How to get the most out of your 10K training, marathon training, or triathlon training as you age

Sure, age is just a number. But as that number inches upward, typically so do your race times. That’s because the physiological processes of aging start to slow you down by reducing your aerobic capacity, muscle power, muscle recovery capabilities, and so forth.
 
You can, however, blunt the effects that aging has on endurance performance by tweaking your 10K training, marathon training, or triathlon training in little ways that most younger athletes simply don’t consider. Aging athletes, for example, should factor in a bit more time for strength training to promote strength maintenance, injury prevention, and optimal body composition. And while getting regular sports massages can help athletes of any age, older athletes in particular stand to benefit from them because they can help speed muscle recovery. Even eating right and supplementing with sports nutrition products such as ARX become more important as we age.

Younger endurance athletes tend not to do these little things, in part because their youth allows them to “get away with” inattention to general health, muscle recovery, and injury prevention. But the older we get, the less we can get away with. So start doing these little things today to gain a competitive advantage over those who don’t.

Boost your sports nutrition program with supplements

Still wondering if dietary supplements should be part of your marathon training diet or triathlon training diet? Well, at the beginning of this year we reported on a survey by the European Specialist Sports Nutrition Alliance that stated that 90 percent of the 11,000-plus athletes who participated in the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics used one or more nutritional supplements in their training. And now as the year comes to an end, we bring you more news of support for the use of nutritional supplements. According to new research from the “Life…supplemented” 2009 Healthcare Professionals (HCP) Impact Study, eight out of 10 registered dietitians say they believe dietary supplements are important for maintaining optimal health.

Eighty-one percent of the registered dietitians who were surveyed acknowledged that most people don’t eat perfectly, which results in nutritional gaps that could be bridged by taking vitamins or other dietary supplements. Most of these dietitians (nine out of 10) said they take nutritional supplements themselves and recommend them to their clients, particularly for improved bone health and for overall health and wellness.

Of course, when it comes to cultivating optimal health and peak athletic performance, there is still no substitute for a healthy diet and a sensible training plan. But these two studies certainly demonstrate the confidence both elite athletes and dietitians have in using nutritional supplements in conjunction with diet and exercise to promote prime health and well-being.

Supplementation strategies to consider if you’re in triathlon training, Ironman training, or marathon training

Real food is definitely the foundation for good health and optimal athletic performance. Yet there are a few key supplements that may enhance performance in ways that food can’t:

• Consider antioxidants—when you want to increase endurance and reduce muscle damage. Studies have shown that certain antioxidant supplements—including n-acetyl cysteine, quercetin, and green tea catechins—effectively boost endurance performance.

• Consider beta-alanine—when you want to increase fatigue resistance in short, high-intensity efforts. This amino acid appears to reduce the rate at which the muscles become acidic during exercise, which leads to increased endurance.

• Consider caffeine—when you want to improve endurance performance and reduce perceived effort. Caffeine has been proven to enhance endurance performance by increasing the efficiency of muscle contractions and reducing how “hard” it feels to exercise at any given intensity.

• Consider creatine—when you want to increase fatigue resistance in short, high-intensity efforts. Even though creatine is typically thought of as a bodybuilder’s supplement, it appears to enhance performance in the shorter, high-intensity interval workouts that most endurance athletes do.

• Consider mushroom extracts, like the ones contained in the endurance and muscle recovery supplement ARX—when you want to increase endurance and accelerate muscle recovery. Sports scientists now know that the lactate produced by muscles during high-intensity exercise can be recycled by the body and used as an additional fuel source to increase endurance. So anything that enables you to use more lactate faster as fuel will help boost performance. That’s what ARX appears to do—it increases the body’s capacity to transport lactate and process it for energy. How does it do this? The functional ingredients in ARX are herbal and mushroom extracts that have been used in Chinese medicine for centuries. These ingredients are believed to increase muscle perfusion, or blood flow through the muscles, which could explain how ARX accelerates the shuttling and recycling of lactate.

My last few weeks of triathlon training in Santa Barbara have gone great. My fitness is slowly picking up, and I am happy with the workouts I have been able to get under my belt as I prepare myself for Ironman Germany on July 5th. A typical training day the last few weeks has looked a little something like this:

• Wake up 7 a.m. and knock back 2 ARX endurance sports supplements and a couple iron tablets. Then I either make some disgusting coffee at home and have it with a bowl of oats or stop off at the coffee shop on the way to swimming.

• Smack out 4-5km at Los Banos pool, which is an awesome 50-meter outdoor pool right on the coast.

• Take a little recovery time to download e-mails and try to reply to a couple. Also, I usually post something on Twitter.

• Grab something to eat while heading out the door for a long bike ride. My Specialized Transition is usually loaded with 2 drink bottles. In my right pocket I have house keys, cell, and iPod, while in my left pocket I stash an assortment of bars—ranging from muesli bars to proper energy bars. And if I am feeling really wiped, I will stash a Snickers bar and a couple gels.

• Stop somewhere along the ride for some Coke. It keeps me from bonking, and I have definitely become accustomed to the taste of ice-cold Coke. Anyone know if they are interested in sponsoring a triathlete? Ha!

• Finish my ride and keep my fingers crossed that Kelly has made me something for lunch. Otherwise, I’ll settle for something simple like peanut butter and jam or leftovers from the previous night.

• Jump into bed for my beauty sleep. I usually nap for about an hour. And even if I don’t fall asleep, the rest is helpful for recovery.

• Wake up, then procrastinate going out for my run for about 30 minutes. But once I’m out the door, I love every moment of it. All I have to do is think, “tanning time.”

• Get home, shower, maybe do some Pilates, and grab a snack. Then I start cooking dinner while I try to reply to more e-mails or Skype my coach Jon Ackland or my folks to catch up.

• Clean up dinner, finish doing e-mails, then settle in front of the TV for a little more recovery time. Sometime between 9 and 10 p.m., I will get in bed, where I usually struggle to fall asleep because my body is aching from the hard day of training.

• Wake up at 7 a.m. to do it all over again. Hey, my legs don’t feel that bad. I think the ARX is working!

Get ready Cambridge, Maryland! The 2009 Eagleman Ironman is this weekend, and the weather outlook isn't bad.  Some of the best endurance athletes from around the world will descend on one of the most beautiful towns on Maryland's eastern shore.  The Eagleman competition will be strong and the local weather for the Eagleman looks promising for mid-June.  Race day holds a 30% chance of showers, but the temperature is looking to be just about 80°. Given that the area is normally fairly breezy, it could feel a little cooler.

The 2009 Eagleman Ironman kicks off on Sunday June 14, 2009 with a 1.2-mile swim.  The Choptank River normally runs about 68-78°, which can be a little cold, so the event team is recommending wet suits.  The 56-mile bike will take you through the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.  The winds in this area of Cambridge can get pretty high (as high as 30 MPH), although Sunday is looking calm.  The race finishes with a 13.1-mile run on mainly open rural roads, which means no shade!

All-in-all, the Eagleman looks to have pretty favorable weather conditions this weekend with moderate temperatures.  So get out there and enjoy the weather and the race. 

The Faster Tomorrow Team will be on hand at the Eagleman Expo.  The Team will be sharing all kinds of great information on nutrition for endurance races and showcasing our sports nutrition supplement, ARX.

 

The Eagleman Irnman 70.3 will take place June 14th on Maryland’s eastern shore, in the small town of Cambridge. The Faster Tomorrow team is looking forward to this event and hoping to meet all of you at the Expo June 12th. -14th. If you’re planning on competing in or attending the Eagleman Ironman 70.3, you’ll want to book your hotel rooms early. As I mentioned, Cambridge is a small town and hotel rooms go quickly.

Our focus at Faster Tomorrow is helping endurance athletes achieve peak performance via sport nutrition products and sport nutrition supplements. Making travel arrangements and hotel booking is not exactly our sweet spot.  However, we do want to help as much as possible, so we hope this Google Map of the Hotels in Cambridge Maryland will assist you in finding accommodations for the 2009 Eagleman Ironman 70.3.

See you there!

Should endurance athletes load up on antioxidant supplements?

Free radicals are bad and antioxidants are good. Right? Actually, it’s not that simple. Although free radicals cause muscle damage during exercise, they also stimulate some of the positive health and fitness adaptations that result from exercise. And now, researchers connected with a new sports nutrition study claim that limiting free radical production too much—for example by consuming large amounts of antioxidant supplements—might attenuate some of the normal benefits of training. They suggest that when the body’s production of free radicals is artificially squelched, antioxidants can change from a good thing to a bad thing.

This new study was conducted at the University of Jena, in Germany. Researchers recruited a group of previously untrained and trained volunteers and put them through a four-week exercise protocol. Half of the subjects received daily supplements of vitamin C and vitamin E, both of which function as antioxidants in the body, and the other half received a placebo. The researchers then measured how the exercise training affected the subjects’ insulin sensitivity—their ability to move glucose into their cells. (It should be noted that one of the documented benefits of exercise is an increase in insulin sensitivity.) Surprisingly, they found that insulin sensitivity increased only in the subjects who did not receive vitamin supplementation, whether previously untrained or trained. The authors of the study concluded, "Supplementation with antioxidants may preclude these health-promoting effects of exercise in humans.” They speculated that vitamin supplementation reduced the body’s production of the free radicals that increase the activity of genes responsible for regulating insulin sensitivity.

The suggestion, then, is that high levels of antioxidant supplementation may become a crutch that could prevent the body from responding to the stress of exercise in at least this one positive way. But that’s a very limited finding and endurance athletes should be careful about drawing firm conclusions from just one small study that only looked at the effects of taking high doses of two specific antioxidants. It simply does not provide conclusive proof that athletes should avoid taking all antioxidant supplements, let alone vitamin/mineral supplements in general. Much more research needs to be done before it is known whether, on balance, vitamin or mineral supplementation enhances the health and fitness benefits of exercise. In the meantime, there’s no disputing that daily exercise extends a whole host of positive health effects far beyond an increase in insulin sensitivity. So keep up your triathlon training or marathon training—and check back here for the latest updates on the efficacy of nutritional supplements for endurance athletes.

Last week, a Faster Tomorrow colleague and I enjoyed spending time at the 2009 Wildflower Triathlon in Lake San Antonio, CA.  We were on hand to promote our flagship product ARX, a nutritional supplement designed to improve performance and speed muscle recovery in endurance athletes.

Liz had never attended a triathlon before, and like so many others who start out as spectators was hooked on the sport by the time the first swimmer hit the transition area.  By the end of the weekend, she was all but ready to start her triathlon training.

While it's easy to be awed by the incredible performances of the elite athletes, it is watching the performance of the everyday athletes that makes you want to get out there and do it yourself.  At Wildflower, there were competitors as young as seven and as old as seventy-three.  There were those who were incredibly fit and some who were just a little bit fat.  (In fact, two celebrity athletes participating were from the show "The Biggest Loser.")  And finally there were the physically challenged athletes who raced using prosthetic limbs.  Truly inspiring.

So here's wishing Liz well as she starts down this path toward triathlon glory.  For Liz, and anyone else looking to become a triathlete, a great way to get started is by using our Triathlon Training Plans for Beginners.  And don’t forget to take ARX! 


Matt Fitzgerald, Terenzo Bozzone, me, Murphy Reinshreiber, James Cotter and Liz!


Liz and her new friends!

How to tweak your triathlon training or marathon training for peak performance as you get older

Age catches up with every endurance athlete sooner or later. You can only get faster for so long before the physiological processes of aging start to slow you down by reducing your aerobic capacity, muscle power, muscle recovery capabilities, and so forth. The good news is that there are several things you can do that will extend the getting-faster phase of your life as an endurance athlete and delay the beginning of the getting-slower phase. Here are five of them.

Set the bar high. Endurance athletes get faster by trying to go faster—specifically, by aiming to eclipse their best performances of the past. Making a conscious commitment to pursue this type of goal naturally leads to a whole host of subsequent decisions—how you train, how you fuel your body, how you allow for muscle recovery—that will collectively raise your performance level. So even as you get older, specifically setting out to race faster, then preparing accordingly, will most likely lead to peak performance.

Learn from experience. Each endurance athlete is an experiment of one. The training recipe that works best for one athlete may not work best for another. One of the most potent means to keep improving as an endurance athlete is to figure out which training methods work best for you and increase their presence in your training, while minimizing and discarding those practices that do not work as well. For example, you might observe that your triathlon performance improves most rapidly when you keep your overall triathlon training volume down and focus on doing lots of high-intensity intervals and tempo work. Once you’ve made this discovery, you can eliminate wasteful “junk miles” from your training and concentrate on high-intensity training to maximize your rate of improvement.

Build your foundation—then make changes. The foundation of endurance fitness is twofold. One component is raw endurance and the other component is pure speed. When you begin participating in endurance sports, it is best to focus on doing long, slow training to build endurance along with very short, fast efforts to increase speed. But as you develop as an endurance athlete, the focus of your training should shift away from raw endurance and sprint work toward race-specific intervals and threshold work. In this way you will continually build upon the work you have done in the past and keep your development moving forward even as you age.

Do the little things. The workouts you do are only one piece of the performance puzzle. Other pieces include little things such as strength training for strength maintenance, injury prevention, and optimal body composition; eating right and supplementing with sports nutrition products such as ARX to support good health and peak performance; and getting regular sports massages to promote muscle recovery. Younger endurance athletes tend not to do the little things, in part because their youth allows them to “get away with” inattention to general health, muscle recovery, and injury prevention. But the older we get, the less we can get away with. Start doing the little things today to gain a competitive advantage over those who don’t.

Move up. Endurance fitness has various components, not all of which peak and begin sliding at the same point in the arc of life. Speed tends to peak before intensive endurance (which is fatigue resistance in efforts lasting less than one hour), and intensive endurance tends to peak before raw endurance. So what many endurance athletes do to remain competitive as they age is to periodically increase their primary race distance. In other words, if you can’t beat ’em, move up!

Sports nutrition supplementation comes of age

According to the results of a survey by the European Specialist Sports Nutrition Alliance, 90 percent of the 11,000-plus athletes who participated in the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics used one or more nutritional supplements in their training. This remarkably high level of supplement use is a sure sign that elite athletes are becoming less concerned about positive drug tests resulting from supplement contamination. And their confidence was justified by the fact that there were no positive doping tests in Beijing linked to contaminated supplements.

There are two likely explanations for Olympic athletes’ increasing comfort level with supplement use. First, athletes testing positive for performance-enhancing drug use are invoking the “contaminated supplements” excuse less often than they used to, because the World Anti-Doping Authority simply does not accept it. And this trend has made it apparent that supplement contamination was never really widespread to begin with. Second, supplement manufacturers have improved standards and procedures to prevent contamination. Many supplements are now sold with independent certifications guaranteeing that the products are free of banned substances.

The reason that Olympic athletes would want to use nutritional supplements is clear: Certain products have the potential to help them perform better. There is solid scientific research to support the use of supplements including multivitamins, creatine monohydrate, fish oil, and ARX. Aware of this research, a large majority of elite athletes now choose to incorporate carefully selected supplements into their training and nutrition regimens in order to enhance performance and boost muscle recovery.

In addition to entertaining and inspiring us, Olympic athletes model training and nutrition practices that the rest of us can emulate to improve our own sports performance. Clearly, these practices now include the use of sports nutrition and muscle recovery supplements. So if you have resisted supplementation to this point because you were waiting for some indication that it’s “okay,” wait no longer.

Sports nutrition supplements are controversial. Some endurance athletes believe they don’t work and that they simply encourage athletes to seek short-cuts to improvement instead of focusing on eating right and training hard. Others are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to just about any supplement that promises to aid their quest for better performance. Who’s right?

The truth about sports nutrition supplements lies somewhere in between these extremes. No supplement can substitute for a sensible diet or hard training. And there are plenty of sports nutrition supplements on store shelves that do not live up to their claims. But there are a handful of supplements that do provide real, scientifically proven benefits for athletes, including:

Antioxidants. During intense and prolonged exercise, the muscles produce large amounts of free radicals—unstable oxygen molecules that cause fatigue and post-exercise muscle soreness. Antioxidants are compounds (some of which are produced by the body, others of which are obtained in food) that neutralize free radicals and counteract these effects. Studies have shown that certain antioxidant supplements—including n-acetyl cysteine, quercetin, and green tea catechins—effectively boost endurance performance. Researchers at Pepperdine University, for example, recently studied the effects of six weeks of quercetin supplementation on time trial performance among 11 competitive cyclists. Quercetin supplementation resulted in an average 3.1 percent faster finishing time over 30 km.

Caffeine. We’ve known for years that caffeine enhances performance in everything from short sprints to long-distance endurance events. Initially, it was believed that caffeine boosted endurance performance by enhancing fat burning. It has since been discovered that caffeine does not increase fat oxidation but instead blocks adenosine receptors in the brain, increasing brain levels of dopamine and noradrenaline, which reduces an athlete’s level of perceived exertion, making any given workload feel easier. Recommended dosing is 6 mg per kg of body weight taken about an hour before competition and following a one-week caffeine fast.

Creatine. Creatine phosphate is a fuel that the muscles rely on for maximum-intensity efforts such as sprinting 100 yards. Certain precursors of creatine phosphate, such as creatine monohydrate, are taken supplementally to increase creatine phosphate stores in the muscles. Research has shown that creatine supplementation enhances gains in muscle strength, size, and power resulting from resistance training, as well as performance in repeated high-intensity intervals. The recommended dosage of creatine is 3 to 5 grams per day. The only potential downside of creatine supplementation is the weight gain that comes with increased muscle size. Cyclists who do a lot of climbing and runners are likely to suffer more from this effect of creatine than they benefit from the extra power it gives them.

Fish Oil. Fish oil supplements are rich in the essential omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA, which are scarce in the average person’s diet. Such supplements have also been shown to have anti-inflammatory properties. For any athlete who doesn’t regularly eat fish that are rich in omega-3 fatty acids, a daily dosage of 2 to 3 g of EPA and DHA combined can be beneficial.

Herbal/Fungal Extracts. Certain herbal and fungal extracts, such as those in ARX, are perhaps the most exciting sports nutrition supplements to come along in some time, as they appear to boost endurance dramatically. In one preliminary animal study by researchers at the China Medical Sciences Academy, mice given ARX increased their swimming endurance 267 percent and improved their lactate clearance—which is the body’s ability to use lactate produced by the working muscles to fuel continued exercise.

The specific functional ingredients in ARX are ginseng, ganoderma, cordyceps, eleuthrococcus, flammulina, and citrus bioflavanoids. These ingredients are believed to increase blood flow through the muscles, which could explain how ARX accelerates removal of lactate produced in the muscles. Cordyceps, in particular, has also been reported to function as a bronchial dilator with the potential to increase ventilation during exercise—another possible mechanism for ARX’s performance-boosting effects.

Whey Protein. Research has shown that consuming protein immediately after exercise accelerates muscle recovery and enhances performance in a subsequent workout. Whey protein is a popular post-workout protein choice among athletes because it is easily isolated from milk and used to create convenient, low-calorie supplements. In a University of Texas study of cyclists, researchers compared the effects of a carbohydrate supplement and a carbohydrate-whey protein supplement consumed after a workout on performance in a second workout completed the next day. The cyclists exhibited 66 percent greater endurance in the second workout when they consumed the carbohydrate-whey protein supplement. The authors of the study proposed that whey protein achieved this effect by boosting muscle recovery after the first workout.