Baking Soda... The Secret Performance Enhancing Supplement?

Will taking sodium bicarbonate today make me faster on my bike? In this video, I'm going to add sodium bicarbonate to my own fueling strategy and try and take one of the most valued Strava segments close to GCN Megabase. Will it prove decisive in allowing me to top the leaderboard? Let's take a look. Sodium bicarbonate is a salt and in sports, it is perfectly legal to take if you're potentially looking to enhance your performance. Bicarb's use in sports is nothing new. In fact, its potential benefits have been researched and discussed for nearly a century. Actually, its use is banned in horse racing where bicarb milkshakes were used for an added boost on the home straight. The optimal doses for us humans is 0.2 to 0.4 grams per kilogram of body weight, taken around an hour or two before riding in the form of capsules or mixed in with water. When we were actually out filming at the Belgium Classics earlier this year, we noticed that Arnold De Lee had a bicarb strategy written on his stem. He was taking bicarb during the race as a way of hopefully boosting his performance for the latter stages where he was hoping to win the race. Now, this appears to be another strategy where you ingest bicarb before a race and also during your actual event. This is to try and get around the potential drawbacks of bicarb, of which they're quite numerous. I'll discuss those a bit later. You're going to want to pay attention to them. First, though, I have got a full gas effort to do later. Now, around here, there is a Strava segment which all the GCN presenters have done. Today, I'm going to try and take the top step. I'm feeling good. I'm feeling in relatively good shape. Will bicarb prove to be the difference, that little bit of an edge that allows me to take first place? I'm about to find out. Inside this bottle, the correct dosage of bicarb for my body weight. I've mixed it with a bit of water. Now, this is literally bicarbonate soda, sodium bicarbonate that you get in the supermarket in the baking section. I've measured it out, mixed it with the water. It's time to take my first dose. I'm going for a strategy of 90 minutes before my effort. I'm going to take half of what's in this bottle and then 60 minutes before my effort, I'm going to finish it off. Settle the stomach, see how I'm feeling, give it beans down the road. Bottoms up. It smells horrible. Oh, wow. Oh, I see why they recommend taking some sugar or something nice afterwards. Right, it's chewing me. Definitely getting a bit of a turn in the stomach. How actually might sodium bicarbonate make you faster? Well, the theory goes that it helps to reduce that burn feeling you get when you're putting yourself into the red during anaerobic efforts. When we push at high intensity on the bike, we can't provide enough oxygen to the muscles at fast enough rates to be able to just use our aerobic system. Instead, we turn to a slightly less efficient anaerobic system which works without oxygen. Our anaerobic system releases lactate and hydrogen ions at your working muscles as a byproduct. While lactate often gets the bad rap for making us feel the burn, it's actually the hydrogen ions which make the environment in and around the muscles more acidic. The enzymes involved in providing energy to your muscle fibers can't work as effectively in this acidic environment which results in fatigue. They're the reason you start to feel the burn when pushing hard. We naturally produce sodium bicarbonate in the body to help clear away these hydrogen ions, but it's thought that by supplementing with more sodium bicarbonate, we can improve this process, reducing our time to fatigue at higher intensity level. The research points there being genuine performance gains from sodium bicarb's use with potential improvements in performance around the 2% to 3% mark, which in the performance world is quite a lot. There was this one massive study in 2021 which put together all that research to draw some conclusions and actually concluded that bicarb supplementation acutely enhances peak anaerobic power, anaerobic capacity, performance in endurance events lasting 45 seconds to eight minutes, muscle endurance, and even 2,000-meter rowing performance, as well as high-intensity running. Although, it did actually add that more research was needing among women to generalize the findings, but that's pretty conclusive. You have a better ability then of those short, sharp efforts, real high-intensity stuff, which is really important in pro races at the pointy end of a bike race where you really need to put down the watts and go into the red, or if you're looking to perform well in time trials, this is why we're seeing the likes of Arnold De Lee and other pro riders using bicarb for performance gains. That all sounds great, and there are a lot of potential benefits. Really, anyone could potentially take bicarb and see some improvements in their riding. If you're heading out on the weekend, looking to pump out a few town signs, why not? Well, hold on a second because there are a few drawbacks. There's a few disadvantages you may want to pay attention to. One, nausea, major stomach discomforts, cramps, and diarrhea. Not ideal, is it? Good for improving your sprint to the toilet. Speaking of which, time for the second dose. Last bit of bicarb down the hatch. Second thoughts, it's like eating a fart, but also, if you've ever been in the sea and you've pounded by a wave and got a massive load of salt water in your mouth, kind of like that. Anyway, hour to go. Will it make me any faster, or will I be stuck on the toilet? It's a 50-50 call at the moment. There is essentially a lot of sodium in sodium bicarbonate. If you're taking it in the dosage, which I mentioned earlier, you're looking at around 5,000 milligrams of sodium in one hit. Translate that to precision fuel and hydration, hydration tabs, that's the same as around six or seven hydration tabs in one hit. That is a lot. That is why you need to be very, very careful with sodium bicarb use because if you then start supplementing it with electrolyte drinks, taking on even more sodium, then quite easily you can reach hyponatremia or high blood sodium, which in the extreme is actually potentially fatal. It's the same reason why you shouldn't drink seawater. Essentially, ingesting sodium bicarb causes an increase in water retention, causing water to flow from the blood into your stomach. Lots of water in that stomach, flushing around. You get the picture. That's where the risk of diarrhea comes from. There are strategies out there that look to avoid this in terms of how you take on the sodium bicarb, how much, and when you take it. There's obviously risks involved that will potentially cancel out any performance gains. Still, professional cyclists are using it to their advantage. I imagine if it wasn't working for them, well, they stopped pretty quickly. We heard from Lotto Destiny that some of their riders are using sodium bicarbonate in races, mostly where there's a really explosive sprint finish on a steep climb or a sprint which some of their riders are really looking to target. Of course, in shorter time trials where you are constantly in that intense, intense effort. You can see here, this is actually Maxime van Geel's, one of their riders, and this is their stem. They've got notes on their nutrition strategy throughout the race. You can see their strategy for taking sodium bicarbonate is actually spread out throughout the stage alongside their usual nutrition from precision fuel and hydration. You can see that is what they normally take in the day. They've got the caps there. That's capsule-form sodium bicarbonate that they're spreading out throughout the race. Riders are using it. They're finding it beneficial despite the potential drawbacks. My hour now is nearly up. It's time to do my full gas effort. What will I find out? Right then, I'm ready to rumble. I'm fully bicarbed up. As I said, my stomach's growling a bit. I feel okay. I feel fine. Maybe slightly on the nauseous side when I drink a bit more water, but other than that, all good. Now, I'm about to take on a pretty hallowed Strava segment for us GCN presenters. We used it in our two versus one battle and series, which you may have seen on the channel. This is like our Alpe d'Huez, our Everest. To top the leaderboard, I need to better 12 minutes and 37 seconds. My best power output here is 422 watt average. It's going to be a tough ask, but potentially with the bicarb, will it prove to hopefully be the deciding factor and push me a little bit faster? There's only one way to find out. Here goes nothing. I'm up for this one. I'm feeling in relatively good shape. It'd be quite nice to take a cheeky win on the leaderboard. All right, let's do it. Three, two, one, we're off. Short, sharp climb to the turn. Body's actually feeling pretty good. Got that usual burning sensation in the legs, but the power numbers are good. It's not, I think for now, it's not as bad as normal. Obviously, still very out of breath. Went as hard as I could there. Quite enjoyed that actually. I did feel like I was able to really push into the red. Get my breath back, see what time I managed. I've recovered a little bit. I've had a bit of water and I've been going through my time compared to previous efforts on that same course. You're probably wanting to know if I was any faster. Actually, I wasn't. I was 55 seconds slower than my best time. I managed 30 minutes, 32 seconds, 411 watts average power. It's around 10 watts less than my best, around 55 seconds slower than my best time, which was actually done in a team time trial. I had others to share the draft with. Here, I was on my own. I was kind of cheekily see if I could beat that previous effort. Even though I didn't manage it, I actually felt good. I didn't have any adverse effects. The stomach was okay. As I said, it felt fun. I was really able to push hard and go into the red above my threshold, really into those anaerobic zones above 500 watts even plenty of times where normally I'd really pay the price for that and I'd massively drop off, whereas I was able to keep quite stable throughout the effort. I could go into those intense efforts, recover from them, and still feel good afterwards. Now, it's impossible to say if that was the bicarb today or if that was just me feeling good, but I can say from my own experience, I didn't feel bad. I enjoyed the effort. I was able to go pretty deep and I was able to put down a pretty solid effort relative to my own ability at the time. For now, I'm not going to knock bicarb. I was almost expecting there to be a bit of a disaster, but from my experience, I'm pretty well. After my effort, it's fair to say that there are potential performance gains there. It's hard to say that there's not anything that you're going to benefit with sodium bicarb. It's also hard to say that you really will benefit from it, especially when you take into account the potential drawbacks and negative effects. Should you use bicarb in your fueling strategy? I'm going to say probably not. I think at the end of it all, there are a whole load of other things that you can do to improve your cycling performance that are going to make a much bigger difference. Proper recovery, proper training, proper nutrition and fueling throughout your ride, looking after yourself, staying consistent in your approach. Bicarb, yes, it potentially will be advantageous, but you're talking a potential 1%, 2% improvement for a few people because this isn't going to work for everyone. It's something that's going to need a bit of trial and error. It's going to need you to understand your strategy and how you use it. At the end of it all, it definitely might not be something that's right for you and you might experience those negative effects which we spoke of earlier. It's something that is really going to need some very careful consideration if you are thinking of using it. There you go, though. That is a bit of info that I hope you can find useful if you're thinking of potentially using sodium bicarb in your own strategy or maybe you're just looking for a bit more information if you're hearing about bicarb being used in the pro peloton. Let me know in the comment section down below if you've got any more questions or if we've maybe missed anything. Of course, if you did find this video useful, please give it a big thumbs up. Thanks for watching. We'll see you on the next video. I'll let you know how I'm feeling in the comments as I ride home because, well, still a bit of time for those negative effects to settle in. Yes.