The Best Supplement for Running? Sodium Bicarbonate Explained | Extra Mile

0:00Hello and welcome to this week's episode of The Extra Mile with me, Spencer Matthews. And me, Oli Patrick. This distance between us today is unacceptable. I can still feel your radiating energy, even through the medium of the interweb. Can you? I can, actually. Oh, good. You are just an effervescent force. Well, of all the things I've been called, I'll take that. An effervescent force. I love you. You really are an angel. I just love you. I think you're one of the most wonderful people to have ever graced the earth. What do you think? What a lovely warming start. For those first-time listeners, they'll be absolutely wondering what the hell's going on.

0:50But there's a deep mutual love here. That's the critical component. Just a couple of guys that enjoy physiology, that deeply appreciate and love one another about as much as a friend could. A total, total joyful relationship. That's how I feel. Sodium bicarbonate is the topic of the day. We had an absolute legendary every marathon runner, Grace, the studio, but a few days ago, Amonal Petros. He is the current European marathon champion. Incredible story, a beautiful man, a kind soul, an African refugee who ended up in Germany, who now holds the German national record for the half marathon, European marathon champion, real legend.

1:44And when I asked him for tips on how to run faster 5Ks, 10Ks, etc. He unequivocally said bicarb is absolutely what we should be ingesting. Not only that, he then went off to his hotel, which was nearby, and returned with some of his sodium bicarbonate, which I genuinely thought was for baking, right? And he said, depending on your body weight, you have a certain amount. It was something like 25 capsules that I would need to consume in the three hours leading up to, say, a 10k. And apparently it just turns you into a Ferrari. Well, it might turn him into a Ferrari, whether it turns you or I is a great matter of great debate.

2:37It's so interesting that because I am slightly surprised that he, at that race distance, was that invested in what has historically been a much shorter distance ergogenic aid. And that ergogenic aid is really interesting because we, you know, whenever we're talking about supplements, you're always asking, is this a nutritional supplement? As in, am I backfilling something I should have got through food and making sure I get enough of it by adding a capsule? Or an ergogenic supplement is something that might enhance athletic performance under certain conditions. And sodium bicarbonate is a well-recognized ergogenic aid, but not historically for half marathon and marathon.

3:19But there are people trying it out. No, it's more, as I understand it, there's just less data to support the longer distances. It's proven to be efficient over shorter distances. Yeah.

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5:32He was hell-bent on bike ab. Others, not so much. I had Tom Evans come in immediately afterwards. He said, in no uncertain terms, if you put that in your body, you won't finish the race. You will be on the bog. He said, definitely don't do it. Stephen Scullion, similar thing. He just said that is a super high risk strategy. I think they both put it in the kind of high 90 % chance of DNFing. You know, they just said you will end up on the bog. Well, most people who've dallied with sodium bicarbonate, whether they've bought a professional supplement or they've literally gone to the cupboard and got some baking soda, most people would report and again i need to double check the literature but most people i've ever met would report some degree of what's called gastrointestinal distress which for someone might be vomiting nausea others might be diarrhea it could be sort of it's chaos in in one way or another normally and if you've ever tried to consume sodium bicarbonate in water which is which is a medium of which you can take it it is effectively like drinking seawater it's just it's heinous you know it's it's absolutely it's heinous and and you would the volume of sodium one of the clues in the name is sodium bicarbonate there's quite a lot of sodium in the volume you need to take you are literally glugging down the old med and then and then trying to deliver elite level performance on a on a disrupted gastrointestinal system so um the days of people sort of mixing this up at home and having a crack at it have probably diminished Capsules is a methodology.

7:20There actually are some even more clever ways of potentially getting it into your system. But I think the real crux is, why would someone consider taking it? Because historically, it hasn't been that associated with aerobic performance. Because much of what it's doing is potentially focused down at where we'd talk about the anaerobic level of performance or where there is less oxygen available. that's where it has its sort of sweet spot mechanistically as in what we think about in terms of how it works so i'm i'm just so interested in an elite level half marathon marathon runner maybe delivering such a speed of turn at the end of the race that he goes into such anaerobic metabolism that this product becomes useful and of course spencer we never know do we pal whether it's a placebo effect you know so in the same way as he might have a pair of socks he always wears or he might have a rubby ducky that he sort of takes away with him.

8:17He did strike me as a kind of rubber ducky kind of person. He's done some stuff. So people have things that they have built an association with performance with, and we can't always separate that from the true physiological impact. But it puts it back on the radar, and it's not a supplement that's been on my radar, truth be told, for ages, not since talking off camera. I did a bit of research on it back in the late 90s before I did my dissertation. And I was amazed how effective it was potentially going to be for certain sports. But because those sports are quite narrow, you don't hear about it in the same way as we hear about the creatines or the electrolytes or some of the other sports performance supplements that are much more in the public's mind.

9:03Who do you think was the first person to go over to the baking cupboard and just nail a bunch of sodium bicarbonate before a run and went, oh God, this makes me feel much better. Is it exactly the same thing? So when we're talking about sodium bicarbonate, we are talking about what you would put in a cake. Baking sodium, yeah. So I think it's the carbon in it that basically creates the gas that would cause your product to rise in the oven. is a key mechanism that's within the sodium bicarbonate. But principally, baking soda is the same product pretty much exactly as you'd buy in a capsule. Why you would buy it not as baking soda is because it's got to find some intelligent way of bypassing my gut, because that's where the big bottleneck for most people lie.

9:55So people are trying to create different types of capsulation. We might call it an enteric capsulation, which is trying to, again, and break down deeper into my digestive system, or there'll be a gelatin, or there's a gel-based formula where you sort of mix it into a gel and eat it. So does it need to reach your colon to work, or where is it trying to get to? No, it's just trying to get through the stomach without causing disturbance to that sort of particularly alkaline-affected environment, because your stomach's so acidic. Because I need, my dosage for this one race, he was saying, should be 25 grams.

10:30Yeah, it's like 0.2 to 0.3 grams per kilogram, I think, something like that. It's a huge amount of salt. It's a shed. You would literally do like 25 capsules. And, you know, if you buy these gels, you're eating the stuff, and you get like four servings for a decent, you know, wodge of cash. It is a big commitment to do it. Like the volume you need, if you scooped up 25, 30 grams of baking soda, you know, it's ridiculous. Hence why if you drink it, you're literally drinking like the med. It is so salty, but it's also so alkaline that it disrupts your acidic environment of your stomach. It's maybe your stomach acid.

11:12And ultimately, the truth of sodium bicarbonate lies in its ability to buffer acidity. So it goes into your stomach where it immediately meets the exact worst environment for it because it's neutralized the very thing that's digesting your food. So if you can get it through your gut, then there's a real argument that as it enters your bloodstream and your tissues, it can have a really important effect on exercise, theoretically at much shorter but much higher intensity duration. So the real crowd who've always leant into sodium bicarb are those people where their sport would last probably between one and 10 minutes at super high intensity.

11:54And there's not, actually, when we look at running, there's not that many running races that sit in that sweet spot. So it's normally been more the preserve of track cycling and endurance and swimming, where you've got lots of events between that four, six, eight, you know, sort of nine minutes of all out hell, where this might have a really important impact. but it's not quite the same as running where you've got your really short sprint events where we've spoken historically you might get a benefit from a creatine or your super long distance events where you're more using your aerobic threshold and therefore fat metabolism so it's a weird space that it really it's got its proven benefits between and there'll be better sports nutritionists than i but you know for my recollection it's between the one and ten minutes is where it has its real potential impact on performance.

12:45And meaningfully so. It's properly classified as a performance-enhancing ergogenic aid. So does it delay lactic acid buildup? That is the best question. And the fascinating thing here is that lactic acid, because you've done loads of lactate testing with Stephen and building up, and lactate is an indicator of fatigue. But what's interesting about lactic acid is it doesn't cause fatigue. and that is a surprise to a lot of people in in the world of athletic performance because people go oh the lactate you know and uh and you know i've got you know i'm being hammered by the lactate lactate is actually a fuel and and lactate correlates with fatigue but it isn't the actual liquid or solution that causes fatigue so it's correlatory not causative and i know and that might come as a surprise to lots of people what's interesting about lactic build-up or lactic acid build-up it correlates with with those energy pathways so me going from you know not using any oxygen at all to using a bit of oxygen to using just oxygen and when i am using anaerobic metabolism so creating energy without oxygen i will see lactate levels rise and at a certain point they rise really sharply that correlates with fatigue but it's not the lactic acid itself that's causing me to fail from a muscular point of view, fail from a performance point of view.

14:09What it is, is something associated with lactic acid, which is hydrogen ions. And as much as that sounds uber technical and unwanted, if someone's listening in their car on a Thursday morning, it's quite important because hydrogen ions basically... Why did you choose Thursday morning as an example there? Because we release on a Thursday morning, Spencer. well i mean technically is it out on late wednesday evening we could we could we could you know potentially have a a nightclub scene crowd as well i think it comes out at kind of two in the morning on on wednesday so if you're listening to this in a nightclub on a late wednesday evening i don't want to bombard you with hydrogen ions but interestingly when you exercise at high intensity, you are yourself, what a segue, bombarded with hydrogen ions.

15:00And these are basically the byproduct of excessive muscular contraction. Now, the genius of sodium bicarbonate is it does something called it buffers hydrogen ions. So if my muscle is starting to fatigue and fail because of the buildup of these hydrogen ions, which by their nature create an acidic environment. So we're sort of drawn to the pH scale here a little bit. But if the pH in my muscles is dropping, and these hydrogen ions are building, then what would be lovely is if I could buffer those as in provide the antidote. And sodium bicarbonate, and it's the bicarbonate, not the sodium, pulls those hydrogen ions out of the cells, and then allows the muscle to have a reduced state of fatigue.

15:44And that would be amazingly useful in activities that are predominantly anaerobic, generate a huge amount of lactic acid, but critically huge amount of hydrogen ions. And that will be explosive high intensity work, generally lasting between one and 10 minutes. And in those situations, and again, some people would have much better personal experience, but the literature generally suggested you might get up to a 3 % improvement in performance from the dosages of sodium bicarbonate that you mentioned at the beginning, which is, again, somewhere like 0.2 to 0.3 grams per kilogram of body weight, taken at some point pre-race.

16:21And again, that also requires a bit of nuance and getting that right to get through the gut. That's quite interesting because 3%, you might notice that, I would have thought. A 3 % uplift in a 10-minute event? I mean, you know, any edge is worth exploring. well it's for you but it's not it is is for example would would all middle distance professional runners be on bike up so like when josh kerr recently broke the world record for the mile is he bike harbing that's such a great question i don't know and i need to lots of great sports nutritionists be that james collins or dan richardson there's lots of great people in space I could probably poll for that.

17:03I would say if they're not, it's because in trialing it, they either had too much tummy disturbance or they saw a negligible increase in performance. And a good coach slash sports nutritionist would have tried it for sure because it is, you know, an accepted usable product that could put 3%. Of course, 3 % for Josh Kerr is difference between gold and sixth place and a world record or European record. So it would be extraordinary if they hadn't tried it. I think if they're not on it, it is because having tried it, the negative impact outweighed the positive impact. But we need to get Josh Kerr on to ask him.

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20:34I believe that Josh should come back on. He has already been on the show, but what an extraordinary... Have you watched him break the world record for the mile list? So cool. Phenomenal. just looks like a gazelle I was raised on the Steve Cram Steve Yvette middle distance when I was growing up my dad loved it we would watch the diamond leagues and the big events and what's so beautiful about those events is that kick at the end and people of course can't fathom how fast they're running it's remarkable insane so if you take a take a 330 odd sort of 1500. That is a sweet spot for sure. So you've hit the nail on the head that a 1500 would be probably the cleanest athletic running event to benefit from this.

21:26Probably a 3K steeplechase would fall into that bracket as well. But I'd be amazed. You do need to message Josh and see if he's on it. But I would be amazed if he hasn't tried it and or either stuck with it or decided that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. When we spoke about creatine, you know, we spoke, is the value of creatine to you in your pursuit of the 245? And the answer is, is probably not in the execution of the race, but yes, in the execution of the training, the strength training, the shorter sprint repeats that get you there. Sodium by carb would be a very similar debate for those at the sort of longer end of the endurance spectrum.

22:03There's some growing interest in it as an ergogenic aid for those endurance sports. That's absolutely happening. But the real question is, if I used it for increased training quality at those shorter distances, would that translate to a better impact on my longer event? And I think there again, you just got to work out, Spencer, whether you want to take 25 capsules, or mix up a gel meal, eat it three hours before, for up to 3%, but probably a 1 % benefit. And like I said, unless you're at that elite level where that 1 % is so determinate of a commercial reward or it's your profession, your amateur athlete would probably be better off doing a slightly better training session to get that 1 % to 3 % or slightly better hydration or going to bed 20 minutes earlier or getting their pre-match, pre-game carbohydrate volume right.

22:56In the ecosystem of things that affect performance, outside of that elite group who are looking for marginal gains, it's probably not a big building block, truth be told. feels like just a huge risk. For me, I mean, I can fully understand why, you know, Eliud Kipchoge, were he to be racing, you know, the mile might do it or Josh, you know, whatever. But for somebody, you know, for an enthusiastic amateur like me, I just, I kind of only see a downside. side. I can't imagine, well, firstly, 3 % to my performance isn't a massive difference, right? It's not the difference between, you know, PBing or not.

23:41It's not the difference between winning or losing. It's sort of nothing. You know, you'd be better off fueling properly, sleeping well, training well, rather than, you know, stuffing 25 grams of sodium bicarb in your system, you know, and then praying that it doesn't come down your leg halfway through the 5k. And I think there is, and therein lies the absolute truth. You know, there is that general sense of just, but you know, some people would try this, they'd sort of panic, get close to a race event, smash it in for the first, you know, like anything, you would never try anything new on race day.

24:26You know, you wouldn't wear a new pair of shoes. You wouldn't try a new gel strategy. Like it, like you would never eat an enormous panini, uh, two hours before a 10k race, uh, that you've ordered from somewhere that you've never ordered food from before, uh, in the hope that you would top up carbohydrate levels that you don't need for that distance. I wasn't even hungry when I ate that sandwich. For whatever reason, race day does strange things to the mind. This was Wednesday. And this was your 10k. That 10k race that I've embarrassingly spoken about was just a nightmare. Firstly, didn't buy carb, right?

25:13So didn't listen to the European... Yeah, exactly. I should have bike-ubbed. Didn't bike-ub. I took down a Panini of kind of stratospheric size. This thing looked like, you know, the Enterprise. And I had it, Stephen said, do not consume anything after 5pm. Race is at 7. It was about 4.59pm when this thing arrived. And then I kind of sat on my ass for, you know, two hours after that, started warming up. Even when I was warming up, I was like, I can feel this thing. You know, it's kind of here somewhere. It's like, you know, top of the lungs. Yeah, set off at a blistering pace. And I kind of knew between kilometers three and six, I was like, this thing's coming up.

26:08You know, and then it reared its disgusting, ugly head at 5.8k. And, you know, such is life. It's not the end of the world. I'd become obsessed with the data, with the splits. So I knew my race was kind of, the race that I wanted was over. No one needs a big stodgy panini before a race. If anyone's considering a large sandwich ahead of a fast effort, I can tell you firsthand that it actually is of no benefit at all. If you want like a little bowl of rice with a drizzle of honey on it, or even a ripe peach, or perhaps, you know, some pineapple or something with a little sugar, knock yourself out.

26:59Big, fat, disgusting panini, non-bueno. I think there's two key points here. One is, it was great, I think it's great that you stopped and didn't try and do further damage. There's that great ability to say, today's not happening. I'll do a cool down. And as much as you berate yourself for that, I think that's an excellent decision. Because the longer vision is clearly the target. You know, you're training for a thing. And if that session is not going to work, then punishing yourself to further nausea, further disturbances is a good decision. So you must be kinder to yourself, Spencer, because that was a good decision.

27:34I don't know. I'm kind of embarrassed because, you know, I could have pulled up, vomited, just toned it down a bit, ran a slightly slower K, and probably finished really strong. And it's a good lesson to learn from, actually. And of course, at the center of this lesson is sodium bicarbonate. Well, I don't know if it's the center of that lesson, but it is the center of, you know, this episode. Again, actually, again, and remembering you don't need a huge volume more carbohydrate to run an event, you know, lasting 35. So, you know, in effect, your lessons there were twofold. One, don't be over-analytical on your race pace, you know, relax into it.

28:13Secondly, you don't need to carb load for an event you're already glycogen sufficient for. I had a gel just before as well and a leukosate. It's all kind of crazy, stupid shit. I set off with a full gut. What am I thinking? Do you know what I mean? Great lessons learned. And that's, you know, you learn these in training, so you don't do them in the big moments. And no one gets every session right. So I think that to learn three lessons from an event makes it a valuable exposure. and I think most people again would correlate we don't change things on race day and the one thing you definitely wouldn't want to be doing is slugging down 25 capsules of baking powder or baking soda just before a big event and then facing a very similar experience and and let's also be clear some people won't get gastrointestinal distress some people take those capsules and if three percent might be the average then you might find yourself with some people getting 5, 6, 7, 8%.

29:08Some people might, plus the placebo of being on this thing, run 10, 12, 15 % better. So what you can't ever do is limit someone to the statistical value of a product, because we're much more, you know, complicated machines than that. So if you, if someone's stagnated, it's a bit like, you know, when that bloke cycles past you with an aerodynamic helmet on, have you done everything else? The sperm hats. So I can't bear those things. I honestly, so this takes me to Arizona, right? After this recording, I'm meeting Chris Taylor, who will know exactly what I'm talking about because we had a really good laugh over this.

29:49So for the Ironman in Arizona, which was the second of Project 7, people were walking around the hotel in full Ironman kit, helmets included, right? The day before the race. So like we walked into the hotel and there were lads walking around like in the hotel with these aerodynamic sperm hats on indoors, right? Like I'm sure they're going for a cycle or they've just come back from a cycle. You're no longer on the bike. Like why are you wearing your helmet in the hotel lift? Remove the helmet. The helmet's worth as much as the bike. I think the challenge there again is people pursuing marginal gains before they've done the foundations.

30:38And if you have reached the point where you're training, your glycogen strategy, your hydration strategy, your rest recovery, your percussion is so good that it's now the width of your helmet that is the defining feature. Bang the thing on. I think if you're a good enough athlete where that makes a difference, you're doing something right. I agree. So I would look at the person wearing that and go, I assume everything else is taken care of. You must be real elite to be wearing that thing. You must be bulletproof in every other part of your life. I say, someone's popping in the 25 sodium bicarbs.

31:11I'm like, whoa, you must be an elite level sleeper, stress manager, carbohydrate, electrolyte, recovery. You have no worries in your life. Let's go through some distances. Let's go through some distances. You can answer yes, no, maybe. Would sodium bicarbonate help me over the following distances? 100 meter sprint No What? No, you're predominantly using ATP or phosphocreatine So in 10 seconds you've got enough stored energy That you wouldn't go into anaerobic metabolism predominantly So your sprinters for 10 seconds would be unlikely to get a meaningful benefit. You're not buffering hydrogen ions in 9.7 seconds, which is the average time that I'd be running 100 in.

32:07So if you're me and you're slogging it through in 16 seconds, there might be a smidge of a benefit. But no, broadly, that doesn't require anaerobic glycolysis. It's pure stored energy. so it's ATP creatine phosphate for those puritanical physiologists out there you can run that basically on your stored energy and hydrogen ions get produced when we start to manufacture energy after that initial store is gone so yeah 10 seconds you'd just be getting all the craps none of the yaps that doesn't quite work but it nearly worked 800 meters I think solid as a rock be really logical 10 times 400 meters interval session oh that's a good question i think at 400 meters it might start to play in everyone looks at 400 meter runners and they're like that's the hardest 400 800 i think in the world of athletics and everyone's going to say their events the hardest i think historically they are the hardest because they are predominantly the energy system that produces the most lactic acid so you're you're going at sprint speed but for long enough that you run out of that original substrate.

33:16I know there's going to be yes, no answers. So I would say 400, it would have a benefit maybe in one, but 400 repeats, almost certainly there'd be a potential benefit there. I think 800 meters is the hardest event. I remember when I was at university, we all ran 50 meters in a relay to try and beat SEBCO's 800 meters time. And we didn't beat it. you know, he had whatever it was, 16 individuals running 50 meters each with some, you know, spurious baton changes. I'm not sure I'll ever forgive Hamish Pearson for his baton change. But principally, the answer there is, you know, we... Should we get Hamish Pearson on to tell his side of the story?

33:59I think we should get him on. The hammer. Okay. The hammer? The hammer. Yeah. Vital. But the reality is 16 people sprinting full out couldn't match what Seb Coe did back before the recent iterations of that time. So it's a pure sprint for what is effectively nearly two minutes. And that is pure hydrogen ion madness. And that changes the acidity of the muscles, changes the acidity of the system. Lots of people get nauseous and would vomit after that. Again, that disruption of the body's pH is catastrophic. So 800 meters for sure. I would like you to answer this as efficiently as you possibly can in, say, 20 seconds.

34:45Why are elite athletes using sodium bicarbonate? And I'm aware of how violently intelligent you are. Try explaining it in a way that, say, a five-year-old might understand. I would say to a five-year-old, because it works. If you are doing high intensity exercise, the waste product of that is literally mopped up by sodium bicarbonate, which means those individuals experience less fatigue and will perform better, but only certain individuals for certain durations. But for that group, it genuinely works. And it might make you poo-poo. If you were running a marathon and you were bang on your splits and everything was going perfectly, but you had to go.

35:32Yep. Would you go on yourself and continue to run? Me as an individual, me as a theoretical elite athlete. I'm just, I'm wondering, you know, If I'd win the suit of my 428 marathon, I probably would spare a couple of mins to pop to the old bog. Yeah. Rather than arriving to friends and family caked in my own turd.

36:03Caked in your own turd is a horrible vision. Were I leading the race and my entire professional existence depends on my sponsor renewing, and that sponsor is, of course, someone involved in quality gut health, I would make an informed decision at the time. But I think you can justify it. I think in the pursuit of elite performance, we can accept bodily functions to be not in perfect order. I think that's fine. It's to be admired, I think. There's something to be admired if someone is prepared to put their performance above what they know will be a social cost of la poop. Good, glad we cleared that up.

36:47Great debate. Bash! Right, you heard it here first, lads. Thanks very much for listening to this week's episode of The Extra Mile with me, Spencer Matthews. And me, Ollie Patrick. And we love you very much. We value your listenership. And we care about producing these episodes. So if you love us, tell people about us. Go, like, call your parents. You know, do whatever. Call your grandparents, whatever. Just send a link, you know, send it around the office. Say, listen, these lads love a bit of physiology. might learn a thing or two from Oli, of course. Catch you next week. Lots of love.

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38:56Plus, get two 2.5-quart or three-quart mums for just$8. A fresh look and savings? Even better. Labor Day deals are on now at Lowe's. In-store and online. Valid through 9-9. While supplies last. Mum sizes vary by location and exclude Alaska and Hawaii. See store at Lowe's.com for more details. Thank you.