As I observe it since several years in triathlon “Food” its 4th discipline is flooded by sloppy scientific facts. Study results telling you their truths are available in huge amounts. Critical, controversial and incomplete are the underlying theories, that present the matrix for interpreting the data. Data remains until today fluffy and inconclusive. This applies first and for all for carbohydrates the pillar of nutrition for all athletes.
Since the early 20th century carbohydrates are considered as the fuel for athletes. In the following I don’t want to question carbs as such, I only want to direct your attention to the fact that the scientific foundation on which diets are based is weak and arbitrary. Therefore your personal experience counts more than you may assume. To find the optimal diet and the optimal race nutrition needs you as an experimenter, this is evidence-based research work!

Food – whether a diet works for you or not – is all about experience decorated with some basic scientific facts

The observation that experiences with the same diet regimen among individuals vary on a broad scale underscores this view. What works well for you does not necessarily work another one. During the last months when I was touring through Europe with Chris “MACCA” McCormack from one race to the other I learned about the many gastrointestinal problems such as stomach pain or cramps, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, cramps etc. that athletes experience during or already shortly before a race. The reasons and explanations given for these problems are in line with the predominant paradigms governing exercise science, it is either salt or/and carbohydrates, or if these explanations don’t work or are unsatisfying it is nervousness about which nobody really knows what it means in the very end.

I was amazed to which extent carbohydrates in form of gels and bars are currently used as race nutrition, be it on the bike or the run. It occurred to me that the gastrointestinal issues may be due to too much of the good, that the quantity of ingested carbs may be too high or the timing may be inadequate. Another thought that popped up was that it might be wrong to narrow all the troubles down to carbs and salt, that the “carbohydrate depletion model” that is the underlying matrix for all the explanatory arguments may be incomplete and insufficient to explain the problems. I think it is justified though to question a model that cannot answer the questions asked anymore. (more…)

The posts before have shown the dramatic outcomes of too much exercise and training. In between, I would like to take another perspective on the whole topic to encourage your efforts, and perhaps give you more cues at hand to make the detrimental results of too much training and racing more understandable.

Modern exercise physiology and biology put a lot of work into studying the healthy body. That has not been the case for many decades where scientists only looked at sick bodies. Exercise physiology gives an amazing insight into the body’s “normal” way of functioning.

Inflammation is a phenomenon of the healthy body

You are probably used to the view/fact that inflammation is only present in cases of disease such as infections or chronic non communicable diseases (atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes-type-2, multiple sclerosis, bowel diseases etc.). Since very recent, scientific data talk a different language. Inflammation is a condition of the healthy body, it is a contained process essential for being healthy, a process that keeps our body with all its diverse functions going. Along all the mucosal linings (bronchi, guts, urinary bladder etc.) that connect us with the outside world, minor inflammatory or immune responses respectively take place… always and throughout our whole life. These borders colonized with its very own microflora are areas where controlled inflammatory processes secure the borders and guarantee our survival, where the communication with the environment takes place, often termed as friends (nutrients, bacteria, virus, macromolecules) and foes (e.g nutrients, viruses, bacteria, macromolecules). (more…)

There are only 9 weeks left until Kona. The IRONMAN world championship on the Big Island, Hawaii is for many an athlete the highlight of his or her career that one should enjoy. I am not talking about pro athletes, for them it is an obligation and in many ways not a question of joy. But for the many age groupers racing there should be joy. Be it as it may, it is hard work to get to Hawaii and it is hard work to finish there. Many currently linger along this very thin red line between overreaching and overtraining, and try to solve the riddle how to achieve peaking on time.

Working with biestmilch and being a physician I am confronted with a lot of health issues of athletes and it is exactly now, that I receive these posts and comments talking about the discrepancy, the lacking proportionality between training efforts and performance. You may feel in top form, you worked hard for many weeks, and then when the day comes, you feel sluggish in the swim or toasted on the bike already. Maybe you overlooked the discrete signs that guide you along the path of productive and unproductive workouts. In this post I would like to start writing about the various symptoms that may give you a frame of reference and standpoint of where you are with your training, symptoms that may help you to assess your very personal body condition.

Sebastian Kienle told me before Challenge Roth: “Well, I don’t feel really perfectly prepared, but you know it, if you feel perfectly prepared, then it may as well be the case that you did too much.” You may know that Sebastian got 2nd in his 1st long-distance race and that he raced under 8 hours. To remember his sentence could help in situations of doubts.

To fall prey to overtraining can happen to everybody who loves his or her sport, because sport can actually become an addiction which has nothing to do with being overzealous or doped. The feeling of whole body fatigue as well as the feeling of being able to deliver peak performance are rewarding and seducing. Both extremes can lure us to do more to get more! One day “the more” turns into “too-much” and can bring about overtraining, a sneaky process that may overrun you! A complex phenomenon that needs elucidation still. (more…)

Endurance sports are very trendy and, so is triathlon for example. But how do we all who are busy all day long achieve the training volumes of 12 to 14 hours per week, a minimum that is assumed necessary to race a long distance triathlon race or a marathon? There are different approaches to what is considered efficient training. Some of the elite athletes are convinced that long training cycles are necessary to get into good form, while others favor qualitatively high-intensity training sessions. The proof of concept is still missing, because there are athletes in either group who are successful, as there are those who are not.

In my opinion, here we stumble into the same troubles as everywhere, if we want to define one rule for everybody. I know athletes who train comparatively very little and achieve a lot. Whether this is a concept for everyone is not known, I myself. I doubt it. But there are studies on the way supporting high-intensity interval training. I have digged one that indicates that high-intensity interval training may compensate up to certain extent for long training session of low intensity around 65% V02 max.

It is an exciting perspective reading that 2.5 hours sprint units at ca 90% Vo2 max per week compared to 10.5 hours low-intensity running may be as efficient in outcome. (more…)