Is Bicarb ruining the sport ?

Bro your grandma and/or mom used baking soda when she made you some baked good.

It bothered me recently to find out that certain colleges are having team meetings about bicarb and giving it to their athletes for free. I find this mindset questionable, as I don't agree with promoting substances to collegiate athletes that are purely for performance enhancement/not for health. I know it's not illegal, it just seems off.

I really feel like this doesn’t need to be explained but I will anyway. Eating 2 tsp of concentrated baking soda and 2 tsp of baking soda dispersed in a batch of cookies getting roasted at a temp of 350+ degrees are completely different . I’m not here to argue, I am here to hear what others think.

It really isn't. Learn some real biochemistry, the source of the acidity. It's ATP turnover and ingesting sodium bicarbonate can't prevent that, however much anyone tries to say otherwise.

There is no evidence to suggest that it has long term negative side effects. There isn't much differnce between this and caffeine.

Bicarb is more accessible now with hydrogel solutions such as the one by Maurten. I’ve taken it twice before 800m races and didn’t have any side effects associated with traditional Bicarb supplementation like the need to go to the bathroom.

Caffeine, beta alanine, l-citrulline, kratom, creatine are all supplements with proven benefits. Why the distinction for Bicarb specifically? And how will you enforce it? Many off the shelf snacks from the convenience store on the way to the meet for the bus have Bicarb in them.

I heard somewhere that ingesting NaHCO₃, by some unknown mechanism, helps make cells more efficient at using ATP. Either that, or the increased sodium just raises blood plasma levels.

Is this a cleverly disguised ad for Maurten? I’ve never tried it, but now I really want to try it.

Is bicarbonate some sort of masking agent? I doubt it but I don’t know anything about science.

Not an ad. Just an observation by the OP that times from 800 to 3k have gotten a lot faster over the past 12 months, and those are the same distances that the new Maurten's bicarb helps.

No

Training volume and heat/humidity adaption also raise sodium retention and blood plasma levels, which is useful for endurance performance. Sodium chloride, normal table salt is all you need.

But for the high intensity efforts, we need to train our ability to shift plasma out of the bloodstream whilst retaining heart stroke volume in order to reach maximum heart rate at the end of the race. This is one of the benefits of interval training.

I think it's possible that Bicarb is partly responsible for times improving - but I'd want to know more about how many athletes are using it. Just looking at this past weekend, in the past Ritz has said that Nuguse does not use it. Does anyone know whether Fisher, Hocker or Kessler use it? The impression I get it is that while quite a few athletes use it, if you say looked at the top 10 in all the distance races at the last Olympics it would still be less than 50% of athletes that use it - but maybe it has become more widely used than I think.

Just so you know, we were put through a "test" in the 1990s to ingest sodium bicarbonate (in the form of crushed up Tums) while doing repeat 800s. It was part of someone's grad school research.

The problem, as you can imagine, is that we couldn't really get enough into our system in time for it to work. We were literally crushing and eating the Tums in between 800s...

Still, the person who thought of the experiment, was a smart kid. She was 30 years ahead of her time!

I go backwards and forwards on this. Bicarb certainly conveys a performance advantage and has contributed to improved times. Is that a problem? Only as much as the supershoes and superspikes are a problem. It does mean that it's harder to compare contemporary times with those from the pre-bicarb era.

On the other side, there a lot of known performance enhancers that are totally legal. Altitude training is a good example. At least bicarb is reasonably accessible to all athletes ($75 for four servings isn't prohibitive for any athlete), whereas training at altitude for long periods is simply not a possibility for a lot of athletes due to the expense. In a world where the advantages in elite sport are very unevenly distributed, at least bicarb can be obtained by just about anyone.

You can bring a horse to a bicarb milkshake, but you can't make it drink.

To administer the huge dose required for a PE effect, the trainer shoves a nasogastric tube into the horse's stomach, resulting in repeated physical trauma and distress, and occasionally death when the tube and its contents go down the wrong hole. This is why bicarb "milkshakes" are banned.

Unless coaches are forcing bicarb enemas into their athletes, maybe the care aspect is less of an issue.

If we could just let it all plop down on the track like racehorses, we never would have needed the Maurten prep.

If you think eating spoonfuls of baking soda is what’s really allowing everyone to suddenly run 1:41, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.