The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

Bicarb Curious? Everything Time-Crunched Cyclists Need to Know Before Using Sodium Bicarbonate Supplements

• Season 3 • Episode 148

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Topics covered in this episode:

  • What is sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) and what does it have to do with athletic performance?
  • How has bicarb been used to improve performance historically?
  • How athletes can improve performance with bicarb supplementation. 
  • Limitations and value proposition of bicarb supplementation
  • Drawbacks and risks associated with bicarb supplementation
  • What kind of workouts and competitions are well suited for bicarb supplementation and which are not?

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Guest: Jason Koop
Jason Koop is the Head Coach of CTS Ultrarunning, author of "Training Essentials for Ultrarunning, 2nd Ed", creator of the "Research Essentials for Ultrarunning" monthly newsletter, and host of "The Koopcast" podcast. He is one of the most sought-after coaches in ultrarunning, and for many years he was the CTS Coaching Director in charge of coaching education and ongoing mentoring of CTS Coaches across all sports. Find Jason on Instagram, Twitter, or his website: https://jasonkoop.com 

Host
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for more than 13 years and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

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Adam Pulford:

From the team at CTS. This is the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, Coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now onto our show. Welcome back Time Crunch fans, and if this is your first time joining us, welcome to the show.

Adam Pulford:

The Time Crunch Cyclist podcast is where we take bigger, complicated training topics and condense them down into short, actionable podcast items so that you can take that and apply it to your own training. We do it without all the BS. In fact, today I've got a guest who's a pro when it comes to sifting through all the BS out there. I thought he would be just the guy for the interview. He's not actually a cyclist, though, so let's not hold that against him. Rich Jason Koop is our head coach for the Ultra Running program at CTS, author of The Essentials to Ultra Running and one of the most knowledgeable practitioners about all things endurance. He's also just a damn good guy and a solid friend. So, Koop, welcome to the show.

Jason Koop:

Apparently, I'm going to add BS sifter to my business card. I think you should I think you should.

Adam Pulford:

It would really round your whole practice out, I think.

Jason Koop:

Yeah, definitely, it's a portfolio ad.

Adam Pulford:

It really is. It's really fun, though, because we see a lot of BS out there, and I usually, if there's something worthwhile, i use the litmus test of Koop to see where it's at. He's usually got his finger on the pulse with stuff. That being said, koop, where the heck are you potting from today?

Jason Koop:

I am in Auburn, california. I'm probably one kilometer away from the finish line of where the Western States 100 will be in just a couple of weeks time. Yeah, so we've got a few athletes out here that I'm going to take out on the course and just basically show them around town and do a little training camp.

Adam Pulford:

Yeah, cool Koopling is a.

Jason Koop:

Yeah, koopling, we're definitely Koopling Yeah.

Adam Pulford:

Yeah, four miles an hour all day.

Jason Koop:

Yeah Yeah, that's a pretty successful Ultra. Yeah, three miles an hour, man Don't like four miles an hour. You don't want to push it too much.

Adam Pulford:

All right, well, folks, to frame this podcast up, this show here. Koop and I, like I said, we keep tabs on some trendy stuff that's going on, and one of which has been sodium bicarbonate. I've had a lot of athletes asking me about it and I'm seeing messaging through different feeds, podcasts, social media, sport, nutrition sites. So, koop, our listeners are, dare I say, bicarb curious. What do we need to know about sodium bicarbonate before they go jack themselves with this new but old supplement?

Jason Koop:

Well, first off, everybody has this in their house. It's baking soda. Wait what? Yeah, everybody has it in their house. I know It's kind of mind-blowing It's baking soda, Yeah, So you either tucked back in your refrigerator because people would use it to just like help the refrigerator smell better, or it's in your pantry as something that you could bake with, right?

Jason Koop:

So anybody who's made loaf of bread or made waffles, cookies, whatever your pastry or whatever your thing of choice, is that you would choose to bake. Baking soda is one of those things that you might put into the batch in terms of some sort of ingredients. So it's a household item and many, many, many years ago, as is the story with a lot of sports science supplements, somebody along the line said hey, you know what? I wonder if we can repurpose this completely benign substance and give it to athletes and see if there is some sort of effect. It makes sense, because it's a base and maybe the muscles are acidic and if we could start to ingest this, then we could neutralize what's going on. And lo and behold, 30 years ago now, maybe even 40 years, 40 years that practice of sodium bicarbonate loading started to be introduced into the athletic sphere. And I remember when I was in college. This is going way back a long, long time ago when I was a very mediocre runner at Texas A&M University. I still have my class ring.

Adam Pulford:

Everybody who's watching the podcast and the video format can see.

Jason Koop:

Yeah, class of 2001. When I was a very, very mediocre runner, this is something that we would do. I ran the 800 meters and the 1500 meters and sometimes the 5000 meter run And we would take a couple of tablespoons of baking soda and we would bicarbonate load, we'd put it in a little glass and we'd stir it around and try to get dissolved and chug it, maybe 30 minutes before the race or so, and if you could get to the start line without any sort of GI distress, it's actually fairly beneficial for races of that duration. So I think the first thing that the kind of like listeners need to know is this practice is not all that new. We've done it for years. I've personally done it.

Jason Koop:

At times turned me from a mediocre, less than mediocre runner to mediocre runner. Right, that's the effect. Yeah, that's the effect. It has very, very small, but the limiting factor is that it's not all that new. But the limiting factor from an application standpoint has always been GI distress, and this is well documented across all of the literature, and anybody who has actually tried this is that most people, when they undertake this type of intervention, have not just a little bit but a serious amount of GI distress.

Adam Pulford:

So you're talking like burpy?

Jason Koop:

I don't feel good or are you talking like below situation Well, either, or, like a lot of people, just because of the volume of fluid that you have to ingest and how much, how basic it is there, it could just literally disturb their intestines as they're ingesting it, and then sometimes, yeah, you actually get the shits. I mean, there's kind of like there's no way around it. And so that practice has been around for many, many years, and it just happens to be over the past maybe decade or so that really smart people have kind of looked at this problem of we know that this intervention works, but let's see how we can get around the problem. Let's see how we can get around this issue of GI distress, and so these different delivery mechanisms started to merge in the space, And some of which are actually kind of quite clever that you and I have both experienced.

Jason Koop:

So I would say that it's just kind of like set the table a little bit. It's been used for a long period of time. We know what the limitations are, we actually know pretty well what the dosing that you need is, and that's relatively rare from the supplement perspective, like how much do you actually need? But we've always had kind of this continual problem of how do we get around the GI distress And so enter into this like new world, right Where food technology starts to take over And we have these really novel ways of delivering the substance that we know works.

Adam Pulford:

Yeah, it's kind of an exciting time, i think, with some of the supplements and food industry, because, i don't know, i feel like an old coach whenever I say, oh, there's nothing new under the sun, everything just cycles back. But I think that the transmission right Of, especially like sodium bicarbonate, that is kind of new, that's bypassing this GI stress And kind of like the two things that we're talking about, like we're brand neutral here but like sodium bicarbonate is the thing. And these two new things are the Morton bicarb and then PR lotion, which is not that super new, but PR lotion, transdermal transporter of sodium bicarb to the muscles. Morton is this goopy paste thing that we'll talk about, that you can eat and get the sodium bicarbonate in. But before we get there, coop, what are the benefits of sodium bicarbonate? Like, if we would just say like a little bit more specifically, rather than making you mediocre to somewhat above mediocre, of an endurance athlete, Well, you know, here's the deal With any sort of supplement like this, with any sort of intervention.

Jason Koop:

I kind of very jokingly say that it made me from less than a mediocre runner to mediocre runner, And I do think that people need to take that to heart. It's not going to go from, it's not going to take you from zero to hero overnight. Maybe if you wanted to do like a 40K time trial we can relate right to this in like cycling terms. If you want to do a 40K time trial, like maybe it's 1%, right, And the one or 2%. And here's the thing. Well, I'll actually point out two things with this. First off, you can get one or 2% in a myriad of different ways, right. Tapering, exercise interventions, nutrition interventions here's a supplement intervention, right. You can kind of get one or 2%. They're not all additive, right. You kind of get it and it's like you kind of reach the total capacity of the athlete. At that point You're just kind of like trying to maximize the capacity that they inherently have with some sort of novel intervention. So that's the magnitude of the effect that we're looking at here is one, maybe, a couple of percent maybe. And the important thing to remember with that is, is that normally that signal, that very small signal that you're getting from the intervention, is drowned out in a lot of other different types of noise, right? So all of the other things have to kind of be in alignment in order for that one or 2% to actually show up. You have to be really well rested and trained and kind of show up to the start line with all of your ammunition and stuff like that. So it's an intervention to be used when everything else has been optimized right, When everything else is going well, your training is going well, your recovery is going well, your added healthy weight, for whatever type of event that you're doing, you're looking for that little edge. So that's the first thing it's like understand the magnitude. Second thing is is you can use it either in a workout or from a race perspective.

Jason Koop:

I try to normalize it in 40K time trial, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with using this as some sort of enhancement to your day to day workouts in order to get a more productive workout right, And we're all trying to kind of like squeeze out the last little bit that we can do in these workouts. And this is a fine application of a supplement, of a nutrition type of intervention that can assist you in order to do that. Now, It's not an everyday thing, Right? This isn't your Multi vitamin that you wake up and you guzzle down the hatch first thing in the morning.

Jason Koop:

This is something that is very specific and I think we'll get into why. It is very specific because of the actual Compound itself is delivering a lot of sodium into the system and people need to be very, very, very careful with that. But for people who are Bicarbicureus which is the title of this time crunch podcast I think if you, if you can wrap your head around the fact that it's a very specific intervention that you're using Either to enhance high-intensity workouts Or to kind of optimize a race that you're using very specifically, that might make a small difference If you can get everything right.

Adam Pulford:

That's a really good context to To put on this, yeah, agreed, and you know it, those marge, these marginal gains, sort of Interventions. The disclaimer is just like hey, we can, in the way of a 40k time trial, we can get you 10, 15 or 20 percent just by training.

Jason Koop:

Yeah, exactly, you know so one to two percent, cool.

Adam Pulford:

But like, let's get the training, let's get the sleep, let's get the fuel inserted first.

Jason Koop:

So that's a 20% training man. That's like big dude. You're a better coach than I am if I get 20% training.

Adam Pulford:

Hey man, you take somebody off the couch, you do some threshold training. Get that glycolytic energy system and do yeah, Yeah you can get some right.

Jason Koop:

You're right, though, if you have, if you have somebody that's like newer, and I think, when people can, normies, normies, yeah, normies. Well, but here's the deal like we did this years ago, you remember, we studied all of our athletes across all of our coaches, and we kind of asked them how much they improved, and it turns out It's about 12% over a six month period for a normal person. And so if you want to rack and stack, okay, how much improvement can I get from just training, smart right, reasonable training? That's 10 or 12 percent, if you want to. If you want to add any of these interventions super high carbohydrate, type of interventions Sodium bicarbonate, sodium bicarbonate intervention There's a lot of different things. You know those are very small fractions. On top of that, and in some applications Those are meaningful, and other applications, like I said, that the signal really doesn't kind of come through the noise. So Contextualizing how much that potential improvement can be is actually really important in this, in this type of context, because you want to see if it's a worthwhile intervention.

Adam Pulford:

Yeah, exactly, and I think for those who I mean a lot of our listeners are, you know, either Seeking that optimization of their training, sleep and all this kind of stuff And are almost in that position to look at this one to two percent stuff, so it's, it's applicable for sure. So let's talk about that like how it can work, since we established that it can work. We're all endurance athlete folk here, so are we saying that? I mean, we've used the 40k time trial analogy, but what kind of time frame of, or what kind of like duration of, exercise It? does the research say that bicarb targets in the way of high intent or in the way of performance?

Jason Koop:

Yeah, so the what you want to think about is really high intensity exercise or races, so anything under 10 minutes. The effect tends to be, the effect tends to be realized more So in the cycling world this would be Criterions, mountain bikes, short, you know kind of short track races, and things like that. There's a really there's a lot of good research around Using this to improve repeated sprint performance, kind of in the middle of a time trial or something like that. So that's why I bring up the Criterium example. I don't think this is where we start to like cross into different worlds, right. Yeah, i Don't know the use case, or I don't understand the use case once the duration of the event starts to get beyond 60 minutes.

Jason Koop:

We do, we do see that it's kind of popped up in my world, in the ultra marathon world more recently, and For the life of me I just don't understand.

Jason Koop:

I don't understand the underlying Physiology that could be altered with the intervention and how it would produce a Performance effect, right, how it would actually impact performance. But you do see it, and we have to recognize this, that even athletes that are in You know the ultra, ultra trail de Mont Blanc, right, which is a 20-hour race for the winners. You see some of those athletes actually trying this. You know extremely novel intervention in the in the middle of the race And they say that they feel better.

Jason Koop:

Right, i'm emphasizing those words intentionally and And so, even so, despite the fact that I don't understand it, we still have to. We still have to pay attention to it. But if you really wanted to get to brass tacks on how to use this, i would start at the high, highest intensity side of things your VO2 max intervals You repeat, your repeated sprint performances and things like that. I think that those are the best use cases for it, because they're the stud, they're studied the most and they're also the things where the Physiology lines up with what should be happening the most as well.

Adam Pulford:

Yep, yeah, agreed with that, and from Everything that I've read, seen and also just like practiced on myself and one of my other athletes, that stacks up in the way of hard intensity, perceived effort of eight or higher up to max effort, repeated efforts, that kind of stuff, and in stuff that is shorter than 60 minutes, i'll throw this out there coop, though, like the Ultra runners doing long stuff. I mean, would you say that the sodium alone could just be a benefit to What they're experiencing when they're 10 hours deep or more?

Jason Koop:

Yeah, who knows? I mean, we theorize this for years, right? So the molecule that you're ingesting is Sodium bicarbonate. It's a very, very simple compound. Once against baking soda, right, everybody's got it in their fridge or in their pantry. Very, very simple compound. When you ingest it, it immediately, It immediately breaks down into the sodium components and into the bicarbonate component. And then, from a physiology perspective, we thought, when we were originally using this when I was trying to do it in college as a very mediocre runner We thought that the bicarbonate component would somehow neutralize the acidic environment, either within the bloodstream and or within the, the muscle itself.

Adam Pulford:

Which happens when you go hard right. Which happens when you go hard Yeah.

Jason Koop:

Which happens, and so that's the physiological theory behind why the sexually would work. But you have to think to yourself well, that's not all of what you're ingesting, right? There's sodium and it's a lot. It's a lot of sodium that you're actually ingesting. In fact, the Martin bicarbonate system I don't know if you paid attention to the directions, adam, but they go to elaborate. Yeah, no, probably not. They go to this. They go to this elaborate extreme of very specifically stating that this is not something that you take every single day, that you might want to take twice a week.

Jason Koop:

And the reason for that is some lawyer looked at how much sodium is being delivered to an individual and they just don't. They just they're, they're very wary of the kind of the health complications. It's six for somebody my size I'm a reasonably sized dude. I'm a hundred and sixty five pounds on a really light day, maybe a hundred and seventy five pounds on a heavy day. It's six grams of sodium per intervention. That's a lot, right? just think about. Just think about it in the context of your electrolyte drinks, right? Your electrolyte drinks have five hundred milligrams per liter, right? No, that's twelve liters worth of salt. That you are taking is twelve liters of electrolyte drink, that that are twelve liters of electrolyte drink to get that much salt into your system. That's a lot in one kind of in one in one serving.

Jason Koop:

I guess is my, i guess is my point there. And there are very real health consequences to doing that repeatedly, or or or or, chronically. So we've thought for years that maybe maybe some of the performance benefit that we might be seeing has to do with this, like sodium loading effect, and particularly in hot environments where we use sodium loading protocols you know, quite frequently with athletes, maybe that might be something that's actually that that's actually going on. So the whole thing is is we kind of don't know right, we've taken this thing in for a high intensity perspective with a very specific physiological consequence. There's sodium and there's bicarbonate. We thought. We think that the bicarbonate somehow has some sort of ergogenic effect, but what happens to the sodium?

Adam Pulford:

that might actually be playing into what we're, what we're seeing from a physiological standpoint and going up the off the notes here for for a second, with that sodium loading Component. Because yeah, we've been doing that for quite some time. And there's the various products out there Scratch has their hyper hydration, osmo has their preload, which is roughly it's less than what Morton's talking about, but like 1700 milligrams of electrolytes, primarily sodium, for that. But what is that sodium loading before a hard or hot workout? What is that doing in the body? What's the benefit there?

Jason Koop:

Yeah, it's just the plasma volume. So anybody who's ever done an ultramarathon who's really screwed up their sodium we have one of my coaching colleagues, adam St Pierre, always tells this story. When he did Western States is a notoriously very hot race He was taking in enough sodium to almost be to be very similar to the amount that you would actually use with with a sodium bicarbonate type of product. He's taking in five or six grams of sodium in the first 10 hours of the race or something like that. It was deleterious for him because he ended up swelling up right. The plasma volume has to go somewhere.

Jason Koop:

So you have to understand that, like regulating the sodium within your plasma volume is one of your body's most highly regulated physiological processes. If you look at everything that your body wants to regulate, it's kind of pH and sodium balance, Kind of go those things, those two things rise to the top of the top of the list. Because you can bonk right, you can always come back from that. Nobody's going to die from bonking. But if you screw up your pH right And or you screw up your electrolyte balance, those are things that you can actually die from. So your body wants to actually protect that. So when you, when you adjust this huge amount of sodium into your system, it's just the plasma volume markedly, and we think what happens is that more that, more that plasma volume can then be distributed in order to cool the body off. And so that's why these hyperhydration products essentially or that's the, the mechanism that these hyperhydration products work out in the field, it's because you're literally shifting the plasma volume so that you can radiate more of your, or you can shift more of your blood flow to assist with radiative cooling as you're out there exercising, and then that has, that, has a performance effect. We kind of don't know how long that's going to last, right, like when you actually adjusted in the field and things like that, and what, like how quickly that plasma volume system. That's the, that's the. That's the basic theory behind it, but I want the listeners to appreciate that it's the.

Jason Koop:

These sodium bicarbonate products are not designed to do that, and you can look at it on the face of the amount of sodium that's being delivered. So, adam, you mentioned these, these, there are already these products out there. They're on the magnitude of about three grams of sodium per liter of fluid that you would ingest Right. So scratch this product is. I think it's seventeen hundred and fifty milligrams that you're taking in a five hundred milliliter, five hundred milliliter shot, essentially. So one, one simple water, one simple water bottle. You're not supposed to take more than that, right? They kind of limit it at, you know, maybe two grams at the very most.

Jason Koop:

Here We're tripling that for a normal individual from a sodium bicarbonate perspective. So when I see, when I see these theories about, ok, maybe it's the sodium loading component that is actually creating the physiological effect, my initial thought is is that's not the right dose. So I wouldn't. If this is the application, the sodium loading piece of it, i would go back and say, listen, we know we have, we know we can get a more effective dose at a slightly lower Amount of sodium. Why don't we just go do that? right, we're just kind of getting lucky with the intervention, essentially. So let's go back and we'll use a dose that actually, that we know actually works.

Adam Pulford:

Yeah, and I think you know you'd have to change the, the molecule. But then goes back to like some of the simplicity of just sodium bicarbonate or baking soda. Right, and I'll talk about some of these protocols. But, like the numbers I looked up before this podcast, like Yeah, the Morton, they give these products between four and six grams of sodium. That's, that's what's happening. But it comes from a lot of the research and one of which I was looking up for master's you can room, but their dosing. So their protocol is about 200 to 300 milligrams per kilogram of body weight of sodium bicarbonate. Right, you take yourself 75, you know kilograms, and that's gonna be 15 to 22 ish sort of grams a lot, it's a lot.

Adam Pulford:

But when you run the math on it, because when one gram of sodium bicarbonate is 275 milligrams of sodium, so when you scale that out to the gram per dosage, you were in that range of four to six grams of Sodium for the low and the high. And so, all that to be said, if you want to decrease sodium you'd have to, right, just take the bicarbonate. I don't know, like that's not applicable, but like that's why we're getting all this high sodium stuff in Bicarbonate and it needs to be that much bicarbonate to have an effect.

Jason Koop:

So, once again, this has been studied for years, going back to the 80s, right, yeah, and they've done it at different doses. And you just it, just it, just, you just need a lot, and you see that and the Products that are actually out there. You know, once again I was just taking tablespoons of baking soda and mixing it in water, but now that you see the commercialized products, they recognize that there is an effective dose that you need in order to produce the ergogenic effect And it's a lot of bicarbonate. If that is what is actually happening, and let's just say that that's kind of We see the effect in the research, but it's still contested that that's the like physiologically meaningful, right?

Jason Koop:

Because once again, this pH balance is so tightly regulated within the body. It's one of the things that the body protects, the protects the most is your pH balance. So if you can adjust a lot of bicarbonate in order to, in order to throw that off or in order to Affect that a, it takes a lot b, you don't even know if that's actually what's happening, because it's like I said, so it's so tightly regulated, but the the take-home message there is. It's a. It's a lot of bicarbonate to actually take in, and this has always been. One of The problems is getting this kind of like massive dose Into the body in some way to have a physiological, physiological effect, because whenever you have to take in that much or something, they're going to inherently be complications associated with it.

Adam Pulford:

Yeah, absolutely. And that being said too, like one of the ways that Morton claims to do that is their proprietary Stuff, that kind of like encapsulates and lowers GI. You know, issue, you know, and I'd say, like I'm not gonna get into the weeds about that. I would say, when I've used that product and this is like disclaimer for you know, because we're talking about all like Jacking yourself on so much sodium. If you're sensitive to sodium or if you have high blood pressure, like don't even go here.

Adam Pulford:

Oh, yeah, don't cuz. Like, oh, like I take it, you can feel it in your face, you can feel it in your, yeah, in your body, like is this pressure? and I mean I love so, like I'm getting excited talking about it right now. I'm like, oh, i should go check myself on some sodium bicarbonate right now. It's good, but anyway, it really has an effect. And your poofy for at least I'm poofy for you know, a day or two afterwards. So there's like these lingering effects and, yes, you know, that's the product that we're talking about don't use daily, i think with PR lotion, just to clear that up. I think you can use that daily. I don't know exactly like how much, you know per handful or whatever you're throwing on there, so don't coat us on that one. But yeah, definitely watch yourself if you're in that to 100 to 300 milligrams per kilogram of body weight dosage. Don't do that every day. Disclaimer I.

Jason Koop:

Agree with that. Yeah, this is not a daily supplement and it's not a daily multi vitamin. No, it is a very, very specific intervention and the amount that you're that you were mentioning That. That has always been my contention with a transdermal delivery system is It's extremely difficult to control the dose. Outside of all of the other logistical issues that you know, everybody can kind of really like I'm gonna rub this on my legs And then I'm gonna go and run a ride or kind of what, like that whole.

Jason Koop:

This is just kind of a rigmarole The dosing piece of it, because a because it has to be such a high dose, right, of Bicarbonate to actually make a make a difference. But but be, because you're using a transdermal delivery system, you don't really know how much of that dose is actually getting into the body, versus if you're just ingesting it. You take in 200 milligrams of something It's in your system, right, it's gonna go through your GI system in some, you know, in some form or fashion. But when you're doing it transdermally, it's a reasonable delivery system. You just don't know how much is actually getting delivered transdermally because there are all these other Effects kind of going on, like the, you know, basically the property of the skin right. It's meant to be a barrier from the outside world, and who knows how much of it actually is actually getting absorbed Through through the skin in that type of application.

Adam Pulford:

Yeah, yep, 100% agree. I'll also link to More research, but with both the lotion and the the Borton product too, for anybody who's interested in reading some of that. But I go, i'd say coop, just like straight up. Would you recommend sodium bicarbonate option for bi-curious Athletes listening to us?

Jason Koop:

Yes, so if you're bicarbonate curious, it's a look. Make sure it's not bi-curious. There's a different podcast.

Adam Pulford:

Okay, sorry, i was on a different podcast. bicarbonate.

Jason Koop:

If you're bicarbonate, bicarbonate, bicarbonate bicarbonate curious. Once again, i think it's a reasonable intervention to try If you understand the context of the type of performance that can improve, which is namely very high-intensity performance. Angie and I'm gonna go through two different ends and And you understand the magnitude of the performance improvement that you could get. It's very small. It's not nearly as meaningful as training or any of these other types of interventions that we can go through And you realize what kind of the limiting factors are. You can't use it every day. There could be some GI distress, even with the Martin System. If you're using a transdermal system, you might actually be getting the dosing wrong and things like that. If you're willing to kind of go through all those different leaps, i think great, go have at it. But here's like we can always drill down to our practice to kind of see the worth, like the worthiness of the intervention. Right, we, both of us, we work with athletes for full-time coaches. That's all I do every single day. I Don't recommend this a lot. I'm not going out of my way to say, hey, dude, you need to ingest your sodium bicarbonate before this workout. I'm not going out of my way to do that.

Jason Koop:

Do some athletes do it? Sure, yeah, absolutely. But it's not something that I'm putting in training peaks, right. And so what I'm trying to, what I'm trying to drill down with the audience here is is that I wouldn't go out of my way To do this type of, to use this type of intervention either from a workout or for a race.

Jason Koop:

So, yes, it can be effective, but it's not very high on my priority priority list of things to do, because when I rack and stack all of the Interventions and all the different types of training that I'm doing, it just doesn't kind of rise to the level of I need to put this in training peaks, like that's my ultimate list list test. Does it rise to the level of where they need to put it in training peaks? and there are Interventions that rise to that level, you know, quite often, and there are other interventions that just don't make it there very frequently. I can go into my stable of 40 athletes right now and And maybe look at a year's worth of training and I can probably find this come up once or twice. That's the, that's the frequency that this intervention is being used amongst my, my, my kind of athlete stable. So I hope that that contextualizes like how, how for the audience. I hope it contextualizes like how frequently we use something like this.

Adam Pulford:

Yeah, i think it does, and to like we got a group text going tonight. It coops on there too and we're kind of bantering back and forth and I was like I Have two or three athletes where this would actually be applicable of my stable of athletes and it's. I think that that messaging should should definitely come across as such. So You know, in summary, sodium bicarbonate nothing new under the Sun. It has been shown to improve Performance and high intensity situations. You know there's, there's sodium, there's also the neutralizing effects of the bicarbonate going on with a sarcogenic aid, but gi distress cost high sodium intakes for some people. Those can all be drawbacks to Taking this intervention on anything else. You want to add those summary points.

Jason Koop:

I totally forgot about the cost. It's a $15 intervention like you're using the Martin products. Yeah, intervention like, once again, coaching is expensive too. So I'm not gonna like knock like people throwing money at the problem. Right, i mean you throw money at performance all the time, from different perspectives, whether it's aero wheels or coaching or nutrition intervention or whatever that's.

Adam Pulford:

That's totally improvement from a coach versus one percent improvement.

Jason Koop:

No, i'm totally with you there. But yeah, you're right, we didn't, we didn't mention the cost specifically with the Martin products begging, so it is pretty cheap, you know, on the kind of. On the other hand, there is, i would say, if, if listeners out there are Are interested in this intervention, outside of making sure that you're not hypertensive, that you're just a healthy individual, your blood pressure is normal, go ahead, try it, see how you feel. There's a number of different delivery. So, excuse me, there are a number of different delivery mechanisms that you can use and If you see an ergogenic effect, great, you can kind of like take that to the bank.

Jason Koop:

I will say that Martin must be selling a lot of these. Because I had to, i had dude, i had to like, you know, because you go through the way that for the listeners out there, you go through this process of like what like, what dose do you need? essentially like it's a pretty nifty little like questionnaire and it's kind of like It's not meant to be a What when they call the purchases, when you're in the line of the grocery store and, impulse by impulse, no, it's not, it's not, it's a considered purchase, right And so they take you through that consideration by trying to get you into the right dose. How much do you weigh all this kind of all this kind of other stuff? I had to fake my weight To like get the product, because they were out of one there, Yeah they were out.

Jason Koop:

They were out at my normal weight. So I said I was like you know, like 90 kilos, you know, and but it's anyway, i just Yeah, i mean, for once again, i mean they must be selling a lot of them because I couldn't, i couldn't get my hands on. So obviously athletes are kind of drawn to it for whatever reason, whether it's marketing or the elite athletes are kind of pushing them into it or whatever. So I'm not gonna knock it that people are actually actually kind of kind of using this stuff. I do think that people need to put the right context around it, as we're mentioning earlier.

Adam Pulford:

Yeah, yeah, completely agree. Well, coop, i think that ends our bicarb curious podcast for the day.

Jason Koop:

Thank you for clarifying that.

Adam Pulford:

Yeah, you're very welcome. If, if you know our audience here that love to ride bikes, if they're curious to Get more of Coop work, where can they find you?

Jason Koop:

That's pretty easy. My handle is just my first and last name, jason Coop with a K, on Both Instagram and Twitter. I've been spending more time on Instagram lately And you can also check my website out, which is just my first and last name, jason Coop calm. You can also subscribe to my podcast, which is the Coop cast with a K, and It's mainly an ultra marathon centered podcast, but we do have a lot of topics that that really Go across. That go across all different endurance Those spectrums. I try to do a really good job of curating, curating content and getting in front of people that are really at the forefront of of Endurance research topics, whether it be ketones I had some of the ketone researchers on a few a few weeks ago or Neuroscientists that can kind of explain what our relationships with pain are, or whatever. I try to make it applicable to all different types of endurance athletes.

Adam Pulford:

Yeah, i think the the Venn diagram of all things, endurance, would be found Quite relevant in the coop cast for a lot of our listeners to. So definitely go check them out there. And if you make your way to Colorado Springs And have a pair of binoculars, look at bikes peak and you'll probably find him Coupeling around somewhere.

Jason Koop:

That's right Yeah that's right.

Adam Pulford:

Well, coop, thank you very much for joining us on the time crunch cyclist podcast today. Good luck With your runners out there in the upcoming event and, yeah, look forward to the next podcast we do together.

Jason Koop:

Thanks, man. It's always good to touch base for you.

Adam Pulford:

Thanks for joining us on the time crunch cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainright comm Newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week You'll get in-depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast. That'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.

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