here is my conversation with Itor Verbe, all about high carbohydrate intakes and how we can adapt to them. Thanks for coming on the podcast. I had a different intro kind of prepared for this, but with some of the delays that we had, I think a better anecdote might actually serve us, and it's probably one that it's not going to catch you off guard, but it's definitely new. I was discussing with one of my colleagues, nick Tiller, about some topics related to the research that you do just a couple of weeks ago and he mentioned that there is a review paper that he and Guimier recently wrote. That should be. Maybe it'll be published by the time this podcast comes out and if it is, I'll serve the link up in the show notes and if not, I'll just serve it up on social media, but they're writing an opinion piece that kind of postulates what limits ultramarathon performance and, unlike marathon performance, where we talk about, you know, the fraction of VO2 that gets utilized and running economy, cost of running and things like that fraction of VO2 that gets utilized in running economy, cost of running and things like that One of the big things that they postulate is a limiting factor in ultra marathon running is muscle damage.
Speaker 1:The muscle damage that occurs specifically during the course of a race and then somehow shows up as a component of what fatigues an athlete or something that causes performance to actually decline during a race. And so the work that we're going to talk about, that you did, where a nutrition intervention could potentially alleviate muscle damage, is actually quite interesting, because normally we think about, well, how do we prevent muscle damage? And we think about it from a muscular standpoint, meaning we're going to strength train and we're going to descend more and things like that. So the whole thing became rather interesting. But before we get into that, I want the listeners to know a little bit more about your background, because you have this very particular background that is both in the scientific world as well as very much in the practical world and those people like yourself are very rare, where you're actually working at the coalface with athletes. So can you go over that a little bit to set up this paper that we're going to talk about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. So probably you have to talk about my background, probably should start on how you are, what you do, on your chill food you know side foods when I was surrounded by movement in my family, really in my hometown in Victoria, in the south of the past country, where you know mountains movement, training and sport is part of our background and what we do. So that probably led me into being elite cyclist by rider for four years and obviously my whole kind of life, 18 years old and then four years of elite cycling, competitive elite cycling I I hung hung out my my bike on just because of a little kind of illness that I had, and definitely I saw an opportunity to bring all my experiences as a bike rider into you know, science or just going to the other side of being a staff and trying to help athletes. So I think I couldn't be the same as I am, the same person or professional as I am, if I couldn't be racing and squeezing myself for more than 10 years, probably since I was very young. So in the meantime, you know, I studied some engineering. First. I kind of gained up a little bit with that Civil engineering wasn't really my place and then I started studying nutrition, first as a main degree, university degree that I studied and then quickly into physiology and how that was related with nutrition first, and then, of course, training, very interested in how really the body works, how metabolism is really impacting on potential adaptations to both performance, and then more recently into health as well and disease, which is something that interests me quite a lot.
Speaker 2:When I kind of retired from cycling, you know, my professional career started, you know, like a roller coaster, really like very quick and having always combining that scientific, more academic work with my practitioner in, let's say in always in contact with the athletes, especially while trial running at the beginning. And, of course, coming from cycling. You know, cycling and being with different teams has been always part of my routine. And now is the moment where I'm not only working with a cycling team, of course, with Inertin Adios, but I'm combining both my scientific career as a researcher in physiology and metabolism and advisor to other athletes as well, not necessarily only cycling. So, yeah, again, I think that is coming from my background, as you know, my family and my environment always linked to movement and exercise and training and competing, and then moving more into that kind of scientific practitioner, you know, as as yeah, both, both at times just to to support other athletes. So that's what I would say could be a good summary of where and so you also have like chops in the ultra marathon world.
Speaker 1:And where did that link actually occur? Because you grew up as a professional cyclist, you work with a professional cycling team in eos team and things like that. A lot of your previous work was done in cycling. I got to know you through the cycling side and kind of constantly keep my fingers on the pulse within that community. But then there, all of a sudden, at a certain point, your name started to pop up, not only in the research field which we're going to get into eventually, I promise, on the ultra marathon side but also as as a coach. So like what facilitated that transition?
Speaker 2:and I'm wondering if you can describe to the listeners like that part of your, that part of your work life right now, yeah, yeah. Well, when I started with uh as a junior researcher, let's say as helping others in that I was introduced quickly to trial running and actually it probably something that we're going to be talking later. This is exactly how I started just doing some science in trial running. I was running the mountains. That has been always a very popular sport in Basque Country. When I retired from cycling, you know, the first thing you do is just okay, now I'm going to go. It's mountaineering or hiking or, of course, running. So I have been always very linked to mountains and trial. And then, of course, I have done my main career as a full-time practitioner in cycling. But I have never been away from trial running, always helping some different friends just being racing or even more professionally.
Speaker 2:You know, I kept researching and in running and trial running in the mountains. And then I had the, you know, the biggest opportunity probably of my life, which was to to meet key and jornet and and have the capacity to learn from him and the different projects and and obviously that was a milestone in my life, obviously, you know, as a child and you know fan of you know trail running. You always, you know you have kill another as a and having the capacity to work with him in a different project and get the you know the content and constant feedback and you know information sharing with him, that was a milestone. So I've been always, you know, leading to trial running and that was a milestone. So I've been always, you know, leading to trial running.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, recently, in the couple of last years, I was, let's say, yeah, I made that a step of helping all their trial runners as well from, let's say, physiology point of view, advising them on how to improve their, you know, their training techniques, nutrition, different testing and monitoring programs that they should definitely, you know, kind of improve or that could be an exit step for them to perform better. So, yeah, I mean essentially having always been willing to try running and basically through scientific and my own practice, and then, just with Kian, I was a milestone and then always just helping all the runners to optimizing their performance. Well, it seems like it's either Kian or Anton always just helping all the runners to optimize their performance.
Speaker 1:Well, it seems like it's either Killian or Anton is where it all comes back to. Whenever I interview people on this podcast in terms of how they got into the sport and kind of what facilitated their trajectory, killian is always super detailed in his preparation, his training as you're very well aware of and his nutrition, so I'm sure that's been kind of a fascinating insight, but maybe we will leave that for another day. So we're going to talk about a paper that you, that you're recently the lead author on. That has to do with high carbohydrate intake and muscle damage and, as I was trying to set up earlier, it's an intervention that a lot of athletes have started to take a lot more seriously, not only in the running world, but also in the cycling world, and one that I don't know if we ever thought that it was possible, but it's definitely become more topical for a whole host of reasons.
Speaker 1:Athlete success, the fact that it's quote unquote extreme it's difficult to manage from a lot of different aspects. But where do you kind of come into this equation? Because in order to prop up research, you have to, there has to be some sort of catalyst, and I'm kind of what I'm kind of? I'm always kind of curious like what was that catalyst for you? What was that catalyst for you in terms of wanting to put together uh, research specifically to address this question?
Speaker 2:well, that's a good question. I think sometimes you yeah, yeah, I don't know, life is hard to say when you start to think about something but definitely my own practices I think they were already capitalists of not, let's say, be conformist with what is published out there in the scientific literature. So I was myself as a by-writer, I was experiencing that little change that I was proving to myself that 90 grams per hour wasn't definitely a limit when it comes to at least the cat comfort and the capacity to absorb all that. Then obviously we had the capacity to prove that hypothesis with a group of doctors in Basque Country that they were already working on that kind of research line, and I joined them and we executed those kind of researches and research studies. Sorry, and we started to see that probably when it was published, there wasn't, let's say, aligned with what the practice, what was happening in the practice. Right, like athletes, they were consuming high amounts of carbohydrates and that was kind of part of why, or part of that equation, why speed and performance was changing slightly in trial running. Then I think definitely a catalyst of that was that I personally invested on a gas analyzer very soon in my life and then I spent a lot of money on that.
Speaker 2:I personally invested on a gas analyzer very soon in my life and then I spent a lot of money on that gas analyzer and I had the chance to start measuring by myself a lot of elite athletes and I started to plot my data against what was published in Scientific Literature and so I started to see that there was kind of not an alignment on energetic demands and metabolic requirements, so carbohydrate oxidation from their energy combustion or far oxidation with recommendations.
Speaker 2:And then I started to look into literature, of course, and some other people like I've never been a pioneer at all, I mean, I've never invented anything All the people they were saying that they were talking about that, you know, years ago. But I started to see that definitely, you know, we could restore more and potentially what is behind carbohydrate supplementation, carbohydrate intake wasn't only that kind of energetic supply, but it was more like it was, let's say, another layer of consequences of fueling high carbohydrates during the run or during the bike or on the bike. So yeah, then obviously we started to see how, by experimentation, fueling high carbohydrate intakes just by feeling, yes, the general feeling of runners and bike riders. They felt better the next day. They were kind of improving their recovery in a way.
Speaker 2:So we decided to say, okay, let's gonna definitely put some you know, some science in here and get some data and a proper analysis of how that could be. And we did the kind of research but yeah, that's what I could say the the catalyst. I think it was first of all from my own experimentation into definitely that I started to see a measure of metabolism by myself and see that at least on that high elite athletes sample it was published in science was not aligned with what I was seeing on my kind of daily work the daily work.
Speaker 1:So it's interesting because what what once started is this energetic problem has kind of moved into a recovery problem and also in now with this new paper, muscle damage problem as well. Right, or the solution to it has moved to, has kind of moved it into these new realms. Before we get into the paper, what's's your hypothesis from a mechanistic standpoint? How high carbohydrate intake can actually preserve muscle or prevent muscle damage? What's going on underneath the hood, so to speak, or what do you think is going on underneath?
Speaker 2:the hood where I can answer that and give you a statement. Unfortunately, and that's you know these common senses. The more you know, the more you realize you don't know. But definitely there are like different approaches that you know. All together they kind of come up with a potential hypothesis why muscle damage or at least muscle integrity is protected with higher carbohydrate intakes.
Speaker 2:I think one of them is just the muscle glycogen. So muscle glycogen plays a massive role in muscle contraction. So let's say glycogen is not only an energetic pool, it's not only a substrate pool, but there is some, let's say, quality if I say that in English, sorry quality mechanisms or a role of quality that is not only quantity when it comes to energy, so that energy that is storing glycogen is regulating muscle contraction as well. So when you deplete and this is something that obviously you know is there's some research published and some data, but of course I cannot say it's 100% proven. It's just something that is getting now published into science and those hypotheses are getting kind of discussed. But it seems like the muscle glycogen is regulating muscle contraction. So it can be understood more or less. It could be something like as you deplete your glycogen source, your muscle function is not the same. Okay, so it regulates the calcium release by, you know, a sarcopalmatic reticulum. So you're never going to be able to contract your muscle properly if you don't have enough glycogen pool on your muscle. So there is a potential rule that says, and it could make sense, that lower glycogen levels promote muscle damage just because of the incapacity to contract properly that fiber, the muscle fiber. So that's one point If you don't have the energy that is required to muscle contraction and apparently glycogen has a qualitative role in this whole mechanism you're going to create more muscle damage.
Speaker 2:So the nervous system, as you probably know, loves glucose more than over or fatty acids. And we saw, and actually in one of our paper we kind of discussed, the fact that when glucose is not highly available around the muscle fiber, the excitation and contraction couple is not efficient. So let's say the nervous system doesn't have enough glucose to get that, that the mandate of contraction to the cell, so the muscle cell can properly contract and relax and keep contracting and relaxing. So it seems that the glucose availability, which is essentially obviously carbohydrates, which has reduced to the maximum just before lactate, can play a role there. And then of course there are other potential mechanisms that you can think about.
Speaker 2:I would say those two main ways of approaching the problem could be related with carbohydrate supplementation. Glycogen pool is not only quantitative but it can be qualitative in the muscle function and secondly, the neuromuscular function, from the view of how glucose is. Let's say, low glucose concentration can impair that you know message that the nervous system sends to the muscle. Then, of course sorry just to finish with this, but then of course you just, you know, you can talk about the lactate capacity to, you know, keep supplying energy into the muscle cells, regulating nervous system, all that, and obviously the more glucose, the more lactate we got as well, and that is, I think it's regardless to say that lactate is definitely not the big game. You know the, you know the bad guy in there. So I definitely think there's some room for that kind of yeah, just to hypothesize about lactate. But I'd say I will leave it there for the moment with those two kind of approaches.
Speaker 1:That's a great way, that's a great position to leave it in An excellent mechanistic speculation which we're always curious about. I mean, it takes, as you're very well aware, it takes a whole lot longer time to actually figure out what's going on and how it's actually happening than the athletes actually will tell you hey, this feels better or this is working for me. We always want to get to the root of it, because if we can get to the root of it we can exploit the mechanisms even further if we get to that route correctly. But the athlete experience usually leads the scientific experience by sometimes an order of a few years, depending upon what we're actually talking about. Okay, so again, go ahead.
Speaker 2:Sorry, just yeah, just one point maybe even to summarize it all. I'll leave it, you know, to the next level of simplicity. At the end of the day, contraction is very expensive when it comes to energy demands. Okay. So if your energy pool in the cell is not enough, that contraction is not going to happen correctly. So even if you know, on that first layer of understanding everything, if you don't have the right energetic status in the cell, that's not going to happen properly. Okay, so obviously then you start analyzing that you cannot absorb whatever 60 grams of fats per hour on the run. It's just different mechanisms and that needs to come probably from carbohydrates or whatever. But at the end it's as simple as a matter of how you can give enough energy to that cell for contraction.
Speaker 1:You know it's really interesting, interesting, I just thought about this. As you're aware, there's a big cohort of athletes that are firm believers and adopters of using low carbohydrate availability and optimize fat burning to facilitate performance. And, and one of the one of the key anecdotes that they point out time and time again and I've had these people on my podcast. I don't particularly subscribe to it If for the listener, for the listeners out there, they're probably getting a chuckle out of this, but one of the key things that they purport time and time again is that they are less sore after a big long ultra marathon or after big long training runs and things like that. Which is really interesting because it's kind of the opposite of what we actually see from a scientific standpoint is that when you have high carbohydrate availability, there's, in fact, less, but less muscle damage. That compare and contrast is actually really like super, super fascinating to me yeah, absolutely definitely.
Speaker 2:I think you know there is a point of that's a great debate that we can start. Of course I don't know the answers of that, but I know that part of, let's say, adapting yourself to low carbohydrate diet, for example, is exactly adaptation. So there's a long process where you finally adapt to creating more glucose and glycogen stores from fat, so you improve your gluconeogenesis, for example, and that's part of the whole adaptation. But in either case, I think it seems quite. It seems for me not the debate, because at the moment the speed that you need that is required to win, and obviously you're going to create the muscle damage according to the sprint or the speed, sorry, or the power that you need that is required to win, and obviously you're going to create the muscle damage according to the sprint or the speed, sorry, or the power that you're putting in the road, in the mountains.
Speaker 2:You know is, from what I see, from what I have studied, is not enough only with fat oxidation. So you cannot compare the muscle damage and someone who is running at, you know, absolute speed, a higher speed, with someone who is running at lower speed. Uh, because of, you know, a structural and mechanic load is can be completely different, and then because the relative intensity of the effort is completely different. So sometimes we should definitely be a little bit more cautious on those statements, because you know you can't do everything. Of course that doesn't mean that it's the best. I mean you can. Of course we can now start running and working for a long time, but that doesn't mean that is the adequate thing to do or the appropriate thing to, for example, perform. So there's something to say that requires a little bit more further analysis, of deeper analysis, and why? Where is that coming from?
Speaker 1:and we're not going to adjudicate that here. We're going to talk specifically about your paper, okay, so let's get into it, the title of which it's this is in nutrients and came out. I mean, this came out a few years ago now, 2020, like right yep, yeah.
Speaker 1:So the title of it is the effects of 120 grams of carbohydrate intake during a mountain marathon on exercise-induced muscle damage in elite runners. So the title kind of just tells you exactly what the research is actually about. But in essence you took three different conditions and compared and contrasted them 120 grams an hour, 90 grams an hour and 120 grams an hour. 90 grams an hour and 60 grams an hour. Can you walk the listeners through first off what the race was, so they can kind of understand the, maybe the demands of what the athletes were going through, and then why you picked those very specific carbohydrate levels to to test on?
Speaker 2:yes, yeah, so it was a trial marathon, probably similar characteristics to slightly lower altitude accumulation than Serama, but it was kind of a similar terrain, so you can kind of understand or get an idea. Geometers, of course, just a marathon and, yeah, quite a good elevation. I don't remember now the name. Obviously is there in the numbers of elevation 4,000 meters.
Speaker 2:So it's slightly lower than Sagam, of course, but it's kind of a similar race. So that was organized by the whole researching group in Bulbos for this race. So it's not a race that is in the calendar, it's just a race that was organized for this race. So it's not a race that is in the calendar, it's just a race that was organized for this research. So obviously we wanted them to get exposed to what a marathon looks like in a real mountain scenario, so real life, and actually we organized the race with the prices and all that. So it was, like you know, like motivating everyone 100%. And obviously when you look into literature and you start you know kind of deciding what kind of groups you're going to be organizing for your research. So 60 was, let's say, the minimum dose that was recommended for that amount of volume of racing or hours. The total duration, 90, was kind of the upper range of the current recommendations. So 60 to 90. And then the experimenter group was 100.
Speaker 2:The reason why we selected 120 was probably because of, let's say, personal experimentation, but it was also you Some literature already published that it was correlating that quantity with greater performances in races like Ironman or long endurance events.
Speaker 2:On top of that, it's looking more into the mechanisms of why and how we absorb that glucose and fructose and we convert that into energy time. We've had some data proposing that the intestinal transporters they could kind of, yeah, they could absorb more than 90 grams per hour. So with this 1.5 grams per minute, we kind of, yeah, built that hypothesis that could go up to two grams per minute. So we decided to prove 120 against 90 and 60. Then, as you can imagine, that is only a standing point at the moment because you know, uh, we, we can see higher quantities being ingested at the moment 150, 160, 180, even if you go to most extreme events like the Tour de France and you can. On the bike, obviously we're less, you know mechanical impact and just a different position and you can stroke higher quantities. But, yeah, at the moment we decided to, okay, prove that based on what we believe it could be, and that's the reason why we selected these three groups and the athletes themselves are good competitive elite athletes.
Speaker 1:I think that kind of that doesn't need to. We can't kind of like brush that underneath the rug. This isn't like the everyday weekend warrior middle of the pack people. These are really good athletes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, we had among the runners we had a couple of world championships as well In general elite athletes that they were competing in, you know, national, international level. So, yeah, by that time, that research group obviously they were working with a lot of runners, so they, you know, that capacity to, you know, call them and then get them into participating was quite easy. So, yeah, we decided to go to that cohort of athletes that they were obviously feeling the criteria to be part of the study.
Speaker 1:And we'll probably come back to this at the end, but that may or may not impact your thinking in terms of the end prescription for the athlete. In terms of carbohydrate intake, you're taking on athletes that could potentially actually have the capacity to oxidize this carbohydrate based on the intensity that they can't that they could run a trail marathon. You move that back down to the pack and they might not need, they might not have the necessity to do that, based on the intensity that they're running, the duration that they have and things like that yeah, definitely, and that's a really good point, because sometimes let's say well, science is not always well understood.
Speaker 2:You know, sometimes we apply concepts or conclusions from studies that are being studied or demonstrated in a certain, let's say, amateurs and we want to apply them for elite athletes. Sometimes it's just the opposite way. You know, something that has been proven in elite athletes we want to apply it to weekend warriors. Something that has been proven in elite athletes, we want to apply it on into weekend warriors. So in this and I think at this point, I think in this topic, it's quite a risky thing. I mean, if you don't have the resources to oxidize the glucose and if you don't have the mitochondrial function to produce that energy, that high amount of carbohydrate is probably is going to give you, it's going to bring you into a danger position. So obviously, if you are on the, if you are sedentary, you know there is any, there's no, any. It's pointless to say that it's going to be harmful because you are not even using that glucose. But even if you're running but you don't have the resources to oxidize that glucose, convert it into lactate, produce energy, probably you're not going to get the most out of them. They're going to be not the best idea. It's not going to be the best idea for you.
Speaker 2:So in this kind of topic, I love that sentence of first prove that you can do it and secondly you ask for resources. Okay, so first you work on your mitochondrial function, you kind of demonstrate that in your body you can convert that glucose into energy because you are running fast, because you are producing that energy expenditure and then ask for resources, which is okay in intake or ingest carbohydrates, energy, etc, etc. So I think you are not going to be able to get a benefit from carbohydrates, especially high intake, if you are not able to oxidize that energy. And at the end of the day, obviously this is a very simplistic way of looking at this, but performance in endurance, sport is mainly determined by mitochondrial function. Sport is mainly determined by mitre, from the function, which is your capacity to basically produce energy and do it with, yeah, from different resources and different pathways of nutrients or substrates. So so, yeah, that's the point okay.
Speaker 1:So you've got this group of elite athletes. You contrive this race for them, contrive this trail ultra marathon race for them. You incentivize them to do, incentivize them to do well, three groups 60 grams per hour, 90 grams per hour, 120 grams per hour. You're doing blood draws after the race. To look specifically, look at muscle damage, synopsize the outcome of all of that, what, what did you guys actually find?
Speaker 2:once it was all said and done, yeah, so, as you know, in the scientific, in academia and scientific world, you get some analysis of the data, you apply some statistical rules and then you publish accordingly, right, and then you discuss your results accordingly and you discharge your results accordingly. So I can only talk about what it was above that scientific criteria sorry, statistical criteria of being accepted as a difference, and in this regard we saw that, let's say, muscle damage, muscle integrity, was better on those consuming 120 grams per hour compared to control 90 and 60 grams per hour groups.
Speaker 1:We also saw that the internal load they accumulated during the race was slower in almost 120 and you're gonna have to define you're gonna have to define what you mean by internal load to the audience, like what does that actually mean and how are you defining that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, internal load was just applied by an equation of intensity of the race compared to hair rate as well, and that was just a very simple equation of how you calculate that in arbitrary units. So we applied that equation and then I kind of discuss about all things that are, all those elements or outcomes that were below that statistical criteria. But if you analyze them from, let's say, a realistic approach what happened in racing you will see that the racing density of the experimental group 120 grams per hour group was higher. They run faster and they saw the lower sorry RPE.
Speaker 1:Yeah, lower rate of precision exertion yeah.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah, thank you, sorry, I was just stuck there with that. So obviously that wasn't statistically significant for us to claim that it's different. But if you see the numbers of the amount of time that it required them to complete the marathon and the intensity they raised according to the maximum and etc. You will see that. You know some races are won by one to 30 seconds, so you will see some minutes there. Of course there is the rules of you know statistics and science really, so we can't really say they improve performance, but we can see some tendencies that obviously afterwards we have been kind of proven.
Speaker 2:Then, on top of that, we published a second study intention I don't know if you are aware of that where we analyzed the neuromuscular function.
Speaker 2:Okay, so we put them after one, so 24 hours after the race we kind of um, we brought them into the Do the treadmill and they started to run again, kind of not the automax but just as an incremental test as well, and we saw the neuromuscular function by all the tests, like you know, the jumps and this kind of very specific test of that trail. Neuromuscular function was better, meaning recovery after 24omuscular function was better, meaning recovery after 24 hours after the varice was better, the lactate production was higher, so meaning bioenergetically they had more capacity to produce more lactate. And secondly thirdly sorry they were able to stay more time at that maximum aerobic pace or intensity. So we kind of obviously concluded that recovery was improved after 24 hours in the marathon in 120 grams compared to 90 and 60. So to summarize it all, we saw implications in muscle damage and recovery, some implications in hormones as well, like cortisol, testosterone et cetera. And then we saw functional recovery the next day by improved neuromuscular function and capacity to perform maximum aerobic intensity or pace.
Speaker 1:Which confirms the anecdote that the athletes were coming to the table with initially. When they undertake these high-carbohydrate programs, is they perform better. The efforts, the, any sort of relative effort sorry, any sort of absolute effort feels easier, and after the workout or after the race or whatever they tend to feel like they recover more quickly exactly, exactly so a lot of listeners out there are thinking, hey, this is a lot, they can count.
Speaker 1:Most people can do basic math. I have a very hard time with it, but most people can do basic math. If I'm going to try to take in 120 grams per hour, that's a lot of gels. That's a gel every 15 minutes or a gel every 12 minutes, depending upon your particular variety of gel that you actually like to use. What did you learn from any of this in terms of the athlete's capacity to actually take in that much carbohydrate during a very high intensity race? Is this something that is generally sustainable for them, or are there people out there that just have a harder time doing it, at least within the cohort of athletes that you were looking at?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really good point. So obviously, the first thing we learned is that carbohydrate absorption and, let's say, gut function, is very trainable. Our gut, so our stomach, can be trained to digest food, especially when you have splagmic vasoconstriction, which is what happens when you're running, obviously You're not thinking of digesting, you're thinking of getting all the energy to the muscles. If you try to get a hamburger when you're running, obviously you're going to stop. If you go to the toilet, that's because the blood flow is, let's say, directed to the main active tissue, right, the muscles in that moment, and the heart, and you know the brain as well but it's reduced into non-important functions like digesting food and absorbing food. So it's always a challenge to absorb well, eat, digest, absorb and deliver food into the muscles while you are running a certain intensity especially. Okay, um. So the first thing we understood is that that process is training. The same way, you train your muscle and you make your muscles more resilient. You can train your stomach to hold, let's say, more volume and you can train your intestine to absorb more glucose and fructose. Okay, so that is something trainable and that's where the gut training concept, you know, arose in a way. So that's the first thing.
Speaker 2:And secondly, this is highly individual, meaning there's no one rule, there's no 120. There's no 100. I mean the maximum amount of what you can absorb is highly individual, meaning there's no one rule, there's no 120. There's no 100. I mean the maximum amount of what you can absorb is highly individual and it should be trained and it should be explored based on your personal characteristics. Why? As simple as you know, same as volume of training is highly individual, or the amount of intensity that you can do is highly individual, or the amount of time you need to recover from a certain workout is highly individual, and there are a lot of factors affecting that, from microbiota composition to, you know, genetics, to your mitochondrial function, etc. To your current practices, etc. Okay, so this is highly individual and, together with this characteristic, it should be done very progressively. Okay so, the same as the first day of training, you are not probably doing six hours of running. You cannot start with 120 grams per hour if you are not used to it. So that is a progressive training that you need to kind of get used to, or get used to your whole car, just to absorb, tolerate and, you know, compare that into those capabilities, into everything. So it is individual, it should be very progressive, but it's very trainable, okay.
Speaker 2:Then of course, we are learning a lot. We are learning about, you know, the training like once you are trained to feel 120, how much does it take to lose adaptations? We are learning about how to manipulate that according to the goal, why, you know, it's not always 120. Maybe it can be when you are running slowly you are able to absorb more or less, or when you are running downhill, and then you've got obviously a very big vertical movement and an impact against the trail. You know it's always hard to absorb and digest more food.
Speaker 2:So we're learning a lot of things, but I could say this is just a training and principles of training are, you know, individual, progressive, you know a plan, et cetera. All those concepts that we apply to physical training probably can be the same way applied to gut training, which is, get used to digest and absorb nutrients, especially carbohydrates, on a very high, challenging environment, which is running. Because, again, if you try to eat a hamburger full of bacon and cheese while you're running at a certain intensity medium, high intensity probably you need to stop. Okay, you're not going to be able to absorb that. So that's what we.
Speaker 1:It's uh. The concept of progressive overload always comes into mind. This is one of the first concepts that you learn when you're, when you start coaching athletes. Irrespective of the sport that you're actually working with, whether you're working in a strength training setting, whether you're working in an endurance capacity or whatever is that the load that you apply has to eventually get greater and greater in order to facilitate further adaptations. And, as a kind of the counterpoint to that, the load that you initially apply should be in line with what the athlete can actually handle when the at the at that particular moment in time.
Speaker 1:So, if you just look at the strength training example, right, you want them to do a bench press. If they can't bench press 200 pounds, you're not going to have them start at 200 pounds. You're going to have them start that. I'm sorry, I'm using pounds instead of kilograms. You're going to have to start that. I'm sorry, I'm using pounds instead of kilograms. You're gonna have to start at 100 pounds or some fraction of that and then progressively overload them to 200 pounds. It's the same. What you're saying, or one of the components that you're mentioning, is that it's the same with the gut. If you want to tolerate, or at least try to tolerate 120 grams per hour. You don't start at 120 grams per hour. You you start at something that is reasonable for you and then you progressively overload to some theoretical maximum that you can actually handle. It might not be a 200-pound bench press or 120 grams of carbohydrates I don't know if that's the right physical analogy there but the point being is you're not starting at the end goal. You're starting at something before that and then gradually working up to see what's actually tolerable or how trainable it is.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that we're learning that we can dive into a little bit, since you have a lot of practitioner experience on this, is what are the time courses for that adaptation? We typically think about endurance training as being chronic, meaning it takes months and sometimes years to reap adaptation out of a huge volume of workload. It doesn't happen after hours. Most of it, the vast majority of it, doesn't happen after hours or even days or sometimes even weeks. It takes months and years to accumulate enough training volume to make these big deviations in fitness.
Speaker 1:What are we seeing along the gut training side of it in terms of that same progressive overload process and what the time course for those adaptations are and we don't have to put a specific number on it or a specific time frame on it. But is it long, is it short, short, is it somewhere in between? Is it reversible on a short course of time? Like what are your current thoughts on there? Because this is kind of a little bit of the wild west right now in terms of where we're at in, in terms of understanding it yes, that's another brilliant question.
Speaker 2:I think you're definitely nearly today with just the key questions, of course. And that's naturally the next question, because once you know that you can train capacity, obviously you start looking into how much time do I need, how much time do I need to lose those adaptations? So you start looking into periodizing that kind of stimulus to the body, right? So your question is brilliant and it has been five, five, six years now of, yeah, different research, uh, to have the capacity to somehow answer your, your question there. So what we see is that definitely doesn't require that long as endurance capacity and it does require 1000 hours of bowling per year.
Speaker 2:But we, what we do now at the moment, is sorry. What we know at the moment is that it depends on your starting point Okay. So it massively depends on how is your, again, your capacity to use that and your mitochondrial function, okay, and normally the q1 body when it is good at doing something, it's good at doing almost everything, at least when it comes to energy, bioenergetics, okay. So let's say, when you know, when we have these native altitude, native bike riders, they are very good as adducing oxygen, of course, they are very good at endurance sport, but when they have an injury they are very quick, they are very fast and recovering. So they are almost very good on everything you know like recovery, healing and also performing. So this can be applied into how you use energy is directly correlated with how you're absorbing that energy.
Speaker 2:Okay. So if you are just killing your net, of course probably you will require less time of training, of that training to get up and get adapted to whatever 120 or 150 grams per hour. If you are an amateur, say, runner, probably that is going to require a little bit longer. Okay, but let's say you're starting from zero. What we have seen is that somewhere between six to eight or ten weeks can be more than enough to go from a normal capacity of absorption, which can be 30 to 40 miles per hour, to 90, 120. But that could be a reasonable, let's say, period where you can really get those adaptations. Trey Lockerbie.
Speaker 1:Two to three months. Two to three months just to kind of put it in a box there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it could be. Yeah, exactly, it could be that On this, there is a really good researching group that is going into detail of gut function and all that in Monash University. They are guided by, they are led by, ricardo Costa, which is all of them. They are like a big inspiration for me, because obviously I don't have those resources to, you know, put into proof or my hypothesis, but they are doing some of those studies and I think, yeah, I can recommend everybody to get their names. And what Monash University is doing is publishing everything related to gut challenges and gut training and all that.
Speaker 2:Then, another thing that we have obviously we have never published because it's hard to get the resources, just to get another study on that, but what we have learned is that at the same time you create adaptations, you lose adaptations, the same as in trading, okay, so how you prioritize that? Because obviously it's not sustainable to spend 12 months per year fueling 120 grams of carbohydrates a week and you need to prioritize those efforts. Of course, you know, and you need to prioritize them according to your training load, according to your intensity. You know, not because that is good, it's something you're going to say okay, every week I'm going to eat on every session, 120 grams per hour. That is another topic that we can, of course, discuss. So, just to be able to visualize that it's very relevant.
Speaker 2:How much time does it take to lose those adaptations? And what we have seen is that in two to three weeks you can lose that capacity to move on that high and top end quantities. So you probably could be able to absorb 60, 70, 80 without problems, but you're going to struggle with 90, 100, 120. Okay, so that is kind of a yeah, the losses of adaptation you can see within that range. But once you are trained and you lose those adaptations, the comeback is faster than the previous. Let's say, a training Okay, so we in another couple of weeks, four to six sessions, you can already be on those 120 pounds per hour comfortably being comfortable from that perspective. I don't know if I explained it well. Sometimes maybe my English can be misunderstood, but that's more or less the.
Speaker 1:Here's what came to mind that I think will help describe it for the users. I'm going to use an analogy that kind of borders the time frame for adaptation and then also the time frame for reversibility, both on the long side of it and on the short side of it. So on the long side of it we already have talked about this this is training, right. So training takes months, if not years, to build up and it's also very resilient, especially especially at the lower end. You know ultra marathon capacity, that we're talking about the D training process. As long as you have a very, a very modest amount of dose, maybe 50% of your normal training, you can hold on to the vast majority of the adaptations that you, that you've made for a relatively long period of time. People always get paranoid that if they have a training interruption due to injury, illness, work, travel kind of whatever it is, that they're gonna lose their fitness in the matter of several days. And that's the fact of the matter. Is you really don't. You can put them on a treadmill and do a graded exercise test before and afterwards and they would test exactly the same. They might feel worse, but they're going to test nearly identical. But my point with that is is it's a chronic adaptation, it's and it's very robust. You look at the other side of the spectrum, something that we've talked about on this podcast a lot and is and is very well researched, is heat acclimation and acclimatization, which tends to be a very quick, very acute process. It takes just several doses to get a very robust response, and that robust response kind of goes away pretty quickly on the order of two to 3%, maybe a day is what most of the research is indicating. This gut training seems to sit almost in the middle of where it takes several weeks, if not months, to facilitate a reasonable improvement in it, whether that's from 60 to 90 or 90 to 120 or 50 to 70, whatever kind of your, whatever your level is, and then to lose it takes a couple of weeks, as you were mentioning. The reason that that's important and the reason that we want to try to get some realistic timeframes for this maybe not exact, but realistic timeframes for this maybe not exact, but realistic timeframes for this is because you can't do everything all of the time and sometimes it's counterproductive to work some component of training more than you need to, and you also want to give yourself enough runway to do that as well.
Speaker 1:The something that you mentioned is also quite interesting is that there does tend to be a group of athletes that have more consistent GI issues and this pops up in the literature.
Speaker 1:This pops up when you work with athletes. When you work with a big cohort of athletes, like I do, I definitely have athletes that are more that are going to have more GI issues during races and have them more consistently, versus the ones that are just better at it. Right To your point earlier, they're probably better at a lot of other things, and one of the things that I'm taking from this conversation into my coaching practice is that for the athletes that are in this former group, that they tend to have more frequent GI issues, is just to give that adaptation process a longer period of time. It's still not several months, but it might be three months, maybe even four months to where we're kind of constantly working things on the long run. We're constantly trying to build things up just to give it a little bit more time as compared to the more adaptable group that I know is not going to have a lot of GI distress. I was wondering if you had anything to add to that.
Speaker 2:No, I think that's correct. You know you do in several different let's say, exposure to altitude or heat, or fueling, or volume or strength. You have responders, non-responders, and then someone in the middle. So, according to what you've got with you, what kind of assets you've got in front of you, you need to be flexible with timings, with the dose that you are kind of applying to them. So that applies yeah, it's a rational or logic to gut training and we have seen that definitely.
Speaker 2:Then I don't know if it's pointless to say, but I think it is worth just mentioning the fact that to have a proper, let's say, gut function, there's something non-negotiable, which is the gut health. I mean you need to have a strong gut health. It's hard to define that somewhere else, especially because science is not very, let's say, at the moment it's not very clear what gut health means, but for sure it means different symptoms upper and lower GI symptoms. So without having a healthy gut and that is related to obviously a of probiotics, of stress you know this of micro how to say sorry, micro, yeah, yeah, sorry, but anyway, just a little illnesses because of the impact of, of the gesture, of the running, for example, you're not going to be able to absorb all that okay.
Speaker 2:So the first rule is you need to have a proper gut health, and that is something that is not very common, unfortunately, at the moment, and that's probably because of the quality of the diets and quality of the products that we are generally consuming is not good enough or they have some kind of disruptors that are affecting our gut health. So that is another thing. Sometimes we think someone is not a responder, but the reality is that non-responder is coming from his or her habits really. So just by reducing those and improving the quality of the diet and improving that gut, that's going to help massively on what we thought was non-responder. Maybe he or she is responder, okay, but they are getting kind of, they are getting capped or blocked by all the practices that are not helping that. But, yeah, definitely. Just to summarize on your point, yeah, as every training, you just need to apply the same rationale to the athlete that you are trying to help or make adaptations to.
Speaker 1:So I'll use another. I'll use another analogy. I think it will resonate with athletes with altitude because, once again, we've studied altitude for decades now and have what I feel are really good practices in terms of when to do altitude camps, how long to do them for, who are the right candidates for it. Which is to your point of who are the responders versus non-responders or low responders versus high responders. We won't get into that pedantic debate today, but one of the things that helps kind of tease that out or filter that out is we just do blood paneling, we just use blood biomarkers to determine if an athlete is a good candidate for an altitude camp, and if they meet certain criteria and all of the other timing works out, then great, we'll do the altitude camp. And if they don't meet all of that blood profiling criteria, then they're not a good candidate for that. And then essentially, you're creating the what we're describing right now as the responders or the non-responders group, based on their own internal biological snapshot.
Speaker 1:At that time there probably is a gut equivalent to that that we have yet to. You know, we might have good practices for right right now, or we might have good like inklings for, but certainly not as robust as the altitude piece, which is very well established. I can absolutely see that transpiring over the last few years where if we want to do a gut training intervention, we know that it's more effective, our person is more likely to respond to it if they have a certain biological state going into it, akin to the red blood cell profiling that we do with athletes, as before we do, before we potentially do altitude camps. I can absolutely see that being the case in the next few years where we have some sort of qualification criteria, essentially to have athletes undertake yeah, yeah, we are not quite there yeah, I can see it, though that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:I can see it exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's going to be a good next step for in the gut, training advices and fueling, compartmentalizing advices and beyond that, to guarantee or to do kind of what we call performance and health kind of issue. You know how performance is managed with health and how sometimes executing performance is not necessarily related to having a good health. But yeah, I think that's probably a good next step. That's something we are looking into. It's very hard to say you know root panel or you know certain amount of, let's say, accounts or hormones are related to the gut function. I think that is going to be hard to say, but we do have some biomarkers that they are representative of the gut function. I think that is going to be hard to say, but we do have some biomarkers that they are representative of the gut function. At the moment we've got well, obviously, just the feeling. You know like a scale of symptoms and how you are feeling from the. You know they are validated scales of symptoms from the upper body, lower body, whether it's diarrhea or urge to vomit etc. But going more into objective data, different biomarkers that are representative of gut damage, some others that are representative of gut absorption, which are related to fermentation. I think you may be familiar with the spiked hydrogen or methane. I think you pronounce it like this you may be familiar with the spiked hydrogen or methane. I think you pronounce it like this.
Speaker 2:So they are all provincial biomarkers that we kind of all together they can give you a kind of an equation of where you are, and that's, at this point, something we're using in the practice. So we are kind of assessing our athletes' gut function through different elements. You have to say, okay, from what we understand, you are in the low, middle or higher range of kind of gut function. What I would like to open up here a discussion is around microbiota tests, the potential, let's say, claims that we do see at the moment, especially in social media, but they are not necessarily precise or valid. Or let's say, we do see at the moment, especially in social media, but they are not necessarily precise or valid. Or let's say sorry, I don't find the word, but I would say that they are explaining what they claim to be explaining. Okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:I got it so microbiota is such an unknown thing for us that we those days I read that we know more about the space than about our microbiota. That was quite funny, because probably we know very little about how our bacteria and different kind of life that we've got in the gut is coexisting and producing products and using substrates for the coexistence with our ecosystem. We know very little and the problem and I'm not an expert on this, don't get me wrong please but what I see, the potential limitation or my reservations towards this kind of analysis, is that we are measuring. We are not measuring function. We are not measuring.
Speaker 2:If we were measuring metabolomics, for example, you're measuring what a friend of mine says, the, for example. You're measuring what a friend of mine says the science of reality, but you are not measuring. We are not measuring on those tests. We are not measuring that. We are not measuring function, product byproducts or metabolomics. We are just measuring genetics of those bacterias and of course they are going to be altered by many factors, but we don't understand at the moment that correlations with the function. So when we are there, when I don't know, hopefully in some years or maybe someone is already working on that, all these in research, for sure they are working on that of analyzing the function of our microbiota bacteria, so how all those metabolites are improving or are impacting on performance and health. Then we will be on that position to really assess how you know that, let's say, gut function is for every athlete. And the same way we are using blood panels or HVMAS or different biomarkers to assess altitude adaptations or even your capacity to perform on endurance events.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I was just going to go to the performance or the training load piece of it, because that's the thing that I'm really wrapped up around as a coach is prescribing the right training loads. We use all these surrogate markers for things and really that's what they are is. It's just a constellation of surrogate markers for what we think impacts what we're ultimately trying to affect. And you know I use a battery of of monitoring variables to help guide me on load management process or load management practices. So heart rate variability and mood and soreness, subjective measures, subjective measures, sleep, things like that. That all of those things combined help me to say, okay, I'm going to do X amount of load more, or I'm going to do X minus 10% amount of load more, or whatever. It kind of helps me titrate what I think should be going on. The same thing might be emerging in this parallel world where we're actually training the gut. But, the hypotheticals aside, let's try to wrap this up with more of like a really practical thing that athletes can do.
Speaker 1:A lot of athletes are looking at this saying, okay, I want to try to increase my carbohydrate intake that I'm going to deploy during whatever race, whether that's 50 to 70 or 60 to 90 or 90, 120 or whatever. We can try to make this as universal as possible, and I want to deploy a training strategy in order to help accomplish that right. I'm now here. I want to be up there. I need to exercise some sort of progressive overload that we talked about earlier. What are some practical guidelines that we can take athletes through, just in terms of what that progressive overload might actually look like and then how they actually practically implement it? Is it more carbohydrates at the same feeding rate, Is it breaking up or is it increasing the number of feeds per hour, trying different substrates out? What general guidelines and and things would you actually take an athlete through, being that you're a coach and a practitioner as well? If we are trying to titrate this up and to see if there are any sort of upper limits, what can we leave the listeners with in that regard?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I've got a little publication in my website where I used to write some posts that is completely blocked or forgotten by me at the moment. I've been already two years without publishing there. It's just a website in Spanish, but I did write some posts in English and exactly this one where I propose kind of a methodology or a model just to start from zero or 30 grams and finish or train up to 120, that was published in my website in the book for science. You can just find there 120. It was published in my website in the book for science. You can just find there. But of course there are many. It's very simple, same as training. It's very simple but at the same time it's very complex.
Speaker 2:So at the end of the day, you just need to be able to increase your exposure to carbohydrates and volume progressively from zero to your target. How do you do that? Obviously it needs to your target. How do you do that? Obviously, it needs to be progressive. So what we kind of map out when we started with all this is that first of all, the stomach is the first barrier of that digestion and absorption. So the way the stomach gets adapted to absorb higher volumes is exposing the stomach to higher volumes. So what we know from a stomach is that it's highly flexible and adaptable. Okay, actually, we know this from these, let's say, eating challenges. Yeah, I don't know, like hundreds of hot dogs and all that they train for that. Yeah, so they train their stomach to hold more volume of food. Okay, obviously this is a completely different thing, because when we are running, we have no blood, so the gut function is compromised and then we've got the movement.
Speaker 2:But to work on those, or set the proper foundations of gut function, you first need to be able to tolerate high volumes. So you can start with, if you are not drinking, just by drinking a little bit more on the run and getting high volume, let's say, foods. And you can use, for example, even fruits that are not ideal you know they are not ideal to get 100 grams, but they are high volume foods that it's going to challenge your gut to be absorbed, and they have some fiber, et cetera. So you start with the, let's say, the low intensity, medium intensity runs and you start getting more, more volume. You start practicing your hydration, more volume of food, sorry, you start practicing your hydration just by setting up proper windows. What we have seen is that probably 20 minutes windows. They work the best and that's because the gastric emptying works depending on how you control the kind of the bus, the bushing sensor, let's say, which is just kind of the ending part of the stomach. So if you have enough volume, then that gastric emptying is going to happen. But if you are very frequent and the volume is not enough in your stomach, that gastric emptying story is not going to be efficient. Okay, so what we have seen there's some research problems there is that probably windows of 20 minutes. So every 20 minutes adding some volume into your stomach improves the gastric emptying and it's you and it's related to less gastrointestinal symptoms.
Speaker 2:So you could start with high volume foods and drinks, especially working on that, not focusing on the grams of carbohydrates but more focusing on, let's say that, volume. This is a phase that is quite fast. In two weeks or three weeks you can probably arrive to a good comfort. And then you go into, let's say, the small intestine, how you are absorbing the glucose and fructose, and this is just a matter of training our transporters to get stimulated by more exposure to glucose and fructose. Okay, so the more they are exposed, the more mechanisms they're going to create to absorb more. So the more they are exposed, the more mechanisms they're going to create to absorb more. And that happens to, you know, sglt1, which is the glucose transporter, and GLUT5, which is the fructose transporter, and potentially GLUT1 and GLUT2 that are, let's say, other helpers.
Speaker 2:So on that second phase you will be focused more into okay, high carbohydrate content by using can be gels, it can be bars, it can be these gums or little, you know like semi-solid options, and you're going to go increasing that quantity. So for a couple of weeks I'm sitting on 60 grams per hour. If that is all correct, no problems. Maybe you introduce them on a high intensity interval training. Well, you know, the gut function is more compromised. So you are, you know, challenging yourself with less resources to absorb all that.
Speaker 2:Once you are, you reach a plateau of, you know, being comfort or having some gut comfort there.
Speaker 2:Then you go into 80, 90, and then it's just a matter of exploring the quantity, you know, with different gels, different options, always trying to respect that the volume is the number one thing.
Speaker 2:You have to train and you always need enough fluid to get that food and to protect the blood that is around around the cup and then progressively increasing with that time in the that I was telling you, every 20 minutes, try to put, let's say, if you are doing 90 grams per hour, 30 grams every 20 minutes, so you improve that volume, capacity of tolerance and that goes into your intestine and transporters.
Speaker 2:They, they work out and again, that's a matter of exploration. And then how you, how, of course, how you refine your race strategy is just a matter of selecting how you refine your race strategy is just a matter of selecting the right products because, as you probably have experienced, not all the products work for everyone, for whatever reasons, because there is a percentage, say pulling there, of flavors, textures, additives, et cetera, that you know, not X brand is going to work for everybody and someone. They maybe they prefer to change flavors to be more salty, less sweet, etc. Well, that's a matter of already an exploration where you are able to absorb 90, 100. That goes out kind of fine-tuning, same as, let's say, I don't know shoes or materials, you've got the fitness, but now you're exploring kind of the next level which is adequate products for your purpose.
Speaker 2:Okay, so the order here is exploring kind of the next level, which is adequate products for your purpose, okay.
Speaker 1:So the order here is actually kind of is really interesting to me, so let me try to really quickly encapsulate this. It's like a two and a half step process. Yeah, the first step you're challenging you're essentially a challenging anatomy right the volume of food stuff that your stomach can take. You kind of don't care about the gastric emptying rate at that point. This is your time to eat your double bacon cheeseburgers, as you've alluded to on your runs, because you're not trying to optimize for that. You're specifically challenging the anatomy of the stomach to handle large quantities of volume, or large quantities of volume, just big, massive amounts of food, right? Or larger amount of food, just a larger amount of stuff. You then go through that process, which is a couple of weeks, a couple of weeks long, and you're kind of in your example that you gave. Then you optimize for gastric emptying and you're trying to challenge on what essentially is about chemical side of things or transporter side of things, and this is the rate of carbohydrate that you can transport along the gut walls, and in that order. So it's anatomy first, volume first and then the transporter second. And I mean I can very easily envision the process that the athletes would go through in this, and it looks dramatically different across both of those two steps and I just tried to describe it, but I'm going to try to do a better job right now.
Speaker 1:During the first one, you're just eating larger volumes of food than you're normally used to eating, and where that comes from, you kind of don't care, because you're not optimized. In fact, it's probably better that you're not optimizing for it, as you've mentioned, because that's a specific adaptation that you want to get. Once you felt that you've got that adaptation, hey, I felt kind of pukey after eating my double cheeseburger and now I can tolerate it just fine. That's a great litmus test. Once you feel that you've gotten that, then you can go back to your more quote unquote optimized nutrition plan whatever that is gels, gummies, drink, combination of all of the above. And then you're working on essentially the rate of intake through whatever means you want to do every 20 minutes, every 15 minutes, kind of whatever it is, and you're titrating that rate up from there in that specific order. Is that a fair encapsulation of what's going on there, aitor?
Speaker 1:Exactly, Exactly, yeah, and of course you know there are some other factors, like you know the famous glucose and fructose ratio, you know the texture of the different options, so that is kind of a topic of discussion where you are already there into 90 100 grams per hour but here's the thing with that, though I think a lot of athletes out there and I'm nodding my head because you know, maybe I'm guilty of giving this advice or even usually using it myself we've kind of gone to the optimization side too early without looking at this anatomical adaptation that could be occurring in advance of it.
Speaker 1:That helps facilitate the transporter side of things. That's why I think the training part of it becomes so interesting and once again, to use a training analogy, we go through this ad nauseum as coaches. Do you do volume first and intensity last? Do you do intensity first or do you do volume last, depending upon the race setup? And like the sequence of stimuli that you can apply to an athlete, we think makes a difference. That's why we try to periodize things and I'm going to leave that debate for another day, whether that matters or not things, and I'm gonna leave that debate for another another day, whether that matters or not. But what you're proposing here is that along the gut adaptation part of it, there is a, there is an order that we need to at least think about in terms of what comes first and what comes second of course, but that's the human being.
Speaker 2:You always feel appealed by what is exciting and nobody's probably more basic. But it's working. You know, we are running at four kilometers, four minutes kilometer, and we are wearing those suits that are done to run 250 or 245, you know. So we always feel very excited by all those things. But, yeah, it's pretty reality that we should start by all these say less fancy things, and even something that I didn't mention how you eat off the bike, off the run, like off the training, impacts massively on your gut absorption.
Speaker 2:So what we know is that the diet that you are consuming is predisposing I don't know if that word is right, but predisposing your capacity to absorb and digest different foods.
Speaker 2:So, of course, if you are and this is something that has been proven in different animals so when the content of a certain nutrient is abundant in their diet, the mechanisms to absorb that nutrient are bigger.
Speaker 2:So obviously, if you stay I don't know two months just eating fats, your capacity to absorb carbohydrate is going to get compromised and, on the other hand, if you, for example, never use fructose on your daily routine, you're going to struggle with absorbing fructose. So not only what you do, let's say on the run on the bike or around training, but you know, on your do. Let's say on the run on the bike or around training, but you know, on your normal, let's say, meal planning, that is going to impact your, your capacity to absorb. So again, let's come back to foundations. It's not about that gel that looks amazing and that the people is taking on all his winning, or that is not the part that you know he learned your net is eating when he's winning utmb. It's more about the foundations of that, or how you really get the basics well and yeah, and that's always hard to explain, because we want immediately that yellow bar, because we believe that makes the difference right it happens in nutrition, I think, more than training.
Speaker 1:I mean, we tend to have a shortcut society. This is going off, this conversation is going on the rails pretty quickly. We tend to have a shortcut society where we want immediate results, but it happens way more nutrition than in any other area. And I do think that this phenomenon of I had gi distress, my distress. My solution to that is to use a more advanced product or chop up the rate at what I'm doing it, or whatever it is. I'm going to move to a hydrogel. I'm going to take in half a hydrogel every 10 minutes or whatever.
Speaker 1:And I think that your point about going back to the fundamentals, which we always try to focus on in coaching, is really important here within gut training of is let's just first work on the volume of food that you can, that you can tolerate, just from an I'm calling it an anatomical standpoint, I don't know if that's the right vocabulary, but just let's just work on that first and that and then from that now we can titrate what types of products when we're ingesting them, what the rate of those products are, what the volume of those specific feeds are, all of that other stuff. But fundamentally let's work on the volume proposition first. I just think that's a really practical take-home for a lot of athletes, especially a lot of ultra marathon athletes that experience GI distress during a race and they're trying to alleviate it somehow is train it, but use some sort of systematic training component. Or some sort of systematic training component. There's some sort of systematic process for that training. Don't just try to work on the end solution for it.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1:This has been amazing. We're going to have you come back on. Well, we will have you come back on. We talked about it offline in a capacity that we have yet to divulge and won't divulge on this one, so it's a tease for the audience. A couple months time we'll hear from my tour again and we'll banter about some other stuff, but before we let you go, is there anything else you want to leave listeners with in terms of what athletes can do to help kind of solve this problem and explore some of these more higher carbohydrate options that tend to be creeping up?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I don't know for sure. You know we could have spent hours here just discussing, talking about this exciting topic, but no, I think we were pretty much on everything. In general. I think this is very, you know, same as in training.
Speaker 2:I think own aspiration is part of what we as individuals, as athletes or coaches, we have to do and, as always, science, which is a great resource and I'm a scientist for that reason, but it's not a sad word, you know and I think in this carbohydrate or fueling topic or this area, there is a big boiling on a big part of self-exploration and that is probably the best way of understanding what feeds yourself or your runners or your athletes.
Speaker 2:So, of course, the more you can measure like we were talking, you know, scales of perception or by markets or whatever, the better you can understand that. But at the end of the day, there is a lot of value on that self-exploration and you know, just trying different products, different protocols, different quantities. So I could encourage everyone you know, waiting to improve that, just to get out there, and by using well, it's hard to say common sense, because common sense sometimes is the least common of the senses, but it's the rationale that we have been discussing here, to go and explore about how they can tolerate higher intakes of carbohydrates and how that is impacting on their mood, on their performance, on their recovery, you know, day after day and potentially on adaptation. So it's a very, let's say, restorative, if you want to call it area, and I would encourage everybody to go out there and explore with Common Sense.
Speaker 1:Great place to leave it there. I'm going to drop a link in the show notes to your website, but where else can listeners learn a little bit more about the work that you're doing?
Speaker 2:well, unfortunately I'm not a very, let's say, productive, uh, content creator.
Speaker 1:That's fine we've got a lot of content creators out there that are unproductive, so yeah, well, I'm not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't have a lot of content. That website unfortunately is a little bit late. You know there in a couple of years ago that I'm not writing some posts there. We've got a little project that is called MedHab. Unfortunately, that is mainly in Spanish. So if you are a Spanish speaker or you're trying to understand or learn Spanish, definitely we've got a little podcast that we are creating some content there. It's just a narrative podcast. We are just telling the stories. It's not a conversation like like yours, it's more just a different, different, let's say, format and the rest, yeah, I don't know. My twitter probably is the best platform where you can follow me, where I'm a little bit more active than you know any other platforms, and that's everything. I don't know. Maybe I should think on creating my I don't know another website or another podcaster, but at the moment that's enough I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean you're going to be doing enough in the coming months. I can see the writing on the wall, so maybe you think time is going to be your limiting factor there, which it tends to be for everybody. I appreciate it, appreciate coming on the podcast and I appreciate you helping solve these problems for athletes, because it's one of the bigger ones out there yeah, okay, thank you very much for uh calling me on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for the great time all right folks, there you have it.
Speaker 1:There you go. Much thanks to itor for helping us to unpack this aspect of high carbohydrate intakes during racing and how we might adapt to them during the training process. For one, as a coach, I am absolutely taking away some of the things that we got to in the latter part of this conversations, where maybe the right path to train the gut is to first challenge the anatomy and then challenge the transport side of the equation, in that order, in order to facilitate alleviating GI distress or having or trying to increase the rate of carbohydrate intake that we want to take in during a race. These are things that athletes can actually start exploring right now. I know it's getting into the off season and there's a lot of talk about that, but trust me, next year in the racing season is going to come around very quickly, and the need to start training and training the gut is going to start coming around quickly as well, and these are things that we need to actually keep an eye on, because it's not an instantaneous adaptation. It does take several months or a few months to actually train the gut properly and to get all the nutrition systems in order. So I hope that you guys out there all take that to heart and have some and have some things to work on, whether that is whether you're working on them in December, january, february or any of these months, any of these months coming up.
Speaker 1:If you like this podcast, please feel free to share it with your friends and your training partners, and maybe the coach that you're actually that you're actually working with. As always, this podcast is free of any sponsorships or advertising, and that is one of the reasons for that is because we can talk about anything nutrition wise. We don't have to be beholden to any one brand or another. So the best way to support this podcast and support this work is just to share the love. If you have a training partner or somebody in the space that you think would find value out of this, go ahead and send them the link, have them consume the content, and that helps us out tremendously over here.
Speaker 1:All right, folks, we are back on our regular scheduled program for the winter. I'm done traveling for at least the short-term time frame, so expect these podcasts to be released weekly. We're going to have a great schedule coming up during the winter. We've got a number of fantastic guests already lined up. Appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you listeners out there and, as always, we will see you out on the trails.
