Is bicarbonate aiding in training?

I often use bicarb 1/2 hour before walking the dog when I'm tired...

Anyone know where to source the bicarbonate in pellet form. You could just mix it with gels and be good to go.

You gotta pellet it yourself. Roll it up into little rods and freeze it. You might need to add some water to make it malleable, but then you just chop it up and boom. Pellets. Now the hydrogel part is the bigger barrier to a homemade alternative. Might need a chemistry background for that.

Nice. Thanks for the info! Will have to give it a shot

I think maurten gel would do the trick. Maybe water it down a bit!

What are some of the terrible ideas from the 90s? Just curious if my coaches advised any of them to me back then.

One of them has to be static stretching before a workout or race. Like trying to touch your toes or doing another kind of hamstring stretch and hold for 1-5 minutes before a workout.

Haha, ok. My HS xc coach from 90s commented that actual runners can't touch their toes. A point of pride was being inflexible? Lol. Same guy advised drinking flat cola before a race. But he criticized my full stack of pancakes the morning before state xc meet. That was annoying. Some decent advice included doing high rep leg extensions with no added weight on the machine.

I hate reading this stuff. It will all end badly in ODing or permanent long term effects. God help these kids.

I agree that shortcuts typically have negative consequences. As an older runner I have no interest in taking shortcuts, but this is our society now. It's not just athletics (think: AI). It's ridiculous in my opinion, and mostly a way for companies to make more money off us. Running should be simpler.

David Bishop has done some research on this. It does aid in mitochondria adaptations. The tradeoff is impaired buffering and lactate and acid transport adaptations which mainly benefit mid-distance athletes and need less training time anyways.

Indeed. This is akin to claiming training at extreme "low altitude" (say, 5000 feet below sea level) improves racing performance.

It can both me positive and negative for training. It may be food if you need quick restitution between workouts, but bad for teaching the body to adapt

Maybe this is more akin to training with super shoes. To see which one it’s more like, I feel like we need to establish whether this allows greater or less recovery training at the same aerobic intensity, and whether or not using this in training hurts or helps adaptations. Training at an extremely low altitude, which doesn’t sound possible, is obviously a bad idea because high altitude is known to lead to adaptation, and running at lower altitude requires one to run faster for the same stimulus versus sea level which we are already very well adapted to, impairing recovery. So magically “lower” altitude would lead to decreased potential for adaptation and decreased recovery.

It seems like bicarb at the very least would probably lead to better recovery, and I’m not sure what impact it would have on adaptation. Maybe the benefit in recovery outweighs the potential impact in adaptation like carb fueling in long runs. In the past it was recommended to not fuel for long runs if you wanted to race a race with glycogen depletion. Now it’s flipped to constant fueling spare a couple long runs at most because it’s been shown to just be not worth the recovery cost. Maybe this is a little bit like that, which would stink because it makes the sport more expensive.
I wonder more modern training is shifting away from valuing lactate clearing. Jack Daniels defines threshold as important to improve the body’s ability to clear lactate, and he picks the pace right before it starts accumulating more rapidly than it can be cleared, unless my high school coach lied to me. On the contrary, the seemingly more effective Norwegian System runs at lower intensities, including at LT1 which seems to be hardly more acidic than easy running. From what I remember from either of Bakken’s articles he makes no mention to lactic acid buffering, which is what Jack Daniels claims is the main purpose of his threshold work, and really just cared at running at a high aerobic intensity. Maybe buffering lactic acid isn’t something that is that important and wasn’t trainable the way everyone thought it was (like VO2 Max). This isn’t my take on this. I don’t have one and I would like to learn as much as I could.

There's a lot of opinions about how things are supposed to work, but sometimes the science is counter-intuitive.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Sodium bicarbonate ingestion prior to training improves mitochondrial adaptations in rats - PubMed

We tested the hypothesis that reducing hydrogen ion accumulation during training would result in greater improvements in muscle oxidative capacity and time to exhaustion (TTE). Male Wistar rats were randomly assigned to one o...

Open link

Do you think anyone has moved on to better buffers? I’m assuming there are better non-toxic buffers. Something phosphate based?

Sodium citrate works about as well as bicarb. Peaks a bit later, similar GI effects.

Hey Xscience / Letsrun.

I had a bad race performance on Saturday in a 5000m. Loaded with BeetIt juice (nitrates) / beta alinine (all summer) / caffeine / bicarb. I was going as expected through 3000m (1-2sec quick for 1st & 2nd kms), and absolutely died in the 4th km. Obviously was going too fast for my fitnes but the problem was that I didn't perceive that I was going too fast until my legs stopped working.

Any thoughts / experiences on the buffering of bicarb interferring with perception of hydrogen ions so much that the runner gets inhibited performance without the normal pain warnings that come before the "blow up"?

KM Splits (avg HR & cadence):
3:07 (152 / 183)
3:06 (164 / 188)
3:11 (166 / 187)
3:36 (161 / 186)
3:19 (163 / 187)