The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS
Coach Adam Pulford delivers actionable training advice and answers your questions in short weekly episodes for time-crunched cyclists looking to improve their cycling performance. The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast (formerly The TrainRight Podcast) is brought to you by the team at CTS - the leading endurance coaching company since 2000. Coach Adam pulls from over a decade of coaching experience and the collective knowledge of over 50+ CTS Coaches to help you cut throught the noise of training information and implement proven training strategies that’ll take your performance to the next level.
The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS
Science of Recovery with Christie Aschwanden: Do tart cherry juice, ketones, and ice plunges work? (#268)
OVERVIEW
Christie Aschwanden is an award-winning science journalist and author of Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery. With all the hype and marketing dollars being thrown at recovery modalities like tart cherry juice, ketone supplements, ice plunges, and the timing of post-recovery meals, we brought Christie back to "The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast" to take a look at the evidence behind the claims. Which recovery products work? How do they work and are they worth the expense?
RECOVERY METHODS/PRODUCTS COVERED
- Tart Cherry Juice
- Ice plunges/Cold water Immersion
- Is inflammation bad for athletes?
- Ketones
- Post-workout recovery window
ASK A QUESTION FOR A FUTURE PODCAST
Guest Bio – Christie Aschwanden:
Christie Aschwanden is an award-winning science journalist. She was the lead science writer at FiveThirtyEight for many years and is a former health columnist for the Washington Post. A finalist for the National Magazine Award, her writing has appeared in Outside, Discover, Smithsonian, and Oprah Magazine. She’s also co-host of Emerging Form, a podcast about the creative process. She was a high school state champion in the 1,600-meter run, a national collegiate cycling champion, and an elite cross-country skier with Team Rossignol. She lives and occasionally still races in western Colorado.
Read More About Christie Aschwanden:
https://christieaschwanden.com/
Book Link – Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery
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.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform
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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 onto our show. Welcome back, or welcome to the Time Crunch Cyclist Podcast. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford.
Speaker 1:Recovery it's where all the gains are made. Without it, your training is kind of pointless. Remember that stress plus rest equals adaptation. If you remove the rest out, the equation doesn't work. So if you can recover faster, you will get gains more quickly. So can you recover faster? If so, how and what's the best you know pill, potion or process to do that? I'm here with recovery guru and author of Good to Go with Christy Ashwandan Christy welcome back to the show.
Speaker 1:I should say yeah, thanks so much for having me, adam. It's a pleasure to be here. Yes, well, I mean, episode number three on this podcast was actually with Christy when she first wrote her book back in 2020, I think we interviewed yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is wild. That it like is that long ago. But so if you're really interested in a long form podcast option, go back and listen to that one. This is going to be quick and to the point. But, christy, for those who didn't listen to episode number three, we'll do a quick intro on you. You were an elite athlete yourself, which led to the curiosities of how best to recover and ultimately writing this book. Could you give us a little summary of your background and motivations in pursuing a monumental task of being an author and you know what I'm going to say a best-selling?
Speaker 2:author.
Speaker 1:When it comes to the endurance community.
Speaker 2:Sure. So I started my career as a runner. I actually went to University of Colorado as a runner. I was on the team there and got into a freak car accident my freshman year, partway through the first running season. I didn't even own a car at the time, I was just with some friends. Anyway, I banged up my knee so I had to stop running. I had to redshirt that track season and I started cross-country skiing because I was living in the dorm with some Nordic skiers and fell in love with that sport. So I started doing that.
Speaker 2:But I also joined the cycling team I guess it was the second year, second or third year and really sort of realized oh wait, this is what I want to be doing. So I ended up my last couple of years of college. I quit the cross-country and track team altogether. I stopped running for a few years and was just skiing and cycling exclusively. I actually raced with Tyler Hamilton on the CU cycling team back in the day, yeah, and if anyone's interested, I wrote a piece I think you can find it on my website about him. I actually covered his case as a science journalist and sort of figuring out, did he or didn't he? And I concluded that he had doped and everyone hated me. And then of course, he came back later and confessed Never apologized to me, by the way, but you know he lied to my face and all of that but I guess that's what one does when they're in that situation.
Speaker 2:Anyway, that's a whole other aside, kind of down a rabbit hole there, but anyway but then I went to graduate school for journalism and decided, hey, I kind of miss competing, and so went back and started cross-country skiing at a pretty high level, was skiing for the Rossignol elite team and actually moved to Europe and lived over there for a few years and did some racing over there. So that was probably the sport that I did at the highest level. Um, but yeah, for my twenties and thirties I was pretty, pretty serious athlete, endurance athlete mostly. Yeah, I do all of the things at this point in my life. I run ski bike, um, but I do it for pleasure and fun, not not for competition, although I will admit it feels good to go hard sometimes still, so, not opposed to that ever.
Speaker 1:Yes, no, agreed with that. Sometimes you just got to go hard. And you know what, when you're fit, everything is more fun including when you go hard.
Speaker 2:So yeah, for sure, Just just for those things.
Speaker 1:So I you know this is going to be a two part series where the Time Crunched Cyclist podcast, so it's going to be maybe 20, 25 minutes each, but where I want to start first is with some of the more trendy things right now in the fitness and recovery industry, especially the hyped stuff coming off the men's and women's of Good to Go and then tell everyone that they should read it? Yeah, please do. First question is Christy, are you good to go for the first question?
Speaker 2:I am good to go Okay.
Speaker 1:All right, tart cherry juice. It is all the rage right now.
Speaker 2:Okay, but that is nothing new under the sun. It's been used for recovery modality. Tell us everything you know about tart cherry trees and I, literally two days ago, finished processing the last of our tart cherry. We had a ginormous crop this year, so I have probably consumed more tart cherries, tart cherry juice, in the last you know week and a half than any human being should. So I am packed full of tart cherry juice.
Speaker 2:I can tell you. I would love to say that, like my recovery has been incredible, haven't noticed a damn difference and what.
Speaker 2:I will say is I love tart cherries. They're great. I have no doubt that they're good for you. I mean, they're fruit, they have fiber, they have lots of antioxidants, vitamins, all kinds of good stuff. Is this a magic recovery pill? No, I am all for consuming tart cherries, consuming tart cherry juice and, by the way, part of the reason it's juice is that actually, I can even take a step back.
Speaker 2:The way that this became a thing in the sporting world was that tart cherry producers were looking for more markets for their products, and so they got together with some university researchers. It's like okay, what else can we do with it? They started funding almost every and I cannot, I haven't seen every single study that has come out, you know, since the beginning, but it's almost entirely funded by industry, which doesn't make it incorrect. You had sent me some links to some papers and looking at them, I mean I think literally every single one of them was a study with 10 participants. You know, 10 people taking the tart cherry juice, and you just, I'm sorry, you just can't come up with any reliable answers with studies that small. And part of the reason I think it's really important to understand is that human physiology is really complicated. It's actually really hard. It's not that the truth isn't out there and there aren't ways to study this, but it's actually pretty hard to pin down and because our physiology is so complex, it can be really hard to figure out if something works or to what extent. But the other thing that I'll say is, if something's really, really helpful, like you're going to know it because you know the effect itself will cue you into it, and if you need all these studies to say, oh, this is amazing that you're taking it. You don't notice a difference. It's maybe not so much. So I have all the sympathy in the world for cherry producers. I think it's a great, great crop. I think it's a great fruit. I would never discourage people from consuming tart cherries.
Speaker 2:But it is not the secret, and I think a lot of people are actually a little bit disappointed with the message of my book, because everyone is looking for the secret and the magic and the secret is there is no secret and a lot of people, frankly, don't want to hear that. They don't want to hear that the things that they already know but yet are not mastering are the things that really matter. And I think, honestly, the really best athletes and the best coaches too, are the ones who can recognize this and separate the wheat from the chaff and say, okay, where are you going to get gains that are really meaningful and that are worth the time and effort? And where are you just chasing mirages? And I can tell you that almost all of the newfangled you know any kind of products and services and things like this. They're almost always a mirage, and when you're chasing those or you're looking at what your competition's doing and now they're using this new product usually it's not worth your time. And I say that with confidence, because I looked into so many of them while I was working on this book and was really surprised, frankly. I mean, I really expected that I was going to find more things that had really meaningful effects. You know what's meaningful is going to be different between different people. You know some people are going to be completely willing to spend thousands of dollars and hours of their time on something that's going to give them a 0.5% gain or something like that. Now, in real life, how significant are some of these gains? They usually don't live up to the hype and live up to the studies. I'll say that too, but I think you know you're really better off using your time and your energy pursuing the things that we know really make a big difference. You know, let the other guy waste their time on this stuff with their money, and it really.
Speaker 2:You know, I think a lot of people you know sometimes say, well, what's the harm in supplements if they're not hurting you, which, in fact, supplements can hurt you? And I have a whole chapter in the book about supplements. If you're a competitive athlete who's going to be drug tested, you should absolutely steer clear of supplements, because you're so much more likely to be harmed or test positive from a supplement than you are to get any meaningful benefit to your performance. And you know I say that having written about Olympic athletes who missed Olympic Games because supplements that their sponsor gave them, you know, made them test positive. So I really want to be careful there. But I think it's really about figuring out what is worthy of my attention and my time. And the good news is there are really, you know there's some basic, fundamental things that if you focus on those you can, you can get really important results. Um, so don't, don't sweat the other stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's. That's a great summation and a great overall message. I'll say that I'll mention this, uh, mention this because on the Tour de France Femme Auvik Zwift podcast, we did talk about tart cherry juice and what I said there was it's a marginal gain thing that these girls are drinking. If they're drinking it, and some of my athletes who say have the swine ears given it to them Should I drink it, should I not? I say yeah, it's not going to hurt you, right, and but what they're chasing and this is what I want to kind of focus on, my message was I don't think for the time crunched athlete, for the amateur athlete they need to go out and buy the $3 per shot tart cherry juice for their recovery modalities, because even the decrease of inflammation, or the decreased DOMS or the is my perceived effort lower today Is that important?
Speaker 1:And I think that the role of inflammation that you write about in your book. By the way, and if anyone's wondering what this book looks like, it looks like this and you should read it. But let's talk about the role of inflammation on the body.
Speaker 2:Well, really quickly actually, I want to go back for a second and then we'll get to inflammation and just about studies. I really hope that people will read my book because, if nothing else, go and read the first chapter, which I think is a really I hope I wrote it and you know the purpose of the first chapter, which, by the way, is about beer and running so if there's any beer drinkers out there but it's really about why these small studies are unreliable and why we have to be really careful about putting too much credence into this. And I want to be really clear. I'm not saying that science is bogus or that science is wrong, but what I am saying is that it's really easy to do small studies that are misleading and it's actually really hard to understand things.
Speaker 2:And it takes a lot of studies with a lot of people, a lot of subjects to really get definitive answers. Studies with a lot of people, a lot of subjects to really get definitive answers. And in the sport sort of area, there are very few things that we have very definitive evidence about, and that includes a lot of training stuff. Believe it or not, you know so much of what we do is based on, like what everyone else was doing, or sort of folklore and whatever. And oh, this really great person. You know, what makes a really good athlete is good genes, which none of us get to choose Right, and so no one wants to hear that either.
Speaker 2:Right, right, right, which doesn't mean that everyone can't, you know, do things to reach their own personal potential, and I think that you should do that. And there are so many great reasons to do sport, even if you're never going to be the world champion. But the idea that these things, you know, I will just say this the whole idea of marginal gains, right, first took root when they were sort of like it was a reason that was pointed to to try and cover up doping, right. It's like, oh, we're not doping, we're just getting all of these marginal gains. So and it's interesting.
Speaker 2:So I do have a chapter in the book about placebos. I'm fascinated by this and one of the things is you can do all these different things and they can create these small, you know so-called marginal gains, but they don't add up, like there seems to be some sort of limit. So it appears as though there's something besides. You know fancy magic physiology that's going on here and some of this may be anticipation effect. You know expectation effect, and that's great, that's fine. I have nothing against that and I think anything you can do to improve yourself is great. But I think there's a limit to how much you're going to get out of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, fully agree with that. And to the placebo effect, it's a grand reveal. We're going to talk about that in part two, because I think that plays a huge role in all the recovery widgets, gadgets, boots, and is the target that everybody's like shooting at when they buy the Theragun or drink the juice or whatever it is so, Christy, is inflammation bad?
Speaker 2:I think there's not a hard and fast yes or no answer. There are instances in which it's bad. Chronic inflammation in your body is not good. That's, you know, linked to heart problems, all sorts of bad things, momentary inflammation, inflammation in your muscles and things like that. I mean people need to understand inflammation is part of your body's healing process. Like in many instances, it's actually a good thing, and so you don't want to necessarily be turning it off or blunting it, and I think a really good example of this, a context in which this is the case, is with icing and cooling. You know this is, you know it goes. It's mostly in fashion, I think.
Speaker 2:For a while these cryotherapy chinks were really popular. It seems like maybe they're not as popular as they were a few years ago, but this idea right, yeah, and the ice baths, which I think personally are horrible. They're really painful and whatever. I was actually very pleased to find out that they actually don't seem to be helpful for recovery and in fact, so a lot of the stuff that I looked into for the book. It turned out well, it doesn't really work, but this was one that there is actually some evidence that it can be slightly detrimental to recovery and it's not something like, oh, you're going to totally wreck yourself, you're done for the season or anything like that.
Speaker 2:But basically what's happening is you know, the reason that you're training is to get fitter, faster and all of that.
Speaker 2:And you know you create this micro damage in your muscles and so the repair process is what makes that muscle stronger and what icing does and cooling does is it actually reduces blood flow to that area. So you're just basically slowing down this process, you're not stopping it, and as soon as you stop it, that area so you're just basically slowing down this process, you're not stopping it, and as soon as you stop it comes back. So it's not a huge effect, but they've done enough studies now that I think are pretty convincing that it seems to be like it's not only not helpful but it seems to be slightly detrimental and it may actually decrease some of your gains, like with strength training and things like that muscle soreness sorts of things. And so I think it's just a good example of you know being careful to listen to some of the hype, because in some cases you really you want that inflammation.
Speaker 2:There are good reasons to. Sometimes, you know, if I go out trail running and I sprain my ankle and it's really hurting me. I might ice it just because it makes it feel better, but I'm not doing that in hopes that it's going to heal any faster and in fact, the advice now is that you want to do everything you can to maintain motion and joints and things like that and to allow blood flow, not stop it.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and I think I even tell some of my athletes master's level athletes really and older ice, if we need to get back out there, I said to decrease the pain but then don't ice it long-term and still blows people's minds, uh, so it's a message that needs to be out there.
Speaker 1:And, in that role of inflammation, I think my personal agenda is to try to get everybody to understand how inflammation works, because, yeah, it is neutral. Generally it's neutral, but if you can understand that momentary inflammation can be a beneficial thing because of recovery, because it's pushing things in and out to help the areas and whatever recover, now you can respect inflammation and say or you know, instead of like, just push it out Cause oh, it's bad, and that's what Instagram says it's not, and so, whether it's, you know so, icing or tart cherry juice or whatever it's like, yeah, respect the inflammation, but there is a certain component to it of like thick legs Right and I have a stage race and I've got to perform the next day Okay, cool.
Speaker 1:So, Christy, how do I get rid of some thick legs if I have to go hard the next day and is thick legs even bad?
Speaker 2:legs if I have to go hard the next day and is thick legs even bad? Yeah, well, that's you know. I will say one thing about recovery is very individual, and this is something I don't think I appreciated to the extent that I did now before I started researching this book. So one of the things I was really hoping to find there's a whole chapter in the book about data, sort of what kind of data you can collect. You know, markers of recovery and all of that. I think we're talking about that in the second episode, um, but anyway, you know, really thinking, okay, what is that going to be?
Speaker 2:Well, it turns out, uh, there really isn't one physiological thing that you can measure for recovery. Um, so, for instance, a lot of people will get this thick legs is what you call it, but you know this particular feeling in their muscles. Other people you know. For me, it's like the slightest bit of a sore throat that I wake up with in the morning. Mood is actually the best marker of recovery, believe it or not, and that's something that we think is really squishy. It's hard to measure and all that. But so we're sort of again looking for this magic bullet, and the magic bullet is how am I feeling and noticing how you feel when you're recovered versus when you aren't recovered, if that makes sense. So, anyway, getting back to the thick legs, though, and soreness.
Speaker 2:So there are instances no-transcript, if you do have to recover in short order. In those instances, icing may be beneficial, just because it makes you it's more of a feeling of it, and any kind of inflammation, you know, swelling that you might get in the muscle will be reduced, and that's not helpful for performing, right. Then it's helpful for getting the training benefit, but you're not going to get a training benefit from the morning to the afternoon, right? So you're less concerned about that. And the same is true for nutrition too. You know, this idea of a very short recovery window, uh, just, really isn't a thing, the exception being if you're going to really be depleting your glycogen stores and then going again before, your body would naturally do that, which, yeah, usually you can just wait until the next meal eat, you're fine. But if you're going um you know an hour or two later, you may need to expedite that.
Speaker 1:Yep, exactly. So again for all of our audience members listening it's, it's understand, like, how things work.
Speaker 1:And and I think, as Christy said, and I've probably said a thousand times on this podcast, like physiology is really complicated. So if you use reductionism to boil it down to tart cherry juice is the answer you're, you're really missing a hell of a lot more than than you realize. So, understand how information works, understand and respect it when it comes in and out, and just know that yeah, there there's some stuff that you can do to maybe mitigate it. Uh, when you got to go hard, you know, the next day, or uh, later on that day, and and and that works. The other thing with, like, a cold plunge or a cold Creek or something like that, like, if you race your bike, if you do a criterium around here in the mobber area right now, and it's 107 degree real field, go get in the Creek because you just need to decrease core temperature afterwards to feel good again, right Like that's going to be helpful.
Speaker 1:But, um, so all that to say as we kind of move along, um and kind of toward the end of this, uh, episode number one, I just want to touch on ketones, because we talked about tart cherry juice. It's a drinky thing. Ketones are kind of new. It's not in your book. Yeah, Ketones for recovery. Any thoughts?
Speaker 2:Yeah, this kind of became a thing after I was finished reporting my book and everything and it's it feels like another. Every every few years a new thing comes up and it's like, oh, here's the new thing. And I don't want to completely dismiss it, but it feels like something that sort of came up. People were really interested in it, they played around with it and it doesn't seem to have really lasted. I'm not convinced that it's something. Again, I don't think that it's something that's going to give you super meaningful benefits. Is it worth playing around with? If you're really curious, maybe, but I wouldn't expect that it would have a huge benefit. And again, you know, like all these other things, the research on it is very slim, both in you know there's more and more studies now, but they tend to be very small, and so you know, the only way to get good data from small studies is to have a whole bunch of them. But even then it's hard to combine those studies sometimes. So you can get you know.
Speaker 2:While I was working on the book, I would look at these meta-analyses of something like tart cherry juice. And I don't want to pick on tart cherry juice because I think of all the stuff. That's probably one of the ones that's like has the most potential and least potential for harm. But you know, you put together sort of crappy studies and you can put them together. It doesn't give you something meaningful. What you need is a larger, better design study, and it's just. There are a lot of good reasons why those are hard to do. I don't want to just say that researchers are terrible or they're not trying, but you know the funding is coming, you know, with sort of an expectation or desire for a certain effect. So there's that, and you know it's.
Speaker 2:The other thing that you need to understand with science and conflicts of interest is that it's not always the case. You know, we think of conflicts of interest as, like I'm giving you this money to make a study that says X, y, z, but it tends to be much more subtle than that. It's like we're really interested in this, we think it's really important. So now, all of a sudden, you're studying it. So now there's all these studies about this thing. That may not actually be important, but there are studies measuring it and so now you have numbers on it and it creates this idea. This is really what happened with hydration. You know you get the Gatorade who creates an entire Gatorade sports industry complex where they are funding all of this research. So they're basically creating this. You know the sense that hydration is, like this, fundamental core part of performance, when in fact, the evidence for that is not great and in fact, part of the reason that we think it's so important is because there's been all this money poured into creating that idea.
Speaker 1:Yep, yep, yeah. So, and that dovetails into the final kind of part of this, you already mentioned this magical recovery window. We used to think that 30 to 45 minutes post whatever you did, you need to guzzle some protein shake. When is that important, if at all, and how should we rethink about this?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this idea, it wasn't just invented, it was kind of a relic of some early studies on this stuff. So it was, you know, study designs where they were comparing people that ate something after a workout to people who didn't, and so it seemed like it was the timing when, in fact, it was just the calories or the nutrients themselves, and in fact, there's pretty good evidence now that you know, for instance, protein is important for athletes, carbohydrates are absolutely important, and if you're doing hard exercise or you're depleting your glycogen stores, you need to, you know, take in carbohydrates so that your body can replenish them. But there isn't this short window and you will not be harmed by waiting a little bit longer. The exception is that if you're going to perform again in short order and you know we're talking a couple of hours, not a full day, normally it's fine to just wait until the next meal. On the other hand, you can really work up an appetite for a workout. So there are good reasons sometimes to eat something. I will often have a snack after a workout if I don't have a meal right away, and I think that's fine. But I think you need to also make sure that you're kind of putting that in your overall calorie budget for the day, and this idea that it's something special about having it then is just again, it's a way to create products.
Speaker 2:And, to you know, one of the reasons that protein powders have become such a thing is that milk producers had this, you know, this byproduct of all the other things that they were making, and so they needed something to do with it. And so now, all of a sudden, protein powder is a thing for athletes, because, again, it's a good market and, unfortunately, athletes are kind of easy targets. And another thing that I think is really worth considering is the extent to which these products sponsor all sorts of athletes and events and things. One of the reasons that supplements are so big is that all of these companies are sponsoring both Olympic teams, trade teams, professional teams. Every team has a sponsor of these things. Does that mean that it's awesome stuff? No, it means that the companies are paying them to create this idea that everyone needs to do it, and this is what makes you fast and simply not the case, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's it. And I think you might've been like one of the first people I heard like speak about it of and I thought I thought it was beautiful. Um, is that, you know, eating something after you work out. It's not a bad thing here, especially my juniors, who they're like, well, coach AP, you say to pack a meal for post race, and all that kind of stuff is like, yeah, cause, especially juniors, they just they forget about stuff, right. So if I can get some calories in them right away, um, especially if we're racing again the next day or just for good recovery habit, that's positive, but that's just like calories in now. The message to add or to layer onto that is don't freak out If it doesn't happen, just make sure to eat properly later. And you know, you know, ask her, as you can, group who's um, I mean legend in the sport to, uh, just give a talk to us and you know, same message from him.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and I think it's really important to recognize that our bodies are actually really good at at maintaining something called homeostasis, which is basically like trying to keep your body alive and going and everything working properly. And these companies have tried to convince us, you know that you need a scientist standing behind you, you know, monitoring how much you're taking in for hydration and all this stuff, when in fact, your body has very good mechanisms in place, very complex physiological feedback systems that keep you healthy and keep systems running. So this idea that you know you're just going to fall apart if you don't eat something within 20 minutes is just ridiculous. And you think about I'm not a big fan generally of like well, think about what our, you know, hunter-gatherer ancestors did. But in fact, you know, human beings have been, you know, functioning quite well and exercising in heat and adverse conditions for a long time without all these products and things. And that's not to say that they don't have a use and that doesn't, you know, some of them don't make life better.
Speaker 2:But I think you have to be really skeptical of these ideas that there's this exact, perfect, optimal way and in fact, I think, this sort of drive to optimize everything is a little bit negative because it creates this impression that, oh, I'm getting something wrong, or if I don't do this exact thing, everything's going to be wrong, when in fact you know most of the stuff is not that important in terms of, like, getting it exactly right.
Speaker 2:You know you can drink to thirst, you can eat to hunger, you know it's okay to do that, and what happens is people sort of outsource decisions on these things to these companies or coaches, or algorithms, or their sports watch or whatever, and it really robs them of this opportunity to be much better athlete, one who can understand and read their body and understand you know the signals that it's giving them on its own, like you don't actually need all this stuff. I'm not saying that they don't have uses and they can't be helpful, but I think the most important skill that any athlete can develop is the ability to read their own body and understand what it's telling you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is also something that I fully will preach on this podcast is create an awareness of your body, create an awareness of perceived effort and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:The last question, just to round off that window and timing. One of my own athletes, josh, asked about electrolytes for that timing window In particular. It's super hot in the South right now, so 100 degrees plus. You do four, five, six-hour hard ride, a little bit crampy at the end. Should you be blasting yourself with a thousand milligrams of electrolytes right away? Is that super crucial or will that too kind of follow the way of the body seeking homeostasis? And as long as you're eating normally, naturally that will kind of take care of itself too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the latter, that's exactly right. Yeah, again, people took these. You know, very cheap chemicals. They rebranded them electrolytes. You know they're just salts. Your body gets them, they store them.
Speaker 2:I mean, we get electrolytes for the food that we eat. There's absolutely no reason that you should be buying products to put them into drinks or things like that. It's not necessary. You know it occurs naturally in our food. You know, if you finish a workout and you have a hankering for a salty snack, then maybe you need some salt. But it's not something that you need to be really thinking about on that sort of level.
Speaker 2:And I think it's really important to understand that your body is capable of sort of keeping its fluid balance. As long as you're eating and drinking, normally you don't need to do special things, and when you really try and micromanage it, that's actually when things can go wrong. I mean, we have people now who are dying in events because they're overhydrating and that's actually believe it or not much, much, much riskier than underhydrating, because your body has the ability to sort of hang on to fluids internally so that you can stay safe and healthy, but when you overload it, it's not as good at dealing with that. So electrolytes, not something to worry about. Just eat food. Normally you get these things in your food.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I wanted to mention so you said something about cramps. There is this idea that cramps come from electrolytes, but the best evidence that we have right now is that it seems to be some sort of neurological thing, that it's not actually something having to do with electrolytes or salts Electrolytes are salts, but it's not something to do with that but really about signaling, neurological signaling and things like that. So it's kind of interesting but it's probably not.
Speaker 2:The thing that's going to save you is a salt tablet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and it's a misnomer that you know a thousand milligrams of sodium is going to help your cramp. That was popular back then. We've talked on it on this podcast before. Cramps are multifaceted, just like fatigue, and usually specificity of training, depletion of all the things um and and peak uh performances like like running faster, skiing harder, riding harder than you've ever had before. Typically, when people are like cramping and stuff, it's usually they're seeing new limits that they haven't reached and then they get tired and they're like oh, it was a shitty day and it's like actually not because, but you know anyway so.
Speaker 1:I guess let's leave it there for episode one. That's, that's a lot and I, and I think too, it's, it's, it's rich. So you know it's quick, but it comes, you know, fast at you, just like her book. So we'll leave it there for today, christy, thank you so much and we're going to hear from Christy again on part two coming up next. 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.
