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June 26 - September 11, 2019
that skipping breakfast resulted in a 4.5 percent drop in 30-minute cycling time trial performance at 5 P.M. that afternoon, even though the subjects had been allowed to eat as much as they wanted at lunch.
It’s not just how much fuel is in the tank, in other words. Endurance performance also depends on what types of fuel you have available, where it’s stored, and how quickly you can access it.
While protein is important for building and repairing muscles after resistance exercise, it plays a negligible role in directly fueling muscle contractions.
For the most part, though, carbohydrate and fat stoke the furnace during prolonged exercise—and
During easy exercise, like a gentle walk, you burn mostly fat from the supplies circulating in your bloodstream. As you speed up, you begin to add more carbohydrate to the mix,
the fitter you are, for example, the greater the proportion of fat you burn at any given speed.
makes sense for endurance athletes to stock up on carbohydrates as much as possible.
Keep your glycogen levels high by consuming a diet that gets 60 to 65 percent of its calories from carbohydrate; top up your stores by carbo-loading in the final few days
in events lasting longer than about ninety minutes, eat or drink some easily digested carbohydrates to supplement your stored gly...
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daily target amount of carbohydrate per pound of total body weight based on the type of training you’ve done that day, rath...
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with enough adaptation time, you could apparently run your engine on fat just as well as it runs on carbohydrate.
scientists have traditionally figured that 60 grams an hour (about 250 calories) is pretty much the maximum amount you can absorb during exercise.
if you combine two different types of carbohydrate—glucose and fructose, for example—they pass through the intestinal wall using two different cellular routes that can operate simultaneously, enabling you to absorb as much as 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour.
your muscles have a cunning self-defense mechanism that’s totally independent of the brain, the equivalent of having your car’s maximum speed linked to the level of its fuel gauge. Moreover, they’ll preferentially burn some of the glycogen within the muscle before turning to glucose
asked the cyclists to swish the sports drink in their mouths and then spit it out without swallowing. It worked: simply having sports drink in your mouth seemed to be more important than getting it into your bloodstream and to your muscles.
it’s as if the brain relaxes its safety margin when it knows (or is tricked into believing) that more fuel is on the way.
fat-adapted runners were able to burn fat twice as quickly as the non-fat-adapted control group. During a three-hour treadmill run at a moderate pace, they relied on fat for 88 percent of their energy, compared to 56 percent for those following a standard carbohydrate-heavy diet.
endurance athletes on a three-week high-fat diet became fat-burning machines to an extent few had imagined possible.
The problem was that the fat-adapted athletes became less efficient, requiring more oxygen to sustain their race pace. This, it turns out, is a consequence of the cascade of metabolic reactions
ATP, the final form of fuel used for muscle contractions: the fat reactions require more oxygen molecules.
LCHF athletes ended up performing worse than the high-carbohydrate athletes in the Supernova study’s final and most important real-world test: a 10-kilometer racewalk.
How hard it feels dictates, in a true and literal sense and with greater accuracy than any physiological measurement yet devised, how long you can sustain it.
Effort is what matters.
how do you train effort? The standard answer, and still the best one, is that you train your body.
Explaining the effects of training by talking about effort rather than, say, VO2max is a provocative shift in perspective, but it doesn’t really tell us anything new about how to train.
anything that moves the “effort dial” in your head up or down will affect your endurance, even if it has no effect on your muscles or heart or VO2max.
all training is brain training, even if it doesn’t specifically target the brain.
How do you improve your response inhibition? By inhibiting your responses, over and over, in a systematic way.
By triggering the flood of neurotransmitters associated with mental fatigue and, in particular, response inhibition over and over, we hoped that my brain would adapt to the insult—and that my resistance to mental fatigue would translate into an ability to sustain a slightly faster pace at the same effort.
I have no way of assessing whether the mental training actually helped my marathon.
“Being boring is an important characteristic for inducing mental fatigue and, therefore, a brain training effect,”
do physical and mental training at the same time.
Half of the volunteers did brain training while cycling, using the flashing-letters test that I had tried. After twelve weeks, the physical-training-only group had improved their time to exhaustion by 42 percent; in comparison the physical-plus-brain-training group had improved by a whopping 126 percent.
most impressive results are seen in previously untrained volunteers—a
long bike rides or demanding trail runs hone your mental fitness to the point of diminishing returns.
Anxious people, he found, tend to overreact to negative stimuli, producing a distinct pattern of brain activity. Elite endurance, athletes, on the other hand, display a completely opposite response pattern.
“Typically, athletes are pretty in tune with their body awareness,” Lori Haase, another of Paulus’s colleagues, told me. They’re in a state of watchful anticipation, ready to handle any discomfort that arises. Then, when the flow of air is restricted and the discomfort begins, the situation flips: insular cortex activity stays low in the athletes, but goes haywire in the controls and in people with anxiety and related problems.
leg pain and shortness of breath become neutral sources of information, to be used for pacing, rather than emotionally charged warnings to panic about. “You learn to monitor how your body actually feels, while suspending judgment about it,” he
mPEAK—Mindful Performance Enhancement, Awareness & Knowledge—another eight-week program modeled on Kabat-Zinn’s stress-reduction course. This version of mindfulness training puts more emphasis on sport-specific skills like concentration and embracing rather than avoiding pain,
insular cortex monitors signals from throughout the body and assesses their significance.
he sees motivation, effort, and pain as distinct but interrelated factors that influence endurance through separate “processing loops” between various brain regions.
a proof of principle that, when it comes to manipulating the brain to enhance endurance, something, somehow, seems to work.
teach athletes that they’re capable of more than they think.
In the end, when it comes down to two guys on a bike, maybe that’s the real secret weapon: believing that you have another gear.
every stride you take during a race is a microdecision:
They run with the leaders because they think they can beat them, and if harsh reality proves that they can’t, they regroup and try again the next day. And that belief, fostered by the longstanding international dominance of generations of Kenyan runners, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“For me, a placebo is direct trickery, giving an athlete an inert substance and saying it is something else. I’ve never done that, except in studies.”
Harnessing a belief effect, on the other hand, doesn’t involve any trickery; rather, it’s “very strategically and slowly developing maximal trust, belief, and evidence with your athletes and coaches over time.”
belief effect as a vital tool for coaches and sports scientists to harness.
there’s a gene called COMT that affects how much dopamine is available in the prefrontal cortex of your brain: those with one version of the gene have three to four times as much dopamine as those with the opposite version.
