Transcript for:
Insights on Cycling Supplements and Training

welcome to an extremely special episode of the ASA cycling coach podcast we're in person Nate for the first time since 2020 maybe since Co it's crazy it's crazy yeah yeah who are you yeah I know so it's good to have us here uh we're going to get into new research that just came out 2024 research pretty cool stuff it's a systematic review on the supplements that actually matter for cyclist and it looks at studies for cyclist human studies randomized control trials or Placebo control trials it's really great we're going to do that but first let's just get into a few things it's awesome that we're in person it's probably going to fix an issue that we had recently on the podcast where like with delay we were making a mistake with how we were editing it not just recently yeah it's true it's gone back further we were making a mistake with how we were editing it and as a result um it was making it so that none of us would be perfectly aligned and then at times we would even get out of sync and then the results of that was that it made it sound like you or Sarah or myself that we were talking over each other but it specifically seemed to affect you because the internet connection that you had versus us so I want to go over that because a lot of people in the comments recently were saying that you know and I get it you're the CEO all that sort of stuff so they're just assuming that you're like talking over everybody a little bit yeah a little bit I do but the so the issue we looked on the the YouTube comments and some of them are Nate constantly interrupting as usual someone says no it's because if you don't let him validate himself by voicing his uneducated ramblings you'll end up like Chad gone and I know um but then I listened to the episode and I was like mortified cuz I was stomping on every single sentence and what we do what happens is we're in you know we're in three different locations and we do this clap sync where Jonathan goes 3 21 clap and then in editing uh if you line up the video is always out of like your own from like my video and my clap is out of sync so you have to line those up but the other one is you want to line up all the claps and if there's like a second and a half delay that you see especially with this software that we do there's a little bit of delay if you don't line those up what happens is that I jump in a second and a half early and just imagine how a second of pause time that's how long it is so it seems like you should but Jonathan then would have a second and a half DeLay So it would seem like hey John's really waiting to speak because everyone stopped talking and I was just mortified I like I actually like asked you for those source files and I was like why is this happening there was another issue where I got more out of sync as it went on yeah and hopefully we're going to fix though or we will fix all those too but um it was I was I felt icky afterwards so I'm sorry it wasn't on purpose but sometimes I actually do interrupt and I've always been trying to help that with ADHD but I'm much better um I think and we'll really see in person about how many times there' be a little ding on this side like you know it's like a ding ding ding yeah I'm also of the opinion that a certain amount of interrupting should happen if it's a natural conversation M it's it's natural maybe viewers if you don't agree with that let us know in the comments yeah um but I think that a certain amount of it how much should it be just it's too that little like what I enjoy too especially better in person we go and it's just saying that you're okay there was another thing that happened on that episode this is the Norwegian method this one I'll just say kind some of the comments so what it was around was when I said that well Jonathan first said the uh um Norway's known for their like performance they have this brand that Norway is doing something very special with endurance training well that's see I'm very pedantic and we'll talk about that in a second that was exactly what you said you said Norway is a dominant force in the Olympics yeah yeah and those were the exact words I heard and I said well are they really a dominant force and I I Googled and I said well you know they don't get as many medals as the US so I'm not they're not dominant as in they get all the medals and then I Googled oh but they're for for the metals per capita they're killing it it's like 8 to one or something like that so although they don't have a huge absolute number they still do well for their population size and other people pointed out hey uh New Zealand did better than Norway right so in the whole context of it being a dominant Force um maybe Norway does very well but they probably aren't doing something special cuz they don't have outsized results versus other countries that are small or overall absolute sources okay and that was what I was trying to get out and what I said is with some of the comments yeah Nate is very arrogant in this episode and can't seem to get past how many absolute gold medals us got in Paris but per capita is Val 2 nothing less and nothing more but let's also throw Paralympics in there too and China and something else next one Nate came across as a in that exchange frankly shake my head uh next one Nate was confidently incorrect his only Grace was looking at the data and admitting his mistake but even a curri knowledge of the world would have stopped him putting his foot in his mouth in the first place um people are so harsh I know uh this is my exact words by the way and it's cool because we have it recorded I don't want to frame it it as in Norway just destroys all other countries in the Olympics cuz that doesn't happen but yeah they do uh they're very good at some things too and then I said I did some math in Norway for every gold medalist there are 1.3 million people for the US it's 8 million people to to show you how much they're punching above their weight for Norway so go Norway there's only like 5.4 million people in the whole country it's yet incredible yeah so yeah I some of these we were talking about this before and to understand me too the pedantic part there might be like a I don't really know this but a little touch of the autism in me sure cuz I don't like I I understand that people thought I was being like super patriotic and just like ignoring them but I don't get from what I said how you get there and I was so confused I copied it and I put in chat gbt and I was like did anything that I Nate said was inaccurate and I like no nothing you said was inaccurate but honestly it hit like a nerve in people and I understand that but I've done that a few times in the podcast and I'm sorry I don't I'm not like this big huge Patriot you know me it's kind of crazy to think it's not Nate yeah it's not Nate's thing um so anyways I'm sorry about that and I appreciate when people tell me and I I think maybe I don't I don't know it's tough It's like a repeated pattern in my life and if you know me sorry too you proba have seen it at work sometimes too and I you say I kind of get there eventually but I think sometimes I'll be P pedantic meaning like factually accurate like with the truth and I'll be like XYZ and then I think maybe sometimes I'll say something and that's exactly what I mean I mean nothing else but with some people they imply other stuff with that um and I'm not implying anything else I'm just saying that's XYZ yeah and objetive my favorite comment um the stash doesn't work unfortunately there's three or four when something this happens mustache hate happens all the time the funniest part to me is that you have had a mustache for maybe a year and a half now like it's a really long time yet every yet every single episode like uh we still get a comment from somebody that's like oh Nate has a mustache and maybe it's their first time watching it but yeah he's had it for a long time I think I bet a lot of those comments came in right after you said the first part when you were Googling the following up part about being per capita results and I think that that's like uh when you look at YouTube comments and social media comments it is it's raw instant emotion reflected through comments like people don't sit and go you know I'm going to write this comment but then I'm going to think about it I'm going to spend some time analyzing to see if it's the right thing to write sleep on it yeah it doesn't happen so I think it was just like you know really fast comments but and we appreciate that we have people that watch our podcast and listen to our podcast that care enough to share feedback even if sometimes it stings and it hurts pretty bad it's like there are a lot of people that would never even have that opportunity to hear from people so the feedback on interrupting help because we got to find that issue totally and we can now address that and the other one the feedback on the mustache and the other stuff helped that algorithm that thing was like two or three times normal rate of our podcast so go USA just kidding just kidding I'm sorry that was a joke someone's going to try to cut I'll just say like for the first half I'll say one political candidate and the second half I'll say another one and just people just as they're reading type in more comments yeah yeah it's the election election season it's it's really intense right now but uh speaking of that much more exciting and interesting things that just happened we just launched new personalized training plans for trainer Road and it's more exciting than that sounds that's like a very descriptive term for it uh this is we were just talking about this before we went on recording it's actually it's like genuinely first of its kind it's totally unique it's something that we're doing so we have all this data whenever you sign up for trainer road and it syncs the data that you have that's all your workouts that you've ever done the rides you've ever done the races you've ever done and now in addition to that all the other activities that you've done too like runs or swims or strength training Etc you have all that information and as a result uh we can use that information to learn how to make you faster in a better way and not only we've done that before with adaptive training and everything else we've done AI FTP detection but now there's no more low mid and high volume plans instead it analyzes your training history what you've been doing historically recently figures out what works best for you and then from there it's going to tell you how many days is actually best for you right now and it'll even tell you like how like uh how many days of intensity you should have within there and it will tell you go through the whole process of like managing the intensity and the training load as it goes on and it's super cool the volume yeah how how long each day oh yeah that too and uh so mate let's get let's talk about I I teased this a couple weeks ago and I'm getting better at teasing things that are close but so now it's actually out for everybody and it's if you go to the training plan section on the website we're just launching on the web at first so that it's a lot easier for us to build and we can do iterations um and there's actually more features on top of this that I'm not going to talk about that are going to be awesome but we pull in your data and then the next step is we have a new feature we kind of had it before but this really impacts it called training approach and training approach is kind of like like how am I feeling about training right now what's my kind of vibe and balanced is like the middle of this five level levels of things you can do so balance means it's a good balance between I'm going to have training stress and Recovery or if you're feeling sometimes we've all had this is like I'm going to this is I'm going to focus on sleep I'm going to do really well we have demanding and then if you really want to stretch yourself you go aggressive yeah and what that does um I'm sorry below that we have moderate and then conser or conservative could be like I'm just maintaining that's a big question for a lot of people and that might even drop you down to just two days per week like two e like not easy but two harder shorter workouts two days a week to maintain your Fitness um and what this allows you to do is that those settings impact your uh what plan is built but also how we're then going to adapt that plan moving forward and you're going to be able to change it in the future too so if you have well you can do it now so if you have you're going to say you know this month I'm to be an aggressive training approach I'm going to see how it goes for a month then after that I'm going to slide it back to a balanced and have a more you know regular life I'm starting a new job so I'm going to go to moate right now because or new a new kid I might think that when I we know when we had Emma the last one through our little one that I was I would have been on conservative probably for months because that's all I could tolerate at that time whereas there are other times maybe like maybe I don't know maybe you are retired maybe you got let go of your job or something and you have some time on Severance I don't know and you're just trying to get in a lot of training and you have a lot of time to recover then you could push it up it's really cool and the cool part is since it analyzes what you've been doing recently and historically it will even tell you which one is recommended you're welcome of course to choose what you want but that I find really helpful and it's it's really smart so like in my case right now I'm like four watts per kilogram right now um I'm not highly trained for myself but it knows that even though I'm carrying not a lot of training volume historically it knows that I probably will do best if I have something that's above that balanced approach so it's really neat to see like it's very intelligent it's not just boilerplate where it's like your age and you do this instead it's it's Dynamic it's it's who you are as a person you get pushed so much more when I get YouTube hate I drop it down to moderate sleep a little less yeah exactly little more worry on the head I think mustache when I trim it I'm like my beard I'm like should I go and I just stop and that actually algorithm it's actually it's really like TSS when I shave yeah there's another cool part about this when you sign up so previously like of course you could train for events and you could add on a lot of different races but then there was this thing like I'm not training for events and then it would just kind of it wasn't fully built out yet and now it is and it's really cool so like you can say I'm just training for general fitness if you're not training for events and then what you go through is you pick your discipline and those disciplines are Road Mountain gravel cyclocross and Triathlon and then you pick a goal thereafter and that could be increasing FTP improving climbing building your endurance getting faster for group rides general fitness just maintaining Fitness and then if you picked Triathlon for your discipline you also just you could just pick whichever of the disciplines you want triathletes a really common thing that I hear is a lot of them in the offseason or in between when they're preparing for an event they'll focus on a certain aspect on the bike and maybe you really want to raise FTP or improve climbing this could be really cool too this whole feuture sorry TR athletes isn't be for you yet we're actually going to do it sooner rather than later um also at this moment polarized isn't an option for this but that is also been it was uh it might be out by the time we talked about this but it was in review so it was built in but we were just reviewing it for accuracy um we launched this what on Monday or Tuesday no Tuesday Tuesday so it's been for us it's been two days that it's been out when you hear this it's going to be nine days so we've been fixing bugs and looking at it and and proving it um also something that's really really interesting is based on whatever race you have or your discipline no not your discipline your goal is that we'll dynamically change your weekend rides and focus on whatever is important so if you are a criterium Rider versus a gravel Rider Criterium Riders were going to focus more on that Saturday uh intense ride and on gravel rid or we're going to focus more on the endurance ride and building that up so that's going to be dynamic and smart inside of there um yeah it's really exciting kind of like building up to too like uh toward toward a longer day so it won't just hit you with a 5 hour day on week one right but it'll slowly Build You Up and there's a future coming too there's a man I'll say this one but so hard uh that it's going to be this this system is going to check in with you monthly because every month that you do or don't do something is going to impact the plan in the future I think we've all put a plan on we do the first three work out something happens oh we start again we'll start again next month well now your plan's going to have to change because your volume's changed or maybe that last month you've done a little extra maybe you've said some workouts were extra hard for um like uh harder than we thought they would be for your RP we're going to want to give you a different volume recommendation then um you could change your goals for different months things like that so it is very exciting um it's no nothing stock everything is custom customized to you another I want to mention is that I I saw on the Forum in other places people are like hey this gives me too little volume and they go I need I'll give an example 8 to 12 hours of volume and I looked at this person's career and they've averaged 6 to seven hours of volume and I think with like a demanding or maybe aggressive approach we gave him like nine or something like that a little more there's two parts to that one is it actually looks at what you've done right so you might have had I we all do this right we think in our head I need a 800 TS s week in order to get faster I looked at my history I mean the most I've ever done is like a 450 like I for six weeks I've averaged that because you don't look at the main big one you look at the average over time don't look at the peak you want to look at the average yeah yeah like a what youve sustained for a while because those Peaks are easy to hit but sustains uh not easy so we look at that and the other part is we look at the kind of training stress you've done and if imagine getting 100 TSS from an easy endurance ride that's different than 100 TSS from an interval ride totally TSS was developed I think it was first mentioned on the like the wattage Forum on Google in like 2002 so it's over 20 years old um we still use it and still show it and I don't think we could take it away people would scream but we have much more I think sophisticated systems the back end to to do to give more nuanced recommendations so although you might have 800 TSS with some type of writing well we might think a balanc approach for you might be I'm just going to throw something out I'm using too biger numbers too but maybe like 700 the TSS there's literally we should show this later in another episode but the amount of people that average that like even 4 or 500 TSS for a s sustain period of time is like the 1% oh yeah it's um even the the best of the best athletes don't average 800 TSS year round like uh does Keegan do that no no not year round no so like I think that that's and I guarantee you if you look at the best athletes in the world too if you were to a actually average out their like yearlong weekly TSS it wouldn't be 800 you there are times to do that and those athletes are super special and they can maintain that for maybe two to three months you know when it's like the the main season that they're really trying to load everything up but they won't do it consistently across the board so it's what you say is really interesting because we tend to remember the high water mark more than the actual water level when it comes to our training history I'm totally of that so if you're listening to this and you feel like attacked by it I'm attacking myself with it because that's that's how I operate too no I looked back I was like I'm sure I've average 700 for 6 weeks before for 12 weeks and I looked back and I was like no that's not right like scroll scroll scroll I'm like I think I think 450 or I could look or F I think 450 was the most and I was increasing so fast too like my that's when my FTP was up to like I don't know maybe a little hot power meter but like 375 or something yeah uh it was definitely a high kg for myself I improved a lot but I couldn't sustain it forever totally I there's some cool context to this let's like I've seen some athletes on our Forum we get a lot of feedback directly from there another very critical Group by the way um and we get a lot of feedback there on the Forum from people and I remember yeah passionate there we go I remember a person saying like I just said it to balanced and then it gave me and I'm just going to throw out arbitrary numbers because I can't remember exactly it gave me five hours a week but then I said it to more aggressive and it said that like that's all I could do and then when I set it too aggressive it said I could do more I don't get it what's going on and that's just the very that's a really important thing to understand about training approach so training approach is is managing that intensity and workload throughout your training plan and if you want to step up it's going to step that up right and it's going to basically assume the fact that okay in this case the athlete has more time to recover we'll be able to recover more effectively and that way I can treat their training differently so it's not so simple as just like it's our buckets per week or TSS buckets per week it's all very much like you said customized so that's why you'll find like a not like you won't just be able to like go through test something out and then just try to find common principles with it because it truly is a customized approach based on analysis to add to that you could be on a border between two like um a balanc and a demanding training approach but if you even though you might have the exact same hours there as you train trainer Road will give you different yellow and red days and adapt your plan a little differently if you're on balanc or demanding so ju just know there is a a difference in there and then when you do your check in you're probably going to then be on one other side of the of it and we we'll push you one way or the other way but yeah I think it's going to be super popular I just interrupted overate by the way H um I think it's going to be super popular over the next um probably like the next four months or so for a lot of you cyclists to instead of making a a plan for an event you're going to make a plan to raise FTP improve climbing or anything else like that so check those out if you're using trainer road if you haven't used trainer Road you should you this is the time to check it out I mean it's always going to be St listening don't deserve this just kidding it's gonna be amazing I'm just thinking back to like a month ago SBT when I went there I met so many of you and almost everybody had this perspective like oh trainer roads just like I use it when it's inside when it's cold when it's bad weather during the winter and I just want to go over this so like you sign up it analyzes all your training instantly it suggests that the an ideal training approach for you or training approach and training schedule for you uh and then I want to go over some scenarios where it will then adapt so first of all if you miss a workout it adapts if you have a breakthrough workout it adapts if you fail a workout it adapts if you go for a run or do strength training or cross training it adapts if you get sick it adapts if you go on vacation it also adapts or if you add like a last minute race it also adapts so and you can do any of your workouts inside or outside and you can swap any of your scheduled training days to be a group ride or a solo ride so then that way you can still do those sort of things so it's truthfully like man we were just you know we were an indoor product for years that helped us be able to get to the point to where we are now but all along you've had this vision of changing the way people train and we're we're there like like we're changing it and it's not just an indoor it's a solution for training and coaching in general I want the like the real world class coach experience for that that's like everyone can have it 22 bucks uh I think it's worth it of course I hope they do too that's one more point that you brought up when you when you get to the training schedule step and you you set your training approach then you have your schedule a really really common question especially when people start training road is but what if I do group rides on Saturdays or I want to do like a long ride um on Sundays outside without any like workout what happens is you can set it to be a group ride on Saturdays we'll still tell you like or or Sunday any day hey this should be an easy group ride or like a endurance group ride versus a hard group ride you have a drop ride though you set it to that you can still do it and then the plan's going to adapt to that and change your workouts based on the performance there which is super cool um we don't score it is in well in the back end we are scoring it and it is it is like influencing stuff I know I've talked about work at levels V2 there was an issue with that where we got like really close and then we decided it need to be a rewrite and then this stuff need to happen and then there's another cooler thing I think coming out that still uses it um but it's it's not dead but I'm sorry it's it's it's taken so long because a lot of people do want it but really there's two parts of it one is how your in your training is influenced by your outside rides which is happening is going to impr improve in continue to improve really soon the other one is actually score rate is how many points do I get for this ride which is motivating that one's a little bit further out um so I'm sorry yeah it's much more of a complex problem to solve perhaps in at first glance like uh it's very complicated whack at the end and and we've been trying a lot of different things for for years now and I think that the main thing that we've realized is that we just need the main thing that athletes want is they want the subsequent workouts to adjust based on like what they're doing right so like if they go and do something and that's what all of this is doing now well I want I want botht I want a score of course yeah yeah yeah and we'll get there at some point but and rather than waiting and holding the whole thing off until we get that that very complex problem solved there's ways that we can solve the other problems along the way which is why we're all this stuff I'm sorry no I have no excuses now there's a lay between us um I hope my sniffles don't go through be with I hope they're cleared out but I've had Co a couple months ago and I've had a running no sense yeah and I don't know but does it get worse when you exercise or is it kind of like the running nose that you is it kind of the runny nose that you get when you exercise and it's just that constantly it's just constant ritis yeah oh that that's frustrating well check it out trainer.com go uh go try it out uh 30 days risk-free and uh man we would love to have you all give it a shot um like there there are times when uh we've I've been like yes go give it a shot and and no knowing that like some athletes might not be best served by it if you're an athlete that just wants to ride outside all the time and now I feel like I can say this to every cyclist and it's going to be an awesome awesome experience and we have a new homepage it's very good by the way you led the the effort on that CEO leading yeah hope hopefully it's good data says it's good you have questions if youself like let us know let's get into the study this one is called nutritional ergogenic AIDS and cycling a systematic review by valinho Marquez and this was in 2024 and the rest of his associates as well there were other authors on this paper uh okay the goal of this and I'm going to explain also systematic reviews and kind of how they work through the lens of this study because I think it's pretty interesting and it's good to understand the differences between different study formats uh but the goal of this one was to evaluate the effectiveness of caffeine creatine sodium bicarbonate beta alanine and nitrates in the context of cycling now the the way they got these these these supplements is the Australian Institute of sport I believe they have basically like a class of like here foods and here like micronutrients and here supplements that all improve performance and they rate them and this is like the ones that are rated to be the most influential so that's why they looked at these glycerol was also in there however they couldn't find sufficient studies human studies to actually include in this review that met their criteria so glycerol is one that they also think is helpful there has been research I think that it just didn't neatly fit with their criteria but there has been research that shows that glycerol paired with sodium in pretty alarmingly large amounts uh with this hyperhydration strategy can improve water retention substantially and make it so that you can go into a really hot event better for more on that you can check out the episodes that we've previously done with Dr fafen Bach where we talked about that and we'll link to those below so glycerol we're not going to talk about instead just the ones I said there and those all sound like the the hot ones right like the ones where you see a lot of marketing behind all those I've taken all of those at once yeah exactly so um I want to go through the systematic review process and how it works so there's a study where a study will basically aim to go out and test a specific idea and they'll do that usually with subjects and many times they'll test them and then they'll measure the results and sometimes they'll have things like uh control groups or Placebo groups and all this other stuff what they do with it a systematic review is different it takes a step back and it looks it sets criteria for studies to be included in this review and then it has a systematic process that it runs through to be able to go through and understand the takeaways and interpret the data from those studies and the cool part about this is it lets you pick up on Trends right and like kind of see that instead of just one study if there's a larger body of evidence supporting a specific topic and this is cool for all of us cyclists because there's a lot of cherry-picking with studies that you see with influencers and stuff like that where they say like this thing is going to give you x% increase and they'll site one study which is okay as long as you're just making sure that you mentioned that this is one study instead of just you know saying that this represents the entire body of evidence so this is what these systematic review processes do okay so they comb databases in this case it was PubMed scopus and web of science those are all three like very like U those are popular journals or databases that exist and they have two authors what they do is they go through and they screen all the articles for their search criteria which I'll get into in a bit then they have if there's any potential disagreements they have a third-party reviewer that comes in to be able to resolve that so that's a cool system good checks and balances in this case the two researchers or I should say the three they used an app called zoto it's a personal research assistant app you can check it out and it basically allows you it has access to libraries and then what you can do is you can go through that you can search and set terms to and filter research and it can pull up a lot of different things for you can I talk about the mask review there's we can put this on the on the screen but there's especially based on what we read about inside of like exercise physiology there's this little pyramid that people have well for all science about how relevant um or how like not relevant but like hierarchy of evidence that these studies show and at the bottom you have like expert opinion right and then above that you have observational studies where their um case control studies and cohort studies where hey we're coming in here and we're looking at this and or we're asking people in the Norwegian method stuff that's that like hey let's look and see what these athletes do and then that might be a um a result and then randomized control trials that's what you're talking about where it might be double blind meaning that the the the people don't know like will use medication they're getting but also the the the people that are administering it don't know the medication they're getting or what kind of group that they're put in could be a control or Placebo and then the meta analysis systematic review is on the top and it takes usually randomized control trials looks at a whole bunch of them and says okay what is the outcome out of all of these and that's where sometimes we get from we get observational studies and or one randomized control trial and people go that's the way right right yeah totally it might be the way and usually what they do is they want to look more at this way in science is like hey there's something over there let's go look at that more and science go oh let's go look at this more it's like a whole bunch of randomized control studies and then they get like 30 of them causes like a cycle right where like you get randomized control trials and then consensus is observed through meta analyses or systematic reviews then after that new research is bred as a result of like an understanding of the body of research it's really cool and uh it's a probably a really good lesson for all of us to when people say there are studies that say or there's research that or something else like that just keep in mind that even if it is published research there's a hierarchy within there and it's not saying that one is necessarily better than the other it's just context that you need to understand to in order to get there in terms of evidence quality yes that's like where that the hierarchy is definitely there and there's also another level of like [Music] um how valid it is I guess is that some journals they get published in journals some journals have very rigorous um requirements and reviews about was this study done correctly and some aren't and some so you have to um like the journal Nature that's like a famous one that's really hard to get into because you have to have really good science uh and other ones you you can if look at where it was published cuz that's going to have some uh if if it's going to be a good study or not without even having to read the study yeah and you don't even have to be familiar with that journal to know that just just search for it and you can find the journal's rating and then that will help you understand the context from it it's it's really helpful to do um so let's get into like how this whole thing works so basic it's pretty interesting um so first what they do is they go through because there's a lot of duplicate studies published across these different even within a specific Journal a study might be published multiple times for one reason or another it's part of like a larger group or it's on its own so what they first do is they go through and they remove the duplicates then they look at the study titles and abstracts and they assess those to see if they are indeed dealing with the topics that they're talking about then they go through and they do a full text review on the ones that remain relevant to the focus of the of the systematic review and then they organize all the data into a table so in this case they were organizing sex age body mass index V2 Max V2 Peak dosage duration magnitude of improvement and the level of significance of that Improvement so that's statistical significance of the data that is being shown there so question then on these ones they're primar looking at a VO2 max Improvement no in most cases they were just keeping track of that but in most cases what they got were actual like performance improvements in terms of time to exhaustion and time trials uh duration of uh or I should say duration of time trials then also time to exhaustion how long you were going to go there and I think that they also and then they also measured like Peak power output or average power output for time trials as well very relevant to all of us cyclists on the ASA cycling coach podcast it's pretty cool um then they use the physiotherapy evidence database to scale to assess the method methodological quality of the data that's a hard word to say um and basically what they do is they go through and they assess the data Within These studies to and they have this and you can go in and do some more research on this this is where I'm weak and I hope I can learn more on statistics it's really like an interesting spot where I don't have a whole lot so it takes me a lot of time to understand these portions of the studies um but the way they do this is they went through and they basically this criteria lays out a scoring method from one all the way up to 11 9 to 11 is high quality 6 to 8 is moderate four to five is low and Below three is very low and for this study for the 36 studies that'll we'll get to in just a bit that were included in this the average score was 7.75 so that's moderate the high side of moderate and then they had um from 6 to 10 was the total range that they had so uh that gives you kind of like an idea of of what we have so this is moderate to high quality consider like yeah ranked data that they're dealing with this kind of sounds like something that like chat could do in the future look at all these and then also like understanding the statistics part there's a new chat model chat o1 and it is like this kind of stuff is crazy it was like PhD level analysis for some things it's also too like especially as you're on the internet to praise chat gbt once in a while so when T2 comes takes us over yeah that's a good one yeah you're great chat gbt thanks it's funny I just saw that message from Sam mman talking about the people that were let go or left from the company and I was thinking in my mind I'm like when is chat GPT going to write this about Sam mman it's coming right let go he's been let way I'm sorry needed yeah exactly so the results of this process they started with 326 total studies that initially like fit basically the search that they had through this whole thing then after removing duplicates and went to 182 studies then after screening the titles and abstracts it was dropped all the way down to 41 and then after that they started looking at studies that either combined supplements with hypoxia which a good amount of them did and they removed those if it lacked a control group or a placebo They removed those and then if it wasn't measuring performance variables such as power output it didn't or if it didn't meet their inclusion criteria in another way they cut those out and then they were left with 36 studies so these 36 studies it gives you 701 participants all the studies were randomized control trials or crossover design studies and as I said before they assess the effects of these supplements on cycling performance in comparison with placebos in most cases the subjects had to be healthy adults which is good news for all of us because this is relevant to people that are trying to be healthy and uh let's get into it so for individual supplement studies they had five studies about caffeine two about creatine six about sodium bicarbonate three about beta alanine and eight about nitrates now if you look at the combinations because they had some studies that tested two things at once caffeine and creatine there were three studies caffeine and sodium bicarbonate there were three caffeine and nitrates one caffeine and sodium bicarbonate one and then sodium bicarbonate and beta Al four and then here were the main three ways that it was tested a Windgate test which is 30 seconds as hard as you possibly can on a stationary bike and effectively like that bike starts out with a huge amount of resistance and then as it picks up speed it's still ramps up that resistance it's very difficult so if you've ever seen like study environments or a person is just really pedaling hard chances are they're doing a Windgate test there is like a modified Wing GATE test where people instead of doing 30 seconds all out they do 10 seconds all out then they let them rest and then they do 10 second and they try to accomplish that within 3 minutes and that was used in one of the studies here but Windgate tests time trials and then time to exhaustion all of these things were done in a laboratory they weren't done outside so uh here's their summary of the results but then we're going to get into the specific actual supplements because I think it's interesting uh their summary of it says a benefit for cyclist athletic performance was found when consuming a caffeine supplement and a potential positive effect was noted after the consumption of sodium bicarbonate as well as after the combination of caffeine and creatine however no statistically significant effects were identified for the remaining supplements whether administered individually or in combination this should blow some Minds wait let's read that again cuz yes so or can you paraphrase it yeah absolutely in short they found that when you consume caffeine it works that if you consume sodium bicarbonate that there's potentially something there as well and also if you consume caffeine and creatine there's something potentially but outside of that in other words for beta alanine and nitrates two that're really really popular in terms of like being in supplement products and everything else they didn't find any statistically significant effects and this is really important because you might find one study that shows it and another but if you look at a handful of studies then you're looking and you're looking at each one and the statistical significance of each study and the data from it and then you're bringing it all together you get a more informed perspective and in short they couldn't find that that should blow some Minds here could say save so much money thinking of all the beat it that you bought over the years and choke down there's still there's it's there's like three-year-old no joke because I haven't really been in the office much since Co yeah I took out a a pre- shaken whey protein shake my my fridge that was four years old oh gross I just put the whole thing and then like um tart Jerry juice bottles there got to be tart Jerry juice wine wine yeah yeah I was just going to say it's probably it's like the 20 2020 Edition that's the next move performance wine that's what we need tart cherry juice wine uh it's it's pretty crazy though to look at this right because um and and look this isn't saying that it's impossible to get benefits from that this is also really important to understand it's just saying that from these studies if you look at it from a from a collected view the statistical significance of the data showing Improvement does not outweigh that of showing no improvement now this is also really important that no evidence is not the the same as evidence of no effect like basically meaning that just because there is an Evidence doesn't mean that it can't work it might actually work it just wasn't tested in the right way who knows there's a lot of different things here right so maybe there are studies that didn't meet the inclusion criteria that did show performance benefit and for some reason they you know again they didn't meet the criteria so they weren't included but this is a really safe approach if you're a person that's just stepping back and thinking what do I want to spend my money on to actually get faster in terms of supplements caffeine and then sodium bicarbonate and creatine these are the cheap ones too that's pry so let's get into caffeine five studies were included on this the dosages range from 3 to 6 milligrams per kilogram that's big that's a lot do some numbers on that that's a lot like uh 60 I'm I'm what I'm 69 kilograms right now so if I was to do 69 that is 414 milligrams at the high end for me which is a huge amount okay I'm 97 kilg now just under like I'm like 213 or something and I am that's 582 milligrams of caffeine gosh that's a huge amount now it's fair to say that not all studies were at six in fact I think that the minority were at six others were uh closer to three and then it ranged from three to five so uh but that's the sort of dosages that they're dealing with here uh they they gave them to the subject 60 to 60 to 90 minutes prior and then the time the test methods they had time trials wind gate intermittent Sprints uh the context for this is with these different time trials it wasn't just really long they had short to long distance and then they also had moderate to high intensity within this too which that's really important to keep in mind because some of these supplements have very specific like niches where they're most effective but in this case like across the board they basically found that TT times dropped by 1.7 to 4.6% 4.6 is nuts can you imagine like uh it's huge and then Sprint power increased when they talk about the intermittent Sprints that they did the Sprint power increased 2.53% uh we've talked about caffeine and how it's like a really sure bet for a performance enhancing substance that you can take that is legal that is also uh you know readily available and really cheap and yeah data backs it up from this from this systematic review the like if you did a th watt Sprint the0 253 is like 25 watts which doesn't seem like a ton um how many Sprints are lost by a tire I know right thanks John flashback happened before a few times I remember when I bought a whole bike and then I wasn't any lighter that was the best day ever he like what did this race you lost by like a you just barely lost in a Sprint it was it was like a half less than half a wheel and the conclusion was like the bike is too like the bike could be lighter it was an uphill finish on a circuit race and I had a slicked out venge yeah s work's venge was great and I'm like I Gotta Buy company I got this stuff on pro deal actually when we sell it we get it for like the same amount so it's pretty much a wash and I was like why don't I get a Tarmac got a Tarmac built that thing up put on the scale same exact same we and it was the tire difference so the difference in like the tires that I had on it and I didn't even have I think I GP 5000s versus the u v um the Corsa yeah um tires which that was the difference in the whole frame weight between the tarmac and the venge but the venge is more Arrow than the tarmac at least back then that H so the venge still would have been faster yeah so I still would have lost either way that was one of those situations where like you but but I hit it cuz I felt bad no you didn't you you like bent over laughing I really I was trying to hide it I feel like I remember I'm giving giving myself the benefit of the doubt I think um yeah it was pretty funny so yeah I mean it it helps I would have won what 25 extra was oh yeah for sure yeah totally creatine there were two studies included on this so not a lot um it's it's always really important to read past an abstract and this is like an example of why right so because you might think systematic review 36 studies I've bet a ton of those had to do with creatine in this case just two so out of these two studies the dosage that they had in both cases was 20 grams of creatine for 5 days it was like a high loading protocol that they had them take uh the performance benefits that they um they saw from this with intermittent Sprints they saw no benefit with constant load to exhaustion they saw an increase and this seems crazy to me and I think that you should look at more research on this yeah an 11% increase in time to exhaustion now heck yeah that's amazing probably totally if I mean like Bro Science if I'm going to take creatine I'm going to be good at sprinting right because big muscles big strong that's what's in my mind however this shows kind of the opposite actually is it didn't help with that with across these two studies and instead with this one it's an increase of 11% it makes me wonder if there other confounding factors at play cuz 11% would just be so big imagine if I took 40 grams a day that's like 22% just kidding better better um I'd like to look these exact studies and also with the Sprint power I like to see repeated Sprints like in personal anecdotal evidence which is the bottom of that scale I think it's off the scale is with creatine being able to hit over and over and over again in crit um especially if it's not a like a cuz creatin you gain some weight if it's not like a really 180 turn and stuff like that yeah it is I think good but it's also good for your brain and it's very studied and very safe but 11% that's massive you know on the Sprint side of things too I always have a very very big like grain of salt handy with Sprints because I don't know if any of you have noticed this which let us know your max Sprint down below um because my Max Sprint that I've ever hit was 1379 um I had you know that number oh yeah yeah had a hot power meter that said 1,600 one time wasn't right 1379 and but there are other days where I have felt so much better than that and 1100 or 12200 is just what I get like I think that with Sprint power in particular there's like it's like the tip of the spear and if you're playing Jenga to get all the way up to the tip of the spear it's like every piece has to be stacked perfectly to kind of make that happen and your um chain has to stay on the Chain ring too yeah no bending chain Rings no yeah so I I don't I always kind of have that grain of salt handy with the Sprint sort of stuff time to exhaustion is usually like a lot more more bulletproof there but I can't help but I'm going to read into that study that individual one because my assumption is there's some sort of confounding Factor at play I don't know I mean it it might just not be Peak power but because it's forced production versus like in um actual like strength and it's different like the power times velocity rather than just lifting something slowly right and what you're saying is that it's really hard to get a maximum Sprint out it's not repeatable so therefore if you have something that's like a 5% increase but it's not repeatable every time you're going to all this noise inside of it correct yeah like you said you have to see like a lot of repeated Sprints I think and it has it usually takes a pretty long time course because if you do really hard Sprints one day and then you do really hard Sprints the next day it's not common that you're going to do the same amount of power on the second day how many times you've done five Sprints and like your third one's the strongest yeah it's just it's not you would think your first one should be the strongest but you're not like locked in you don't have the uh the hand the coordination right totally yeah so but it's interesting to see on the creatine side of things I think that one side of this that this was not looking at is the ability to be able to store uh your glycogen stores and increase those and that's something that uh could very well be beneficial for an endurance athlete as well yeah totally and if you're just looking at like consistency with your training and being able to perform at a high level it seems like it's a good good approach in your brain cognitive sodium bicarbonate there were Six studies involved in this and I've done a full deep dive on sodium bicarbonate you can check out the video we'll link it down below um where I went through a lot of this so This research was all quite familiar to me the dosage is2 to4 gram per kilogram of body weight that they gave and it was 60 to 180 minutes prior more of the modern like the most recent research seems to suggest that it's better to do it somewhere around like 2 hours is so somewhere in the meat of that uh performance benefits constant load to exhaustion 12% % increase crazy now this is from one study I want to make make sure that this isn't like averaged out across the rest is like baking soda yes yeah but here's the deal so and and sodium bicarbonate is consumed in like three main different ways now it's either mixed in as a powder into your drink which is pretty tough to drink and it usually offsets The Taste and the palatability pretty substantially then there's sodium bicarbonate capsules and you can get those that are just like raw they're effectively baking soda capsules and you take those uh the tricky part is if those get wet they're very ineffective and cycling is a sweaty sticky mess of a sport so a lot of them have like their in the little capsules that you can get that are actually like coated um and that's one way that you can do it you have to take quite a lot of them in order to get to the point where you're getting to the2 to4 grams per kilogram or there's a product like Martin and Martin has their sodium bicarbonate product which has a bunch of those little tablets that you put in you mix it in and it seems there is research that has been released on this and I know that like some of you might be thinking that it's like very incentivized research yes Mar 10 did fund the research so that's important however this isn't a situation where like you know the the research isn't all roses here it shows like pros and cons of the whole thing but there does seem to be some benefit with co-ingestion with carbohydrate and as well with this and there does seem to be some benefit to this to Martens product number one it is statistically significant in showing that it is less disruptive to your gut and then it also is statistically significant to show that it has greater buffering capacity if you were to consume the Matched amounts of sodium bicarbonate but one through the marm product and one through capsules or powder or anything else that you actually get increased buffering capacity through that whether that's because of their hydrogel stuff whether that's because of co-ingestion with carbohydrate I don't know um but it's it's got substantial data to prove it so 12% increase in tte which is just of these use sorry yeah no it's fine yeah any of these use use the um martan product you know no I didn't see any yeah okay yeah uh 2 km TT no benefit which this makes sense here 4 km TT they saw a 1.6 to 2.3% reduction in time to complete that time trial now as you get longer you typically see a bit more benefit but then if you get too long you see less benefit and this shows that like constant load Plus plus intermittent Sprints that they had them do which basically is like you do like a one to two hour long effort and then every 20 minutes you do a hard Sprint and then you settle back in yep they only saw decreased RP with that and then with a Windgate test they saw no benefit and that totally makes sense because where this really helps is in repeated efforts or spots where you have like lactate building up and then you have to maintain that sort of effort that constant load to exhaustion would be the buildup over time that's right and then that's when you go ow it hurts but I say ow it hurts later that's right yeah so uh bicarbonate I feel like is a you can look on Amazon you can find bulk sodium bicarbonate like little tablets that you can buy and You' be able to mix this in with your stuff and you'd be fine if you get the mar product I kid you not it is $20 per serving after like taxes and shipping so every time you train and it's suggested that you do it on high intensity days and races right so like in like key Training sessions and races but if you start to add that up it gets so expensive it's just like I mean it's it's a effectively a month of trainer Road in one serving and keep in mind what you're looking at here uh that constant load to exhaustion one I want to look into too for the 12% because that somewhat stands at contrast with the other data that we have on a constant load with intermittent Sprints so that'll be interesting to see um but yeah it's if you go to Walmart 20 bucks is like a year Supply a lot Arm and Hammer yeah totally although that that's always messed my stomach up so have you noticed that the pills do like let's check Maran out of it cuz the the cost have you noticed that the pills have done less stomach issues for you yeah I have um and but usually it's because it's easier to like um get it down the hatch a little quicker I think like you know when it's just the baking soda in there you have like a really it's like a fizzy drink foamy drink and you take that thing down but it's even just hard like in like the Sensation that you have in your mouth when you're drinking it to really drink it rapidly whereas otherwise I just it's like a handful of pellets you put them in there you drink it down and then your gut doesn't feel great for a little bit but then it tends to calm down and it's okay did you ever try like having uh carbohydrate too like like a sports drink or something a banana so we did tests for the video that we had and we did not coest anything else with it you know was interesting with the test that we did for this video and again this is Nate talks about the pyramid this is below by the way I want to be clear on this like this is individual experimentation with this is entertainment yeah with myself and three other people so this is not scientific evidence it is evidence but not scientifically graded evidence evidence for you yeah exactly yeah and uh and three other people here and when we went through and did those tests uh it lowered RP for everybody but it actually increased or I should say it lowered RP for everybody but for everybody beside myself it actually increased um their lactate levels and there's a big misconception is the fact that it will lower lactate levels and that will burn less but it actually seems to allow more lactate to be in the bloodstream and your body is able to just make or do what it needs to do with it faster more efficiently in one way or another uh for me strangely enough which I usually have very high lactate it lowered my lactate levels but it did also Dro My RP so I almost I have this Theory that's totally unproven and I it' be really cool to learn more about this with researchers but I wonder if it kind of helps your body find kind of like an ideal where it's like it's like a moderated level who knows maybe that's why my lactate dropped I tested I did it three more times by the way and same results across the board so not same numbers but same Trends if I were with this I'd probably buy the the pills and I would take it with maybe a banana or like sports drink or some like some simple yeah or even I would do it not with a workout coming up because I wouldn't want it to hurt that workout and just see workout and just see how my stomach feels cuz when I did it it was like knives I'm sure this is the dosage is 02 to four grams per kilogram I was probably doing two or three I don't know I was doing I wasn't doing that much I'm just joking but I would test this out cuz it's so cheap I think with the pills and a banana to be able to try it without having it be connected to your stomach maybe try with or without all with stomach and then try it in a workout that's a really good point it's also worth noting that the people that did take the mar 10 product here then we when we tested that um I was fine with it but everyone they said it was very hard to get down it wasn't because it was messing up their gut but the the texture and taste it kind of has that boogery texture of like what their gels have what do boogers taste like J and then it's like uh it's like uh sparkly tablets within that and like kind of like crunchy boogers it's it's an odd mix so that was what it was described as was crunchy boogers so uh anyways the take that I guess uh take that information with what and do whatever you want with it I think that it is actually something that can benefit athletes if you have repeated hard efforts also worth noting that in the research it does seem that it's if you take this it doesn't last very long you know if you're going to take this and then go out on like a Iron Man bike leg for example it's not going to be benefiting you and even then that sort of nature isn't going to that you know constant state effort that isn't up at high intensities probably isn't going to be beneficial do we know how long yeah it's typically somewhere between 1 to two hours of of actual activity until the benefits start to go away the interesting thing is there are some people that have like cited that it's much much less but I'm not sure if those are science-backed claims that it's much less so right now the consensus you saw was about 2 hours four-year event yeah then might it's like a a crit yeah exactly yeah Sprint Triathlon something like that perfect for a crit uh xcoo race um cyclocross that sort of thing the other thing you do for any race and then you still would use you'd be more fresh for later in the race you should right so yeah theoretically uh beta alanine was the next one this has a lot of marketing behind it a lot of products with beta alanine um three studies were on beta alanine specifically the dosage was 6.4 gram per day day for four weeks so this is like a constant loading with beta alanine it's uh something that if you take it habitually for a period of time that's where you actually start to see the sort of benefits like you load it over time it was dealing with recreationally trained adult men in Endurance Sports and the performance benefits from it they had this adapted wind gate the 3x 10 seconds sort of thing and then they also had a 3 minute constant load uh to exhaustion and no benefit there they did intermittent Sprints with no benefit then they did 120 Minutes of constant load so 2 hours and then they had six Sprints every 20 minutes and then at the end of that they did the 4 km time trial that sounds like a really weird thing but it's actually kind of a common method of testing cycling performance in studies where they do this kind of like a kitchen sink sort of thing where they're just throwing everything at you and then they sometimes they test during the whole time or they just test at the 4 kilm time trial afterward because they're trying to test what happens when you're really depleted but they saw no benefit with that either so the remember this is three studies so this isn't necessarily the body of evidence but with these three studies that met the criteria they didn't see any benefit from beta alanine um does make you tingly does it make you tingle oh yeah it doesn't make me tingle I like just I I don't see any benefit from it like I don't I almost feel like uh I always wonder if I'm taking a placebo just because I don't feel anything from it right uh but yeah anyways that's an interesting one nitrates the next one so anything that has to do with Beats in particular uh lots of products that have to do with this there were eight studies on this the dosage range was absolutely massive from 6.4 up to 18.5 Millo so like and that's like measured nitrates once it's in your system that's a that's a huge amount uh the timing two to three hours or two to three hours prior or chronic for four days like a loading which there does seem to be more we've covered this too recently um on a video I'll link to this one too but there does seem to be a bit more evidence maybe that's unfair to say there is evidence that shows that loading protocols might be more beneficial if you are highly trained and if you are not so highly trained then you can see benefits from just taking it kind of like as a oneoff uh so the performance benefits here two out of the eight studies found signif significant performance improvements 10K time trial was a 1.6% increase in power and 6% reduction in TT time so that's awesome that also I feel like it tracks like where it's so little it's but that's that's what I mean by saying that it tracks right sometimes when I see 11 12% I'm kind of like hm that seems crazy if that was the case we'd all be bathing in creatine or something right but then in this case when I see 1.6% in power and then 6 in TT time I'm like hm that that kind of like I would that seems like an appropriate range but that's my assumption on top of things uh Windgate they saw a 4.4% increase in power with that which is a really interesting one um you would have more like you know oxygenation is one of the benefits of nitrates and so perhaps you'd have more oxidative capacity for a really short effort like that it me I don't know yeah but nitrates they did see some benefit but keep in mind that's two out of eight studies the rest of the six so the remaining Six studies saw no benefit um across the board then they had combos creatine and caffeine they saw no benefit in one minute Sprint test and 45 minute constant load tests they did see an increase in mean and Peak power in intermittent Sprints and they also saw a 4.5% increase in time to exhaustion wait if you took caffeine and creatine yeah but okay so the other creatine only was 11% time to increase and then caffeine cre 4.5 that's probably due to like dosing in amounts CU totally you would think that there would be some you know 1 plus a plus b equals c kind of thing rather than a plus b b minus or something yeah dosage this probably covers a really important thing to cover just with like human randomized control trials they aren't perfect like people aren't just robots or you can replicate the exact same scenarios who knows what they ate slept or what happened in their lives in between the days of the tests as well this all these things can affect and you just kind of have to always keep that in mind you know and this you want like a the same group probably doing the creatine and the caffeine creatine have a washow and do it the opposite and doing different orders and all of that to get a real what the percentage is but in general it seems like both of those are going to be performance enhancement individually they showed likelihood right or caffeine was strong evidence then creatine was was potential um so yeah and then together it seems like a safe bet and also like you said cheap and approachable and you can get in a lot of different ways was creatine potential or his constant load to exhaustion time to exhaustion is plus 11% which is sprinting no correct and in this case yeah what they found is that they said that there was like a potential for it but not something like conclusive across the board scientists yeah stands to reason stands to reason the earth goes around the Sun and caffeine and sodium bicarbonate was another combo that did have some improvement they saw no benefit in 3K time trial and high-intensity test to exhaustion but they did see a 2.3% decrease in time trial time and a 4.9% increase in power output in a 4 km time trial so that's sort of like you know with both of these it's hard to say that both of them working together like has any sort of unique benefit it could you know caffeine has so much evidence behind it showing that it's it's significant performance enhancing so take that keep that handy as well that's why I'm killing this podcast yes that's right it might just be caffeine the caffeine uh what it does is reduces RP so then you don't stop as early because it doesn't hurt as much yeah absolutely so yeah it's it's this is a really cool example of research that's kind of wrapped up in a tidy little bow for us but you have to keep it in context still it's a systematic review it doesn't represent every study in the world it represents the studies View through the lens of their criteria but that is really helpful for all of us trying to make decisions when we get told by one person that this supplement is going to make us 20% faster than the other person it's going to make you slower so this is a really cool thing to see and I'm super grateful that the authors like authors publish this sort of stuff um hopefully it guides new research too okay I like to give my recommendations based on this and my experience love it um creatine I say take it five grams a day um you're going to get like what happens is you're you do get saturated to a point and this 20 G of creatine for 5 days I think I believe the scientists wanted to get people to the saturated point and this would do it but you don't need to do that forever after that you taper off right not just you know you get to 100% full and you don't you're not using all 20 yeah so so you tapered off in your dosage to like five like five no I I just do five every day or sometimes 10 it depends but basically there was some um like a study that worried about kidney with like L high creatine use my understanding is unless you have some kidney problems it's not an issue um I think it's one of the most this in caffeine most studied supplements in the world um can I share one more thing on Crea here uh I just saw a study referen the other day that showed a 10% increase in body weight no 10 was it 10 I think it was 10 pound increase in body weight for a person that they were on Creatine and an influencer was running with that just saying that or 10 what was it it 10 lbs increase and and I know right that's a lot that seems crazy and this researcher was basically running with that study or not a researcher an influencer very different people not the same um they were running with that and just saying like don't take this for endurance athletes here's a study that shows why this person gained 10 pounds who knows why that person gained 10 pounds I haven't looked into the study and I don't know how controlled it was I don't know what the scenario was so also we're saying if that person is like severely dehydrated or something and then coming in there after it's a lot of different things but um you will gain weight when you take creatine 10 lb is a an extreme amount of weight to gain it's like one to three maybe yeah uh but again the the cognitive benefits I think are going to be worth it just buy a new bike and tires just kidding I see a lot of jokes now I can say so many more jokes now that I can like we can really jump in uh what happens with creatine is it makes your muscles hold more water so people might say you you're going to be puffy your skin doesn't hold you don't hold any more water between your skin and your um muscles even bodybuilders will take it right before they step on stage is when they really want to be shredded to think about a 10B increase which means you would have effectively 10 more pounds of muscle you take you go to the store and you get that package of ground beef that's a pound it's a pretty big package I have two hands up right take one of those and put 10 of those on your body people train for years to get 10 lbs and this thing saying like days I can join I can look like I did trained for years and like to have 10 more pounds of muscle right that I mean uh I can totally have a 10 pound swing though of like hydration glycogen like people do it in um uh before fights all the time right they drop like 105 pounds yeah that's possible but I don't know so any anyway going back to this I would just do 5 to 10 grams every day um you're going to hit that loading period like pretty fast creatine that sounds good caffeine the amount of caffeine they show in here is so much that this I think will impact the rest of your life and I would save this three to six milligrams per kilogram for race day or really big key workout um that you're going to do that you have plenty of time before you can go to sleep so you're saying when you're saying impact the rest of your life have a negative impact on the things outside of training jittery and you're not be able to sleep and I I I've noticed this where I do that six Mill because I've seen these studies six milligrams that was my Target and it makes two things makes your workout you can go so much deeper that you're not going to sleep as well plus you have the caffeine and the half the half life of caffeine you're going to have so much inside of your body still while you go to sleep um A good rule of thumb is not before afternoon but it's all that is considering normal caffeine usage if you're doing twice as much yeah um then it's like at noon you're taking your initial you know your initial well depends on how early you take in the day but that's a that's a tricky thing because I I see a lot of athletes like gels with caffeine or drink mix with caffeine is really common and I see a lot of athletes just taking it on training and that sort of thing and when they've got and it's in the afternoon even into the evening yeah and it's it's it is affecting your sleep um even if you feel like you can sleep well and everything else you probably just don't know there's opportunity costs there that you don't know about the one thing I'm not sure about is certain cases of ADHD it actually calms you and I don't know if that also impacts sleep or not um it does the opposite effect of you which is wow yeah it's crazy and some people drink coffee right before bed in order to sleep but I don't know if that is the outcome is also you sleep better or it just makes you like more calm so you're not like anxious um and your system is more be able to focus on something that's why you're calm and then you go to sleepzy I don't know on that but I would also do in the morning uh still use caffeine before workouts but a regular dose like whatever your normal dose is you can combine that with a workout uh and then on the sodium bicarbonate what I would do is I would get the pills the pills are cheap right yeah yeah I'll I'll look right now yeah while while you go through that get the pills I would try on a day that I'm not uh doing anything just see how my stomach feels and then I would probably try that with some banana or something just just in case and then I would do those before uh longer workouts and I would probably do it pretty if I didn't have stomach issues I'd probably do it before every workout yeah absolutely Che and so I'm going to do the math here if I'm going to do 0.2 * 69 kilograms which is my weight here says 13.8 um if I'm going to take 13.8 grams set grams let me double check grams per kilogram of body weight you can go on Amazon you can buy a $26 tub of these things and it comes out to three cents per and that's uh 650 milligram tablets 1,000 of them so uh divided by so that's man that's going to last me months months months for how much uh $26 yeah and that is that daily or is that yeah I could take a daily and I would last exactly so you take it two times a week or something for your big workouts that's right yeah and big workouts and races are you really want it it's not going to help you on your endurance rides yeah I think I would do like the harder the hard like the the hard days right correct um and when we even say hard it's like threshold and above and even then like on like the anobi stuff that isn't like like on a Sprint day I might not use it like I wouldn't need to like I mean for how cheap it is I would do it on Sweet Spot too and then the other nice part about it is if you do it consistently you can really understand your stomach and because it's the worst is when you go I'm going to save this this $20 gel for race day and you do it and you're like hurting before race day oh yeah yeah and you could easily fall victim to that one what about beta alanine do you I guess for like because you're mostly doing strength training these days yeah and I know beta alanine and beta alanine is definitely included in a lot of pre-workout stuff um but I for cyclists and this isn't just this systematic review I wanted to actually do like a video reviewing the research on beta alanine and after looking at it I just couldn't find a lot of research that was the body of research seems inconclusive yeah to likely to not have a benefit if I remember correctly it was supposed to be like it's marketed towards short hard efforts um being the benefit to it and so I would definitely I used to take it on short heart effort days yeah and I got tingly and it kind of makes me feel uncomfortable and I don't really know if that that's probably not a benefit yeah and now today I do obviously you can tell I do weight training now you're watching and uh the mustache that's what I was talking about okay I don't do that anymore it's just it's creatine is the massive one and again carbs in weight training is crazy because you pump up and carbs and some salt and water you get these giant like gym pumps and you feel good you can lift some more oh yeah I still love carbs dude it's becoming invoke even in golf like uh I know seems like off the wall but Bryson dambo like one of the best like golfers he was built like a normal guy and then like he just like he's super data driven does everything unorthodox he went and just trains like an absolute animal and he's huge now just really strong big guy and it's cool because you see him out on the golf course and stuff and he always talks about what he's eating and it's just carbs he's just huge on carbohydrate he eats during the the oh yeah during golf which you would think that like oh yeah it's you know you're just walking around alcohol you need yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah just Arnold Palmer's but no no he's it's like that's not alcohol John no clue I see it all the time on the golf cart on the meal cart that goes around so uh yeah that's tea isn't it it's ice tea it's ice tea and lemonade yeah there we go yeah yeah yeah that's the Mormon LDS alcohol it's spicy that's right uh so beta alanine inconclusive and then nitrates man messed my stomach up do they really oh heartburn oh that's the one is like it's fine and then heartburn especially if you're B over and then eating other gels were problems I would get such bad at least from the the be it stuff that I would do oh yeah cuz that had a decent amount of like um I mean beats themselves and then and and then I think it has like a lot of lime or lemon juice in there too like cut the flavor helps the flavor but that's really acidic and can cause some other things I man I've done the beat thing I've gone through beat supplements I've gone through actually juicing my own beets or even blending my own beets I've done a lot of different different stuff and sounds messy oh it's so messy it's a pain I I just don't like I'm not really typically a picky person but beats are never going to be something that I really want it's just me you know we did a too we did a a Instagram video that showed the amount of nitrates and different kind of like things that study was wild yeah and Dr Cogan was involved in that one um and somebody else yeah it was it's wild I'll link to it the highest was uh it was like the lake something it was just beet juice that you get the grocer store and it was the cheapest thing out of everything and it's the most accessible and it was the highest amount of nitrates yeah it's um organic tarte cherry juice I'm going to search for it right here because it was not um it's Lakewood Organics yeah Lakewood Organics that was the top one you can find them at like any store in the US yep in the US uh there's also some products over in um in Europe that are like uh I guess a whole lot cheaper than what we have over here for that sort of thing um and you'll see like uh I did a video on this because everyone was saying that like they're taking in beats that doesn't make sense after the tour CU to Garrett Thomas everybody was drinking something looked like it but it's a tart cherry juice primarily drink that they have a what tart cherry juice man wish you would have known about this years ago if only somebody was telling us about it yeah um tarte cherry juice and it does have like some beets and stuff in there from what I understand but it's mostly tarte cherry juice but yeah nitrates um don't seem to be as beneficial perhaps as some might think so so anyways hopefully this is helpful to everybody um this is the sort of stuff that we're always we're always looking at the physiology side of things in terms of like testing different ways to train and get faster and then we're also looking at the so the supplement side because it interests us because we're cyclists just like you uh if you found this helpful and now if you know that like hey I can save a bunch of money I can just put it into caffeine creatine and sodium bicarbonate and you can get those cheap capsules and do it that way uh then maybe you have some more money to be able to spend on traveling to cool races doing anything else using TR you there you go the amount of money that we just saved you or John saved you uh is definitely worth it and I almost say like if you do what we just put in those plans the balance St above and you do those workouts we will give you a better Improvement than these supplements yes 100% there'll be somebody at like 5.5 watts per kilo won't work for but if you're in the the the the best let's correct that it's not that it won't work for them but they probably hit it to the point where they're going to have fractions of a percent Improvement rather than something else cuz we have athletes although it is surprising everyone thinks that like oh if you're fast on a bike you must be 5 watts per kilogram everybody else is 5 watts per kilogram barely it's not it's not even a a it's not a single percent it's fractions of it and this is across athletes in 150 countries of all ability levels hundreds of thousands and it's having uh an accurate some people say they are and then they never hit those those power numbers so we don't count that if just you say you are but you never actually can operate around 5 wats per kilo and that happens pretty often oh yeah it's like the high water mark versus the water level thing again yeah right you always remember Your Glory Days how much do you bench 315 I don't think so I never I saw someone do that in high school and I was I spotted them it was a cre effort um but yeah that I think we will increase all of this stuff then I say you do them all yeah 100% go for it with that thanks for joining us everybody if you want to see more iners episodes let us know uh let us know what supplements you find helpful or if your individual evidence doesn't align with something in here let us know because then that's always interesting to see um if maybe one of those things really works for you and you do get faster what's like the new one we're sleeping on that we don't know oh I know right right I'll take it I saw saw a bucket of horse feet that was like yeah that was like marketed is like something they use for for like horse racing or something is making it around in the cycling memes that it's like the new pre-workout yeah J maybe that's it yeah just hey just hey all right everybody thanks a bunch we'll talk to you next time byebye