Episode 198: Potassium in Sports Drinks & Planning Recovery for Time-Crunched Cyclists

IN THIS EPISODE

• Question 1: Should I add potassium to my sports drink?
• Natriuresis from overconsumption of potassium
• Question 2: How can I keep my job and get enough recovery while training as a Time-Crunched Cyclist?
• How to recover well when you have limited time for recovery
• 4 Steps to scheduling sleep, rest between workouts, training intensity, and training volume.

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HOST
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

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Chapters

• 0:07 Training Tips for Time-Crunched Cyclists
• 14:51 Optimizing Recovery for Athletes
• 24:04 Actionable Training Advice for Cyclists

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

From the team at CTS. This is the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now on to our show. Now on to our show. Welcome back, time Crunched fans. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford. Today we'll be answering more of your questions in that Time Crunched Cyclist format short, sweet and to the point. So let's get started. First question today refers to potassium in sport drinks. Here is the original question In regards to Adam's podcast on homemade sport drinks. I add citrus juice to my homemade mix in order to add potassium into the mix to keep sodium potassium somewhat balanced. Adam didn't mention potassium in his podcast. Is it good, bad or no importance to have potassium in the mix? And this is coming from Steve? Steve, yeah, good question, and one, actually, that gets asked often when I'm like with athletes and we're talking about sports drinks. So to have you write in after I do a podcast about sport drink, it's timely. So here's the short answer no, we don't need potassium in sport drinks for performance, so long as we're eating potassium in our healthy diets in adequate amounts. So healthy diets, thinks stuff like dark green, leafy vegetables, mushrooms, whole grains, whole grains, different types of fruit, including, of course, that edible, incredible banana. The long answer is we don't need potassium in sport drinks, or at least not much of it, because potassium is highly regulated by the body. This means that it's precious and we don't just like let it go a bunch in sweat during exercise, like sodium, for example. I mean sodium is important too, but we links to a bunch of research articles from people such as Astro Jukenrup, who is another preeminent researcher and practitioner when it comes to all things nutrition, electrolyte and sport drinks. In fact, I've also included some stuff from MySportScience, which is Astro Jukenrup and a couple of his partners talking all about electrolytes. So if this is a topic of interest, head over to trainrightcom backslash podcast and go to the landing page here for this particular podcast and you'll see the links to further research on potassium. Further research on potassium.

Speaker 1: 3:29

Okay, so for most training sessions, um, for time crunched athletes, potassium is is definitely not something we need to worry about. Uh, in our training sessions for longer stuff like ultra cycling and running, I still wouldn't be concerned about it, as the intensity is lower. We're eating more whole foods, say, during the event itself. But, like I said, it's also highly regulated electrolyte in our body that we don't just let go of Any drink mix that does have a lot of it or says that all this potassium is going to help prevent cramps. This is not accurate and they are wrong. In fact, straight into the point, if you overdo potassium, things can go wrong, like natural uresis. I think I'm saying that right, but without getting into the full details on this podcast here, because that can get a little complicated and then we can go for a long time on it, I'll link to an article on natural uresis as well and that can cause a lot of problems in your body. So, steve and other listeners here, don't overthink it. Sodium carbohydrate and total fluid intake are the main drivers of what help you stay hydrated and well-fueled during exercise, and that's why in a previous podcast about homemade sport drink. I didn't talk about other electrolytes such as potassium in those beverages. Again, good question, steve. It's really important to keep on asking good questions like that so we as a collective endurance community of athletes here can stay grounded in good science and not overcomplicate things like a solid sport drink, all right.

Speaker 1: 5:15

Second question of the day refers to proper rest after high intensity. This one's coming from Deanna. Here's the question Hi, I'm moving to mountain bike marathons from triathlon training and I'm finding the emphasis of going from completing an Ironman to winning bike race is a challenge. I'm going from lots of Zone 2 to varying emphasis training sessions with different intervals. While I'm enjoying the glow up in my watts, I also am struggling with work training balance. I work 12 hour varied shifts. I've noticed my ability to hit numbers in training is really affected by my work schedule. I'm loving that I'm now winning races, but the recovery after is really, really tough. How do I make sure I'm recovering well enough while also staying employed and I'm ready to hit my next hard interval session? Again, that's coming from diana.

Speaker 1: 6:17

Yeah, I will admit, diana, this is one of the harder questions to answer because when I'm working with an athlete like yourself, this is one of the most challenging situations to figure out. The reason being is that anaerobic workouts are hard, both mentally and physically to recover from, versus just aerobic sessions alone alone. Okay, now, true, recovery is being still not expending energy and letting your all of your systems recover brain, body, okay With you, and many time crunched athletes. This is a huge challenge. In fact, this is, this is our challenge. I often I oftentimes say it's not the training, that's the problem, it's everything else, and that's not a cop-out from writing a good training program or picking the right intervals. Okay, a good training program is actually hard to build when you have a lot of those life challenges in there, such as this how do I recover with limited time? So it's going to be a combination of things to try, and I'll give those examples here in just a second.

Speaker 1: 7:27

But my first piece of advice is this it won't last forever. What I mean by this is that because you're moving from triathlon, like longer aerobic stuff, and you're coming into marathon mountain bike stuff, which is I mean it's shorter than Ironman marathon mountain bike stuff, which is I mean it's, it's shorter than Ironman, uh, but it's in it, but it still has quite a bit of anaerobic, um, intensity to it in order to win the bike race, okay. And so when you're moving from triathlon into the more stochastic nature of, you know, bike racing, you need more intensity, okay. And when you have, when you're doing something for the first time that you haven't done before, especially when it's anaerobic, it's going to cost you more, it's going to cost more fatigue. And when you're going through that, especially the first time or the first time in a while, there's a time and place to get through it, okay. And when you have this intensive, heavy training with big work hours, this shouldn't and won't last forever. There's a time and place to hunker down and get after it, put in the work and then move on. But I want to encourage you, as an endurance athlete, which we'd normally like, really embrace the suffering, and I can get through it. That's what makes us successful as athletes, but that's that can really crater us as well. Okay. So my first advice is yep, like you're, you're. It sounds like you're doing the right thing because of where you've been as an athlete an aerobic athlete and where you're trying to go as more of an intensive endurance athlete, so you're on the right track, okay.

Speaker 1: 9:08

So now let's. Let's kind of break this down into three or four kind of good pieces of advice that I that I would give you if I was working with you as an athlete. First thing, start with planning your recovery versus planning your, your, your training. Okay, and what I mean by that is maximize sleep for your best recovery. At least seven hours of sleep, if you can, eight hours if you, if you can, even more, and more sleep is really where I would start. Okay, that's the best form of recovery for any athlete of any type, in any kind of situation. Full stop Now.

Speaker 1: 9:48

Put in your days of rest. Now, when it comes to, like, building your actual training, put in the days of rest which means no training at all, and then even some days where you have no training and you also have no work, and this will be a complete reset. So you should have some days where you have nothing to do, sleep in, be lazy, let your total system recover. There should be those days in your life. If there's not, put some in and you will start to have better success. This will also, by planning your rest days and planning your recovery, this will help you to organize your hard days so that you come into them as fresh as possible.

Speaker 1: 10:32

And that's really my second point is prioritize the intensity. So do a hard session after a rest day. In theory, if you take a rest day, at least to the point of no training right, you should be more fresh that next day. I understand that your situation is. You could have a hard 12 hour session with probably a ton of stuff going on I mean, it could be an ER doc or or a firefight or something like that where you can't control the fatigue that's occurring. But at least we took a rest day from training and therefore we don't have as much stress coming into that that day. So what I'm saying is, whatever that rest day is now, plan a hard day after the rest day and you should be more fresh. You should be ready to crush it Um in it in theory.

Speaker 1: 11:22

Now, another time where you can prioritize intensity and plan on a hard day is put one of those hard sessions in on your day off from work. Okay, because you have less total stress going on. You have more time. If you can do it, I would train, and I would train hard on the day that you don't have work to do. Go for it and probably add in a little bit of volume on that day as well, because we have recovery on the back. We have time to recover on the back side of that.

Speaker 1: 11:54

Now this it's kind of like this rhythm or the method that I'm talking about here in training is really like polarized training. Okay, works well in a situation like this where you have anaerobic goal, anaerobic intensity goals and we have fatigue issues going on. Polarized training is a method to help you keep the hard days hard. The easy day is easy and you know, honestly, the time crunch cyclist method is essentially that it's just very limited time and so that recipe kind of shakes out to two or three times of intensity per week, two or three sessions or two or three days, ok, and then the other days are aerobic in nature.

Speaker 1: 12:37

Now my third piece of advice is get your training done before work happens, if you can do it for a lot of my time crunched athletes, this is what I advise is because work takes a lot of energy, work takes a lot of time. So if we can prioritize our training sessions first, when we have more energy and we have more time, you're going to set yourself up for a lot of success. So, if you can and this means, you know, waking up a little earlier, which then means going to bed a little earlier um, do it first thing in the morning. It has nothing to do with burning more calories or being more metabolically efficient or anything like that. It's simply getting work done so that you can recover and move on with your day, and getting work done in a very efficient, high quality way. So, get it done first thing if you can.

Speaker 1: 13:29

Fourth piece of advice maximize your post-workout recovery window, both physically and mentally. Now, don't think that you can really separate those two. You can't, even though I'd say coaches, athletes, podcasters and all the people talking about it, try to separate those two, okay. So, along those lines, let's separate the two and then pull them back together. So, first, physically. What I mean by this is, if you work out in the morning like I just described, you should then eat and drink within the first hour post-workout so that your body starts to replenish the glycogen hydration that you lost during the session and then also put in some protein so it can do its rebuilding and repairing duties.

Speaker 1: 14:23

Okay, you've heard of that recovery window. That depend on who you talk to. Um, really about an hour. Some people say 45 minutes, some people say 30 minutes. The thing is, is your body, because of everything that it went through in the training process and the um, basically the, the glucose that's elevated in your body, it it and it's ready to receive nutrients. It's ready to rehydrate because it just had a stress. It's now going to go into rest and if you fuel up the tank afterwards, you're going to replenish and recover more quickly.

Speaker 1: 14:51

Okay, so that's my advice is hit the recovery window with hydration and food right away after a morning session. Don't hit the morning workout and then just charge into work or life and think that hitting a late breakfast once you're into the office, or maybe an early lunch to save time, that's not adequate for an athlete. This will impair your recovery for sure. Now, along with this is um on the mental side of things, or maybe just like again, cause it pertains to both mind and body is take five. Okay, it's a take five, so to speak. What I mean by that is take five to 10 minutes right away after your workout to lay down, relax, shut your eyes, maybe elevate your legs, breathe and relax. Help your body to reset after a hard workout before doing anything else, before checking in with work, before checking email, before checking Instagram, whatever you do.

Speaker 1: 16:00

And I'm saying like, even before that recovery window of food and and and drink and all this kind of stuff, take five minutes just to relax and I think for a busy time crunched athlete, you'll start to find that there's there's a lot of benefit there for some of my athletes that call this mindfulness training and and it is because we do some things, um, some systematic things to work on awareness, work on body awareness and things like that. But like, if you lay down and relax and do nothing more, you're going to really help clear the mind, clear the body, help it to relax. Because what I said before, remember, recovery is when you do nothing. Okay, no Theragun, no squeezy boots, no, I don't, I don't know. Uh, ice plunges, sauna treatments, whatever all that stuff. Do nothing, okay, that's recovery. And the reason why I'm saying take five right after a hard training session is because it will start the recovery process and clear the mind more than anything, and especially versus just like trying to like soldier through the day, you'll be more aware, you'll be more relaxed and, again, you'll have better recovery outcomes If you take five after a hard training workout.

Speaker 1: 17:24

I was at the CTS coaching summit last month and I was talking to Coop and some other ultra running coaches and we collectively discovered that we're kind of doing the same thing, giving the same advice. It's just like, wow, we can help our athletes slow down a little bit right after a hard session. It's really helping in the recovery. Now, lazy athletes do this really well. Ok, if you have any friends that are lazy, um, lazy like I call it ambitiously lazy, right they're, they're not super type a uh in all aspects of their life and they do a hard session and they slow roll it with those types of athletes, when I'm working with them, I tend to find that I have to really encourage them to hit that recovery window with their food, because things tend to slow roll so well, but they typically recover better because they're not so anxious, they're not so busy. But time-crunched athletes are terrible at this. So if you're a time-crunched athlete, if you're that type a personality which, I would argue, many endurance athletes are okay, take a few notes from the lazy athlete and slow roll it just a little bit more. I think you'll have a lot more success in the way of recovery and starting that recovery process.

Speaker 1: 18:45

Now, finally this is my last point is it's more like a summation for how best to recover when you're super short on on time. It's it's honestly don't go hard every day. If you're going hard every day, thinking that you need all the anaerobic training possible because you were a triathlete, now you're bridging back up to becoming a mountain biker, deanna, um, no, that's not it. The recipe is more like two to three times hard per week, and that's about as as effective as the anaerobic training can be if you're truly going that hard. Okay, so listen to your body throughout, and you know I've talked about having the warmup rule in here. Listen to your body If you're, if you're bringing some fatigue into a training session and you have an anaerobic workout coming up, warm up.

Speaker 1: 19:34

I like to do a couple of openers, which are 20, 30 seconds of like ramp up hard efforts, not max, but that's before the main set of your workout. Maybe you start in on the main set and you do like one interval and if you're listening to your body and you're like, whoa, my, my legs are just heavy, like I'm not hitting that power or I'm hitting like the very low end of the power and the and the perceived effort is like two numbers up from where it should. It's probably going to be a bad day. So I would shut things down and I would give yourself more recovery by not training the next day and then trying that hard session the day after that. So give yourself a couple of days and think outside the box a little bit more.

Speaker 1: 20:14

So when I talked about, when I started to answer your question about you know, how do I, how do I recover and still keep employed and still keep on with my goals? Think about your recovery first, plan your recovery next. Think about your recovery first, plan your recovery next. Then plan in your intensity, then plan in your endurance. Okay, so think about it in that way, rather than looking at the training program and be like how do I fit all this in? Because if you start with sleep and then rest and then intensity, it goes a lot better rather than starting with the intensity. Intensity it goes a lot better rather than starting with the intensity.

Speaker 1: 20:53

Now, if you can't crack the code yourself on this, because this is very tricky and I work with athletes daily on this Okay, if you can't crack the code yourself, or after listening to this podcast, maybe do a coaching consultation with one of our CTS coaches. This, this would logically be the next step if you don't have a coach, and it could be. And this would logically be the next step if you don't have a coach, and it could be. And the reason why it's the next step is because it's going to provide more context around your situation and around your, like, unique life. Um, that a coach could uh, then you know, listen to and give you more granular answers and specific answers and suggestions to modify the training and recovery process for you.

Speaker 1: 21:32

And yeah, we do consultations I don't know if our listeners don't know that we do which means you don't have to be a coached athlete with us in order to benefit from all the knowledge that we have. So there are great opportunities for self-coached athletes to just pick the coach's brain a little bit and if you're stumped or if you hit a plateau, if you've got a training challenge like this, you can hire a coach for essentially an hour and have your questions ready to go, so that it's efficient on the time. But ask your questions, jot them down, and I think what I've found in working with athletes on consultations and what I hear from my colleagues is uh, it can really help you, um, break through some of those barriers and in plateaus. So, uh, if it turns into regular monthly coaching after that, that's great, um, but that's not the intent. So just know that we, we do, uh, do coaching consultations with athletes such as yourself, deanna, in sticky situations like that. So, in summary, on this podcast here really good questions, by the way, you all are like knocking it out of the park.

Speaker 1: 22:44

I can't keep up with all the questions rolling in, so I'll keep just chipping away at them. But in summary, potassium, yeah, it's not needed in sports drinks because it's so heavily regulated in our body as an electrolyte we don't lose much of it through sweat and as long as you're eating a healthy diet with potassium in it and taking a potassium supplement, which some athletes are, it's not an issue in the sport drink. You could cause some problems if you overdo it. So read that research in article links that I have in there. And then second point is yeah, long work days and hard anaerobic training blocks are sometimes the trickiest scenarios to figure out. So hopefully I provided some solutions for everybody in that situation. That's listening, and if you still can't figure out, we do consultations, and I would highly suggest picking up the phone and talking to a CTS coach if you need more information on that.

Speaker 1: 23:39

So in closing, I want to thank you all once again for not only listening to the podcast but sharing your questions, challenges and curiosities by writing into us here at CTS. If you're new to the show, how you do this is you head over to trainrightcom backslash podcast and click on the button that says ask a training question. Your submissions get sent directly to me and we'll do our best to answer it on upcoming episodes. That's it. That's our show for today.

Speaker 1: 24:04

So if you like what you heard, please share it with a training partner or friend, as that's the best way to grow the show and make sure you keep getting all the actionable training advice to help you reach your goals. Be sure to come back next week for more and until then, keep getting out there and keep training right. Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to train rightcom backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in-depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast That'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.