Home / Articles / Q & A / Going Postal / Jan 31 2003

Going Postal
We respond to the good, the bad, and the ugly of this month's mailbag.

Q: Hey John, great interview this month! It was great to finally attach a voice to the name. I have a quick question though. I’m an endurance athlete and from your interview you suggested that the same post workout drink that weight lifters use is equally beneficial for skinny guys like me. How can that be?

A: First of all, for those of you who don’t know what this guy’s talking about, you must not be signed up for our newsletter. Therefore go sign up now! You’ll be kept abreast of when we update the site, what’s new at Science Link headquarters, and new articles, interviews, etc. And we promise – no spam, no annoying barrage of emails, and no giving or selling your name to other companies. We’ll just send you updates of cool happenings.

Now, getting to the topic at hand. I did an interview on January 7th at www.bodybuilding-radio.com. The topic of this interview was workout nutrition and during the 20-minute conversation, I discussed the research projects we’re currently conducting on protein and carbohydrate post workout drinks like Biotest Surge and, in addition, I discussed who could benefit from proper pre and post workout nutrition. Fortunately, the Internet is a very technologically advanced place and the MP3 for the interview is hanging out over at www.bodybuilding-radio.com. If you’re interested in workout nutrition, go check out my interview. Of course, that last statement was a loaded one. If you exercise, you’d better be interested in workout nutrition!

In response to your question, in much of the research we’re currently conducting, we’re using endurance athletes like yourself. Since intense endurance training seriously taxes the body’s physiological reserves, you’d better believe that proper nutrition is very important to recovery and subsequent performance.

While with weight lifting studies, we have to seek out biochemical markers of recovery (muscle glycogen, muscle protein synthesis, markers of damage, etc) to determine the effects of pre and post workout nutrition, but with endurance exercise studies, we find immediate and measurable increases in exercise performance with specific nutritional recovery tactics. This gives us some index of the importance of these strategies.

To be specific, we’re finding that consuming 3 nutritional beverages and 1 food meal (1 drink given immediately after exercise, 1 drink given an hour later, one drink given another hour later, and one meal given 2 hours later – each drink consisting of 0.8g of carbohydrate per kg and 0.4g of protein per kg) markedly improves performance recovery when compared to a variety of other feeding protocols including carbohydrates drinks alone plus the same food meal and placebo drinks given plus a really big food meal that contains the same energy intake as the other conditions. And the performance differences aren’t just significant, they’re big!

Therefore weight lifters can benefit from this type of nutrition via increases in lean body mass, protein turnover, and muscle recovery time and endurance athletes can benefit from increased protein turnover, improved muscle recovery time, and improved performance recovery.

Q: How come you guys aren’t taking on new clients? Isn’t that your business and all? Or perhaps you don’t like income, success, and all that other stuff.

A: Of course we like income, success, notoriety, and, don’t forget, helping understanding empathetic individuals like you in their personal quest to get into great shape. But, alas, when it comes to success, both Phil and I have better things to do - like play X-Box and stare at those 80’s style 3-D pictures that come to life if you screw up your eyes just right.

- OR –

A: I’m a full time PhD student and researcher who also teaches some classes, writes reasonably prolifically on training and nutrition, consults with a host of elite athletic teams, maintains a free web site, and tries to train seriously himself. And Phil’s a full time student who’s working on his own studies, maintaining this free web site (doing a whole lot more than I do), consulting with companies on web design and usability, writing training and nutrition articles, and training himself. To this end, we either take on new clients or sleep. Forgive us our transgressions if we choose to sleep.

Q: I'm an up and coming sports nutritionist and I’m wondering if you have any suggestions regarding the best way to break into this field? Any ideas for educational resources, journals, groups, or any other pertinent information that may help me along the way? I'm asking because you have the background and your doing the work that I want to be doing. (Edited for length.)

A: Here are some tips that I would suggest considering:

-Being that you have some time until the completion of your BSc degrees, I would stick to your academic work exclusively. Assuming you want to work in this field, you'll need to pursue graduate school. That’s another 2 - 5 years in addition to your undergraduate completion. During your undergraduate work, it's important to rock the academics so that you can get into a primo graduate school. Patience will be the key to your success now. I know you probably want to break into the field today but there's time and this field is only growing. Keep in mind that I didnt publish my first article until I was a PhD student.

-If you are interested, practice writing articles so that you can improve your skills. I wrote articles for 2 years before ever sending one off to a magazine. During this time I had my friends read them, I compared them against what's out there, and I improved them. This enabled me to hone my skills. Therefore when I sent off my first article it was published. After that, almost everything I've ever written has been published. The bottom line is that I don’t want you to start trying to write for the magazines until you are really ready. Otherwise you'll close doors instead of opening them. Even if you don’t consider writing to be an important part of what you’ll eventually do, it’s important to do these exercises to clarify your views.

-Start attending conferences in exercise physiology and sports nutrition - any and all of them. If you network at these conferences you'll be able to get to know everyone that you eventually will need to know. Oh yeah, you’ll learn some new stuff too.

-Always keep an open mind. Although some people may have ideas that are different from popular sports nutrition lore (on the conservative or on the extreme end), you may be able to learn from them. I've met a lot of brilliant professors who don't have the protein thing right for athletes, and most would therefore dismiss them immediately. However, these guys know a hell of a lot about other topics and have been an invaluable resource.

- Spend a few hours per week on pubmed. 1/2 of this time should be spent reading stuff you're interested in. The other 1/2 should be spent reading stuff in our field that you dont particularly care about just yet but one day might.

Also, I remember discussing a similar topic once before in a T-mag Gang of Five column so check this out when you get the chance.

Q: I've been reading your articles at t-mag and your own site and was wondering if you could recommend a specific exercise bike that could be used for the aerobic and anaerobic training you discuss in Getting in Shape By Training The Energy Systems, The Mad Max Program, and The Winning Formula. I was looking to buy a model for home, and wanted one that measured power output in watts, could time intervals, etc.

A: There are several advanced options that you can choose from. Sure, you could always buy a cheap exercise bike and that will be enough to get a good workout. However, if you want to truly use science to best improve your aerobic and anaerobic capacity by monitoring work output (as discussed in my “Mad Max” article), you’ll want to go with one of two options.

First, you could buy a standard upright bike from Life Fitness or some other fitness equipment manufacturer. If you decide to go with this option, ask the manufacturer for the bike that allows for the following features:

• The ability to use a manual programming option.
• The ability to rapidly change levels (i.e. workloads) with the touch of a button.
• The ability to accommodate watt outputs up to 400-500W (your 30s sprints may need to be done in the 400W range while your rest intervals may be done in the 100W range).
• Hyperbolic functioning (the ability to maintain a constant and known watt output regardless of pedal speed). This is crucial for the recruitment of fast twitch fibers and for high intensity cycling).
• Heart rate monitoring

Another series of (perhaps better) options is to purchase a trainer device with a computer interface. This device allows you to attach your own bike and preprogram an unlimited number of workouts. Or alternatively you could buy one of their bikes. Then, all you need to do is construct interval courses and ride away. Some companies who make such products are Comp-Trainer, Cardgirus, and Tacx. Assuming you have your own bike, this may be the cheaper route although it will take a bit more time to figure out how to use the equipment.

Wanna drop us a line? Contact us at info@johnberardi.com