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Post-race Recovery: Fuel for the Next Performance

Welcome to Endurance and Nutrition with Dave Scott, where we cover topics such as nutritional considerations for training, competition and recovery to help you achieve increased endurance and reach your optimal performance. Dave is a six time winner of the Iron Man Triathlon World Championship and one of the world's most prominent authorities on endurance athlete training and competition. Now, here's Dave Scott.

Dave Scott: Hi, I'm Dave Scott and welcome to our fourth Podcast on enduranceandnutrition.com. In the first three I had two sterling guests. Simon Lessing, thing we talked about on our first one - about the reasons why muscles get tired and how you prepare yourself athletically and nutritionally for a heavy train or a race and second Podcast I have Davis Finney, one of the all time great Olympic cyclists who lives here in Boulder, Colorado and we talked about the 48 hours prior to competition. What can you do for preparation and nutritionally what were some of the things that he actually did and he shared some great insight, and I had Simon Lessing again on for the third one, we actually talked about race day. What are the things you can do in preparation for the race and how can you overcome some of the hurdles that you may run into and we also talked about some of the nutritional avenues that can keep you running for the longest period of time. Today, in our fourth one, I'm pleased to have on our guest expert, Dr. Robert Portman. I've known Robert, as I'll refer to him, for a number of years. He's a recent author of two books, Nutrient Timing and the Performance Zone and has written numerous articles. He's also the Chief Scientific Officer at Pacific Health Labs, a nutrition technology company that has created a number of innovative nutritional products that are on the market right now and welcome Robert.

Robert Portman: Welcome, it's fun to be here.

Dave Scott: Well we're going to - today we're going to talk about one of the areas of your huge expertise and I'm just going to sit back and listen Robert. So - and that's what we do recovery wise at the end of your exercise day how can you recover nutritionally so that you can optimize your fitness and your condition to perform the next day and the next day after? It's kind of an area that I sort of fumbled into years ago as an athlete not really knowing what to do after I finished exercise. We'd essentially anything and everything that we could put in our stomachs and say, well gee that feels kind of heavy, that feels kind of dense and you sort of roll some dice in doing that. Before we talk about that I just want to lead in with the first question. As I mentioned, Simon, Davis and I we talked about fueling before and during exercise, and I just want to throw a question to you Robert, if we had to pick one of the fueling stages before, during and afterwards, is any one of those times better then other? If an athlete has only time to fuel before is that the best thing to do, or if he can grab something while he's exercising, or let's say he limits the first two and he just fuels afterwards, from your scientific viewpoint is one better then the other?

Robert Portman: Well if you look at the three stages, probably the refueling before is the least important only for the simple reason, that's going to be more of a function of your overall nutrition so you really should be taking care of your hydration needs between workouts. You should be taking a good diet and that will usually suffice. I mean if you want to take the extra step by taking a sports drink before, it sort of tops off your blood rate, is your blood glucose and prepares you. You certainly cannot if you're a tri-athlete ignore during for the simple reason just the extent of the competition means you're going to be depleting a lot of your glycogens stores. You're going to be dehydrating your body so you can't ignore that. In terms of raising the training level, in terms of helping your muscles come back stronger the next day, clearly the most important phase is after and that probably is interesting scientifically because that was probably the most ignored nutritional phase up until about eight or nine years ago when a number of scientists, and I was involved with it, began looking at that recovery phase and we recognized it really played such a critical role in raising training level for athletes.

Dave Scott: Now how about if someone just has an hour of exercise? Is that statement still stay in effect? Is it really afterwards, that's the most important one as far as fueling?

Robert Portman: Well let me put aside, sort of puncture a myth about how long you need to exercise before there's a recovery. We focus so much on duration and it - that's really not the key; it's really the intensity level. You can walk and probably have enough glycogen in your muscles to go for two hours or so, so at a low intensity you certainly have enough glycogen, recovery's not going to be so critical, but we know athletes under heavy intensity can actually deplete their muscle glycogen stores within 20 minutes. So the recovery and your need for recovery are really going to be a function of just how intense your exercise is, one hour or more.

Dave Scott: One of the things that we've added to our website enduranceandnutrition.com is that we put a number of charts up actually Robert that you've provided via your two books that I've mentioned in the opening and if you just take a look at the website they will sort of steer you and guide you through actually the caloric replacement, electrolyte levels that you need to take and also taking a look at your sweat loss which can look at all the different phases of fueling before, during and after. Robert, just a second question, there's a term that we're both familiar with and it's called the window of opportunity post exercise and it's a period right after exercise where a lot of athletes finish the exercise session and quite often depending on the environmental conditions outside and also the availability. They don't feel like taking in any type of nutrient calories, what is that window of opportunity and how critical is it as far as your fueling?

Robert Portman: The window of opportunity is really a metabolic term and what we've know found out is that right after exercise, probably as a result of the exercise stimulus, the anabolic enzymes, in other words, the enzymes responsible for synthetic processes for building up your muscles are in a heightened state. So if you take in the right combinations of nutrients, and what we found is that carbs and proteins at a 4:1 ratio are really ideal. What you have here is a situation where the engine is really primed to rebuild the muscle and all you have to do is provide the right fuel and that's really what that window of opportunity is. It's a window that really doesn't stay open that long.

Dave Scott: What happens if they miss this window? The finite amount of time of this window is really what? I mean it's probably somewhat individual but - and I always tell me athletes it's up to a certain point, but since you're the expert today I'm going to let you just fill in the gaps.

Robert Portman: Well what it really - the window of opportunity is really a function of your insulin levels and although insulin has a bad rap because carbohydrates in the general population tend to have a bad rap unnecessarily. So, insulin is really the master recovery hormone, it really controls most of your synthetic processes, whether its protein synthesis, amino acid transport, glucose transport, glycogen synthesis and what happens after exercise insulin levels begin to peak and than they begin to fall and that really parallels the synthetic or loss of synthetic activity that you see in the muscle after exercise. So after about one hour it falls off pretty dramatically from one to two hours it gets down to maybe 25 to 30% at what it was say at 30 or 40 minutes. Then, interestingly enough, because you mentioned the problem that tri-athletes tend to verbalize is they're not hungry and they eat the calories later but what happens is four to eight hours after exercise your body actually becomes insulin resistant, so what this means is consuming calories in that four to eight hour period really have almost a negligible effect in terms of rebuilding muscle glycogen stores and stimulating synthetic processes.

Dave Scott: So they miss that hour, they really miss the opportunity to rebuild and repair for the next training session or the next day.

Robert Portman: The results are pretty dramatic. I mean we've just completed numbers of studies where you measure the delay and you see that drop off very considerably. You can lose 60 to 70% of your muscle synthetic activities and when I say synthetic activities I'm really talking about replacing muscle glycogen, restoring muscle protein levels, rebuilding muscle protein, so there's a whole sort of galaxy of effects that you miss out on and it becomes that much more difficult to come back stronger the next day.

Dave Scott: How about the concern - a lot of times when - and not to be gender specific on this, but women quite often say, well gee I don't want to eat before, I'm going to go as far as I can without any fuel and I'm certainly not going to eat afterwards because I want to burn fat. Where does that myth lie in this whole function of missing that window of opportunity?

Robert Portman: It's truly a problem. I do a lot of lecturing to college coaches who often coach female athletes and that's exactly what happens is because of their concern about weight they will finish a hard exercise, and we're talking about some pretty serious athletes, that finish a hard exercise and they don't eat. Now they pick up those calories later on in the day, we've shown that time and time again, that just because you don't eat after an exercise bout that doesn't mean you won't eat those calories for the rest of the day. You tend to pick them up at later meals, but what happens is by missing that window of opportunity you lose some of the major beneficial effects. It's certainly a problem because it's a mindset that has no basis in physiology and in fact there's certain data going back to where I explained before about this insulin resistance. Taking the calories right after exercise will actually build lean body mass. Taking them four hours later you have a greater likelihood that it'll be converted into fat so it actually works against you.

Dave Scott: Sure, I know we've talked about this a lot because I have a handful of top professional women athletes in running and also triathlon and a couple in cycling and I've mentioned this many, many times to them and they're sort of taken back that it's sort of counter intuitive to do this, but yet the research certainly shows that they should eat during that window and to really enhance that observation. Robert you mentioned the 4:1 ratio, is there any other ideal nutritional components that we should consider in a type of drink or gel or fluid? Now we're not having a bowl of beans when we finish the exercise, that's a great carbohydrate but it's not the perfect thing to put in your tank during that window. What really is that ideal nutrition compliment?

Robert Portman: Well what we looked at and probably a good example of that is Endurox R-4 because it was developed specifically for recovery. It has antioxidants in there, ENC, which we show has some beneficial effect. It also has glutamine and although it's somewhat controversial your glutamine stores are depleted during exercise and glutamine is probably the number one, it represents about 70% of the amino acids within muscles and it is depleted and glutamine is believed to have some effect on the immune system. So if you look at a specific recovery drink like Endurox R-4 that certainly has the calories necessary but even the sports drink such as Accelerate, which again, has that 4:1 - and that 4:1 it's not just a marketing ploy. I mean the reason you need that 4:1 is the carbohydrate in a sense is the stimulus for insulin, so once you stimulate insulin then you're going to get all of the additional benefits of protein utilization.

Dave Scott: Now as far as this 4:1, I mean you're recommending fluid replacement drinks with a 4:1 ratio and you mentioned Accelerate. With that drink - now what if someone says well listen I want to make this doubly potent, how about if I add a little more protein or I increase the sugar concentration, I boost the carbohydrate levels in that, what do you think of that?

Robert Portman: Well there's two flaws there. Once you boost the protein, one of the problems and that's why the research was so interesting and how we arrived at the 4:1. If you take a large amount of protein after a workout, and this is always - has been the habit of say the body builders or the weight training people because protein is the hero nutrient and we can't get enough of it. If you take that after aerobic exercise it's actually working against you because what happens is if protein slows gastric emptying, so taking protein is actually going to slow down the absorption of - too much protein will slow the absorption of carbohydrate and the other nutrients that you need. It'll even slow down the absorption of fluid, so too much protein actually works against you. The same with carbohydrate, what we have found is there is a peak amount of carbohydrate that your body can absorb and John Ivy at University of Texas did some really elegant work here where he showed that if you kept increasing the amount of carbohydrate, you didn't get any effect in terms of glycogen storage. Now you were certainly taking in calories which certainly are going to work against you in terms of weight control, but you weren't getting any beneficial effect. So that 4:1 ratio is really ideal because you don't want too much carbohydrate because you're going to wind up converting that extra carbohydrate into fat. If you have too much protein it slows down the process.

Dave Scott: Well how about people that have multiple sessions of exercise during the day? For example, they get up early, they head out for a morning run and than at lunchtime or after work late in the day they're doing another endurance related activity. How do you advise them to fuel and what's the most important thing? I know it's kind of a big, broad question but what do you recommend for fueling? I mean obviously this window of opportunity which we've already discussed, but is there anything else that they can do in between those sessions so that they're fueling is right on for the - particularly for the second session?

Robert Portman: Well a couple of things they should be concerned with depending on where they are. If it's very hot you have to worry about re-hydration and remember that dehydration is cumulative. So if you're doing a hard workout in the morning you're dehydrated, you really have to focus number one on consuming about 150% of what you think you lost before your next workout because you're going to certainly feel that in the next workout and than if you're doing two a day on multiple days in a row, that response becomes cumulative. But in the example you gave where you're doing a hard workout in the morning and than in the afternoon, there's enough time that you can treat each one almost as a separate recovery phase, so considerable recovery drink after each one. When you start running into workouts and/or competitions where one comes right after another, such as we have in swimming or in wrestling or those types of sports, there you're better off just fueling with a 4:1 basically sports drink which doesn't have as many calories, it's quicker absorbed. But when you have an interval of six to eight hours I would just treat it as two separate distinct sessions.

Dave Scott: Robert you mentioned 100% of their water loss and one of the things that I advise my athletes to do is to weigh themselves nude before they exercise and weigh themselves post exercise and you can actually get an idea of what the total sweat loss is and it - let's say for example they lose a pound, 16 ounces, your 150% means that they would have to continue to drink so that they consume roughly 24 ounces or a pound and a half, 150% of that initial loss, correct?

Robert Portman: That's correct and here's something to really consider. That - and there's a study that I'll just briefly elude to that was done by Dr. John Siefert at St. Cloud University, that even if you're severely dehydrated and you're consuming water, you're still excreting about 30 or 40% of that water leaves your body, so it's not staying with you.

Dave Scott: Right.

Robert Portman: Even in a fairly dehydrated state and in fact Dr. Siefert did a study where he compared water, a carb protein sports drink and than a carb drink and so he used Accelerate and Gatorade and what he found was that the athletes who re-hydrated with a carb protein had a 15% better improvement then the Gatorade or carbohydrate electrolyte sports drink and 40% better then water. So depending on what you drink as your re-hydration drink, you either have to take 150% or sometimes even a little bit more.

Dave Scott: Right, well I know this from personal experience. During a long clinic down at Dallas in July, one of the steamy sections of this country, and we were outside all day long and we had a bike run - or a run initially and than a long bike and than a swim session afterwards and I was out in the sun for about seven or eight hours. I remember I came back from that and I had some pretty severe symptoms and I always thought I was lizard, I could handle any kind of climate, but for about three or four days I had severe dehydration after that one long day in Dallas. Nothing against the -

Robert Portman: Dallas can be very, very brutal. I mean I -

Dave Scott: Yeah they're tough down there. I'll tell you in the south they're really hearty folks. Hey Robert, you had mentioned glutamine, you also had mentioned the word immune system and I think all athletes are always kind of worried when they keep pushing the throttle about how they can rebound not only athletically but also to avoid any upper respiratory tract infections or colds, and so on. How does a fueling after exercise really enhance that immune system?

Robert Portman: Well it's interesting because when you exercise you release a catabolic hormone called Cortisol and it seems so unfortunate because you exercise to get in good health and to feel good, and yet when you exercise it places enormous stress on the body and exercise believe or not we were not built for exercise.

Dave Scott: Well I know you aren't.

Robert Portman: That's nothing relatively new in our evolutionary track.

Dave Scott: Is that why you've stopped for the last 25 years?

Robert Portman: No that is absolutely - what a base can art that is.

Dave Scott: All right, that is kind -

Robert Portman: While we're getting personal now.

Dave Scott: Excuse me, go ahead and finish your comment.

Robert Portman: But anyway, you release this catabolic hormone, Cortisol, and Cortisol produces a number of very negative effects. It causes the breakdown of proteins so the body actually cannibalizes its own muscle protein for energy. It also has a very, very negative effect on the immune system so one of the things you'd like to be able to do is sort of reduce the Cortisol levels and fortunately there are some things that you can do and I know it sounds like a broken record, but they found that if you use carbohydrate or carbohydrate protein drinks during exercise you can actually reduce Cortisol levels during exercise and than you can further reduce them with a post exercise recovery drink. So that's one thing that certain has an effect. The question on glutamine, I think it makes sense. I don't think we've seen a definitive study on there but it certainly is what I call a why not statement. There's certainly evidence that glutamine will have a benefit, why not use it?

Dave Scott: Right.

Robert Portman: The other thing too is the overtraining syndrome which we talk about. Where athletes they start working out and they work out harder, and harder, and harder and it's not unusual they get sick and we see this with professional basketball players or football players when they have a long season. The hockey players they start to be much more susceptible to upper respiratory infections. What you really have to do is give your body a rest. I mean you have to take a day off during the week and believe it or not, most of the adaptations to greater muscle strength and growth occur during that rest period. So that really has to be part of the process to avoid the overtraining syndrome and the upper respiratory infections that occur.

Dave Scott: Right. I always advise my athletes, I said we've got a three part puzzle. You've got to have progression in your training, there's got to be overload and than you have to build in some recovery in that program and I think quite often the recovery is always on the tail end and the last thing that we consider. But if you put in the first of those three, it becomes a priority and you see athletes being a little bit more resilient. It only took me about 25 years to personally figure that out, but now that I -

Robert Portman: Well we know you're a quick study on that.

Dave Scott: Well one flaw in my program. Robert, just the last thing, one final question. If you're on the cutting edge of the scientific findings in the scientific community, you've mentioned several things today in our discussion. Is there anything else that athletes can do post exercise recovery that's legal? That they can say, boy I - this will really give me the boost. Is there anything else out there that we haven't drawn on already?

Robert Portman: Well some of them are fairly traditional. I mean massage clearly has some benefits there. There's certainly some supplements that people have looked in terms of ______, etc., but if you look at the doses and what the effects are it's pretty marginal. There's a lot of products out there that make some pretty extravagant claims. I know there's some Chinese herbs that their companies have out there and we looked at those years ago, we're actually doing some controlled studies and we recognized they had no effects. They weren't the mystery ingredients that the Chinese swim team was using. So I keep -

Dave Scott: They used something.

Robert Portman: Pardon? Yeah they were but they were steroids, it wasn't any mystery herbs.

Dave Scott: Well I don't want to say that.

Robert Portman: But what I really think you go back to basics and I think some of the points that you made in terms of the regimen, in terms of just paying attention to recovery nutrition, if you can refuel properly, all these things work in tandem to help you recover better and keep you stronger, and I like to keep it down to the basics. I mean there are no mystery things out there, just like there's no mystery way that you're going to run a strong triathlon without training.

Dave Scott: I found that out that training does pay off. Anyway Robert, we're going to wrap it up here and I just would like to thank you for coming on today; Dr. Robert Portman who certainly is our expert over our four part Podcast along with Simon Lessing and Davis Finney and a little bit from my side, and please look at our website and some of the other materials that we have on there, enduranceandnutrition.com and hopefully you'll join us for a future one. Thanks again Robert.

Robert Portman: It's a pleasure.

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