Really? NYTimes: "Even Tylenol has been shown to boost endurance performance by 2 percent."

we should all be jacked up on caffeine, beet juice and tylenol.

Maybe someone should come up with a caffeine-beet juice-tylenol smoothy. It would sell like reindeer milk.

http://www.runnersworld.com/general-interest/tylenol-boosts-performance-in-hot-conditions

This is a really interesting new study from Lex Mauger of the University of Kent, just published in the journal Experimental Physiology (abstract here; press release here). It's quite simple: have volunteers cycle to exhaustion in hot conditions (30 C, 50% humidity) after taking either a dose of acetaminophen (aka Tylenol, paracetamol) or a placebo. The cyclists lasted 17% longer (23 min vs 19 min) when they took the acetaminophen; here's what their temperature readings looked like:

Beet juice won’t help you retain a multimillion dollar Major League Baseball contract. But, according to an impressive amount of quality research, it could help you run 1 to 2 percent faster in 5Ks to marathons. That might not sound like much, but it’s actually a big boost. Enough that I’d be surprised if most elite distance runners haven’t given beet products a try by now.

onsuming moderate amounts of caffeine combined with carbohydrates during a long-distance race could also aid performance. Another study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology reported the effect of adding different amounts of caffeine to a carbohydrate and electrolyte sports drink consumed by cyclists performing a long time trial. The study concluded that the addition of moderate amounts of caffeine (3.2 and 4.5 mg/kg) to a 7 percent carbohydrate-electrolyte drink (0.5 grams of carbohydrate per minute) significantly improved one-hour cycling time trial performance compared with a lower dose of caffeine (2.1 mg/kg) and the carbohydrate-electrolyte drink.

Nah never heard o' studies on "endurance performance increasing effects" of Tylenol., advil. etcetra but now I'm interested. Next time I'm at the University's computers I'll check the literature. Plus my sib' works in med consulting is always researchin public (and secret numbers) related to drugs, med devices. Next time I'm on the phone...

I believe it.

not because it's trivial no but quite the opposite actually. More often runners talk about using tylenol as a painkiller post run never heard of it admitted as booster. The recent talk in the grape vine seems to say that tylenol is pretty dangerous.

Me? use it as a last resort for unbearable headaches. The kind you hesitate to wish on your worst enemy. And it Works and something that strong but man made cannot be good for you. Long term. Just can't. There has to be a catch twenty two.

I suspect it might do the same thing for performance boosting. Like visiting one of those "quick money" establishments...

I'd love to try beet juice, and have had coffee before a race or workout before, but morally I feel like tylenol and even more than just a cup or two of coffee are cheating, whether they are or not. I don't know if I could drink beet juice and feel perfectly fine about it integrity wise

Don't know the study, but the author, Alex Hutchinson, is really on top of the exercise science aspect of our sport--and doesn't throw out statements just to be controversial or support an argument. He writes the "Sweat Science" blog over at Runner's World's website, and he's a reliable source of info. I recognized a lot of the info from the article (from my own research while writing my recently published book), and I'd be shocked if he just pulled that statistic out of his nether regions. ;-)

Jan. 25 [2010]: Tylenol (Acetaminophen) Improves Endurance Performance by Blocking Pain Signals

http://www.runnersworld.com/running-tips/jan-25-tylenol-acetaminophen-improves-endurance-performance-blocking-pain-signals

"casually had this line in there" ??? Rojo, do your homework, please. Alex Hutchinson is one of the best informed sport-science journalists out there, and he doesn't just "casually" drop lines into his well-researched articles.

Runs to exhaustion are ridiculously inaccurate.

Also the beet juice stuff only really works on sedentary/out of shape people. Pretty useless in elites...

"Pretty useless in elites..."

The voice of experience chimes in. How many elites did you use for your sample to support your conclusion (hypothesis?)?

fdsafdsafdsa wrote:

"Pretty useless in elites..."

The voice of experience chimes in. How many elites did you use for your sample to support your conclusion (hypothesis?)?

And how many samples were used to support these Tylenol/beetroot/whatever hypotheses? Maybe "10 well trained athletes" as deer Jack D. was so fond of?

You should all be happy that the medical industry (i.e. real scientists not ex. phys "scientists") will investigate many thousands of subjects before any product is released on the market.

In a quick search I found this article discussing the risks and (at least perceived) performance benefits of vasodilators including Tylenol, Viagra, and beet juice:

http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1550-2783-7-25.pdf

Performance benefit or not, it makes a credible case for abuse of various medications.

Anecdotally, I think beets do have a noticeable effect on my performance, but it could be placebo.

"Pretty useless in elites..."

This is YOUR CLAIM. Provide your evidence.

Thanks for sticking up for me, Pete and others! :)

The study I was referring to in the NYT article was this one:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19910336

Performance in a cycling time trial (NOT a time-to-exhaustion test, though that's been tested too) improved from 26:45 to 26:15 in a randomized, double-blind, crossover design. That's a 1.9% improvement.

That's just one study, of course, though the results have been replicated in subsequent studies under different conditions (e.g. hot weather, repeated sprints). I certainly wouldn't claim that everyone will see a 2% boost (highly unlikely that a truly world-class athlete would see that big a boost, for example), but given the study results it seemed like a reasonable ballpark estimate.

That said, I agree with the guy who said it seems like cheating. And I also don't know whether there are health risks. I most certainly do not recommend trying it -- but there are certainly athletes who do it.

What do you expect from a Mexican newspaper company?

If it was my shoes No Tylenol no way not Using it regularly to increase performance instead of sparing use to alleviate emergency pain That's suicidal like Sean Kingston. Beside hearin it thru the grape vine my Sib told me 'bout it. Tylenol some wicked bad stuff. Sib's making bucks on big money data that the big c-suite boys use. You know the saying "put the money where the mouth is" the $ don't lie. Maybe the ads are telling you chums otherwise but Tylenol for recreational use Heck no.

It's called the placebo effect.

Tellin' cats to take tylenol to improve their training or races is so sinister! This can't be an accident. You know what money where the mouth is I bet some cat's got skin in the game. Get the competition to start popping tylenols. Come the Trials the comp is wrecked #2rekt What a hustle and then the dog in the fight takes all and the cru in the game clean up in Vegas.

Even if the 2% improvement is real (for cycling) I doubt it would work for running. A common side effect of pain killers is GI discomfort (nausea, vomiting, etc), not to mention the burden it could bring to livers and kidneys for long term usage. And we all know GI discomfort is already an issue for many runners even w/o using the drugs. Last time I checked, some study (I didn't keep the link) tested runners (or endurance athletes, I don't remember) taking pain killer before bouts of "strenuous workout" and conclusively showed that the group using pain killer had stressed GI symptoms commonly. So for those who are considering trying it in your next race, keep in mind that it could also get you the opposite result or ruin the race for you.

HonestThief wrote:

I'd love to try beet juice, and have had coffee before a race or workout before, but morally I feel like tylenol and even more than just a cup or two of coffee are cheating, whether they are or not. I don't know if I could drink beet juice and feel perfectly fine about it integrity wise

Hasay doesn't have any moral qualms about guzzling beet juice as a PED. Of course, every NOPer is a doper.

oodle wrote:

Last time I checked, some study (I didn't keep the link) tested runners (or endurance athletes, I don't remember) taking pain killer before bouts of "strenuous workout" and conclusively showed that the group using pain killer had stressed GI symptoms commonly.

Those studies (and there are several of them) refer to non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs), a class of drugs that includes aspirin and ibuprofen. Tylenol belongs to a separate class of drug that is not associated with GI issues. That said, I fully agree that athletes shouldn't abuse Tylenol!

As for the guy who said it's just a placebo, the studies were all double-blinded and placebo-controlled. So the "placebo" is somehow more powerful when the pill contains acetaminophen than when it contains sugar... :)