If you’re watching the Olympics, you know that many of these competitions are won or lost by a fraction of a second — a touch at the wall, a lean over the finish line, a tiny bit more power at the end. And there are a few things elite athletes can do to give them that little extra push — or, at least, there are a few legal things they can do.
Jason Siegler is here to tell us about one of them: baking soda. Siegler is director and associate professor at ASU’s College of Health Solutions. The Show spoke with him more about it.
Full conversation
JASON SIEGLER: Athletes are doing things that we as a public generally cannot do. And so they’re really performing at an incredibly high level. And I think when you look at the margin of difference between the first place athlete and the athlete that doesn’t make the podium, I think the margins are so small. And so they’re always looking for an advantage or an edge.
And there are not very many legal edges that an athlete can look into, especially on the nutrition side. And so there’s probably three, maybe four or five legal supplements. and baking soda happens to be one of them. Sodium bicarbonate is what it would be referred to oftentimes in, not just in the literature but also with the athletes.
Basically what it is, is when you’re exercising at a really high rate, you’ve got lots of energy demand going to the muscle. And what you end up doing is you’re using these what are called non-oxygen pathways. And so they’re very quick at replenishing your energy stores. But they also run out relatively quickly. And you can tell when they’re running out because you begin to feel that burn in your muscle.
LAUREN GILGER: I’ve definitely felt that. No fun.
SIEGLER: Everybody has who’s exercised or climbed a mountain or whatever. And so, baking soda — or sodium bicarbonate — basically is is a supplement to the buffer that’s already in your system. So your kidneys produce something called bicarbonate. And that bicarbonate is your first line of defense against that acidic burn that you’re feeling.
But the interesting thing about sodium bicarbonate is that when you supplement with it, you can actually top up your own body’s stores of bicarbonate for a temporary or for a short period of time.
GILGER: For a short period of time. So basically, you’re delaying that kind of burning sensation?
SIEGLER: Correct. That’s it.
GILGER: Giving you an extra tiny edge. Which makes a difference, right?
SIEGLER: Absolutely. So in the context of yourself — or myself, not to judge — but we probably wouldn’t notice the difference. But if you look at some of, in particular certain sports, certain athletic events, you’re talking about fractions of seconds, right? I think the (men’s 100-meter sprint) just recently in Paris was one by five-1,000ths of a second.
GILGER: Really a hair.
SIEGLER: So those are the kind of margins that you’re talking about gaining an advantage for.
GILGER: How do you eat it? Drink it?
SIEGLER: So this has been the challenge of sodium bicarbonate supplementation over the years. And I guess I’d like to stress to the audience it’s really important to note that this is not a supplement that you would go — even though you can buy it off the shelf, you should not. And I’m certainly not advocating you do this. Because what happens is if you ingest it in large quantities — like those that are recommended for performance enhancing doses — you basically create a big change in the gas concentration in your stomach.
So your stomach is very acidic, causes a big carbon dioxide shift, and then you end up with some pretty severe side effects: bloating, gastric issues that we won’t get into.
GILGER: So you’ve got to be careful with this.
SIEGLER: Absolutely right. And so this has been one of the challenges with sodium bicarbonate over the years is how do we actually alleviate or how do we minimize those symptoms? And so this is what we started to look at or what we’ve been starting to look at. And not just in the research sphere or in the lab. It’s it’s really been companies that have started to try to look at ways of bypassing this problem.
And so there’s, there’s a couple, companies out there. Momentus does one. They have a lotion. The particular company that we’ve been looking at recently has developed this way of kind of encapsulating the bicarbonate, and basically what that does is just bypasses the stomach, bypasses the gut and gets it right into the intestines where it gets absorbed. So you don’t have that big carbon dioxide shift, right? So you end up having very minimal symptoms, but actually getting the benefit of having that.
GILGER: So what types of athletes use this kind of thing? Like I’m thinking of runners, maybe sprinters. Is this for short distances? Long distances? Swimmers?
SIEGLER: So so so traditionally it’s been used for events that maybe last — you know I would say probably the shortest might be the 800-meter run. Rowers are a big user group, if you will. That’s, that’s generally about 2000 meters that they’re rowing, and that’s 6 minutes, 7 minutes, 5 minutes depending on who they are.
So anyway, so you kind of have that bookmark of, of maybe a minute and a half, 2 minutes to upwards of 6 or 7 minutes. And so that’s that’s traditionally been the way it’s been used. We now are starting to look at using it in different contexts.
So a marathon is a good example. You think of a marathon, you think endurance, which it is.
GILGER: Going for a couple hours, yeah.
SIEGLER: That’s right. But you’re just running at the same pace in most people’s mind. Think of that same concept, but during a race you’ll have periods where they’ll be breakaways, or maybe there’s a hill or something like that that requires that we have to switch to that other energy source. And so when we do that switch, if we’re strategic about it and we know we’ve got extra buffer, then potentially you can build that into your race strategy.
So you could say, “Well, there’s a breakaway happening now. I can either handle that breakaway because I know I’ve got this extra buffer in my system, or I’m going to create that or that breakaway.” Working with athletes over the past 15-20 years, that concept is not new to them. Endurance cyclists I know have been using it. And those are athletes that are on the bike for five, six hours at a time. It’s one of those instances where you’ve got the athletic world or the elite athletic world trialing and error.
GILGER: Have you tried it?
SIEGLER: Oh yeah. Yeah.
GILGER: What’s it like?
SIEGLER: Well, this is one of the areas I’ve been looking at for the past, I don’t know, 17 years.
GILGER: Wow. Yeah.
SIEGLER: And when we first started doing it, we mixed up that stuff that you find on the shelf. Threw in a little bit of water and had some flavoring, maybe a cordial in there and knocked it back.
GILGER: Just drinking baking soda? OK.
SIEGLER: So when you do that, I can tell you firsthand your body oftentimes does not like that. And so you end up dealing with those consequences. But I think understanding those consequences and feeling that also makes you understand that, OK, you have to get this right.
GILGER: This is interesting because it’s such a glimpse into this world of elite athletics. What other kinds of things out there are athletes doing at that level that might surprise the rest of us, that are legal?
SIEGLER: I guess there's a whole host of things that athletes do, and I guess this is also a challenge, right? Because you’re talking about what we call in the lab N-of-1. Individual athletes. And so you have … a team of support around them, and everybody has their expertise and what they’re trying to do is figure out exactly what might benefit that individual athlete.
As far as these other ergogenic aids, caffeine is another one that everybody has that’s legal. Creatine is another one. But we’ve seen some of the swimmers use something, it’s a bit of blood flow restriction.
So there’s something called ischemic preconditioning, which is again legal. But it’s basically, you’re applying a blood pressure cuff more or less to a limb or two limbs in the body for a short period of time. And basically what you do is you completely occlude the muscle. And just for 4 to 5 minutes. And then you release that.
So when you have that big increase of blood flow, your body is also recognizing that and saying, “That was a pretty stressful event. I didn’t have any oxygen down in that limb. And so now potentially I need to overcompensate and over-open, if you will, my blood vessels.” And so potentially there’s a bit of a benefit there as well.
So that’s just one of a few.
