Soda Loading

For the baking soda to affect the pH of your blood would be a difficult thing. First, all the acid in your stomach would have to be neutralized, seriously messing with digestion and producing a ton of CO2 (buuuuurp). Then, your blood is a buffered system, meaning that it is really hard to change its pH, not including the fact that there are active systems trying to keep it at a specific level. If you consumed enough soda (or any other base) to overcome all of this enough to significantly affect performance, I think your whole body would be so thrown out of balance that some lactic acid would be the least of your worries.

wannabechemist wrote:

For the baking soda to affect the pH of your blood would be a difficult thing. First, all the acid in your stomach would have to be neutralized, seriously messing with digestion and producing a ton of CO2 (buuuuurp). Then, your blood is a buffered system, meaning that it is really hard to change its pH, not including the fact that there are active systems trying to keep it at a specific level. If you consumed enough soda (or any other base) to overcome all of this enough to significantly affect performance, I think your whole body would be so thrown out of balance that some lactic acid would be the least of your worries.

I agree with this guy. There are several acidic areas that would need to be neutralized before the bicarb would ever reach your muscles.

I wonder how much bicarbonate the guys in the study had to ingest for them to have any noticable results. I don't plan on doing this anytime soon because I have terrible GI problems and such but I thought it was pretty interesting.

Look up "milkshaking" in racehorses - bicarb loading works, but only if you ingest it in amount which would trigger severe digestive upset and vomiting in a human. Horses are physiologically unable to vomit, so they don't have to worry about that, and they aren't restricted by social conventions to crapping in portaloos or behind bushes.

Wouldn't sodium bicarbonate raise the pH of your blood?

It sounds like something that is more likely to severely damage your health than improve your athletic performance in any meaningful way. Train harder and more intelligently.

Just like Marion Jones, I'm always looking for the easy way.

I often do a Mt. Dew load before my races. For the 3 days prior to the race I only ingest Mt. Dew soda. I have found that this method of soda loading is not an effective performance enhancer but trials are still progressing.

Try a thread search. This has been discussed on here a number of times before, including by people who have actually tried it.

There is one prodominate study on this, in which a small number (I believe it was 12) 800 metre athletes tried running an all out 800 without soda loading and with soda loading a couple of days apart. The average time of the 12 runners was around 1:57 without soda loading, and around 1:53 with soda loading - obviously a significant difference.

Other things to consider before you try it:

- This obviously wasn't a blind test, and its likely a placebo effect occured to at least some degree.

- 11 of the 12 suffered severe gastrointestinal side effects

- I read in a different study (I know I am not linking and that's weak) doing this multiple times may increase your odds of kidney stones, which suck.

- The amount the athletes consumed was pretty absurd. They basically sat there for 2 hours prior to their race consuming massive quantities of Sodium Bicarbonate.

I wanted to try it for an early season race once, and so I picked up sodium bicarb pills. I can't remember how many milligrams each pill was, but there were probably 80 pills in the container. I am a light person, like most runners, and to take the recommended "soda loading" dosage I would have had to consume 3 bottles of the pills over a two hour period! Pbviously I didn't do that. I took take about 20 of them, and proceeded to run my worst time of the year - mostly because I was mentally focused on the soda loading rather than my race.

I do not recommend it, though it is an interesting phenomenon.

I'm not going to try it but I thought it was pretty interesting. If I tried it I would probably unload in my pants after a lap or two.

yeah it will make you shitt

It's a silly idea. But if there is one race where a placebo effect is guaranteed to work, it's an 800m, where a runner's confidence can be very shaky.

One other thing, we don't produce lactic acid, but sodium lactate.

Sodium lactate production actually consumes H+, thereby reducing adidosis.

weIlnow wrote:

It's a silly idea. But if there is one race where a placebo effect is guaranteed to work, it's an 800m, where a runner's confidence can be very shaky.

Oh wellnow, you're right on cue. The man who admits to having "no science background" is telling us what's what again. And the 800 is the "one race" where a placebo effect would work?? And how do you know the study wasn't double blind (not saying it definitely was, but that is how one controls for a placebo effect).

It's not a silly idea, but one that can have adverse GI reactions. There are PLENTY of studies showing it to be beneficial. Bicarb may even spur mitochondria growth.

I will re-post a recent long review article I read on the subject later this evening. I guarantee some of you will say after reading it: hmm....I think I might try it.

I can't wait until tonight, so I will say it now:

"hmm....I think I might try it."

Go ahead post the link, I can't wait to read all that bad science.

Don't you realize that scientists have been talking about 'lactic acidosis' for over 100 years, and it doesn't even exist. Metabolic acidosis is not a simple thing to understand, nobody has it all figured out, or even what the real effects are.

Sir Lance-alot wrote:

I will re-post a recent long review article I read on the subject later this evening. I guarantee some of you will say after reading it: hmm....I think I might try it.

Where´s the article?

A buddy from grad school used to do it while running at an NAIA school. He claimed that it helped to run faster but, "would make you shit through the eye of a needle".