EndurElite Chief Endurance Officer Matt Mosman discusses how endurance athletes can train their stomach for optimal performance.
Video Transcription:
How Runners, Cyclists, OCR, And Other Endurance Athletes Can Train Their Gut
Good morning, family of fast, Matt Mosman, the Chief Endurance Officer over at EndurElite, coming at you today with an Endurance fast fact. Now, we all know we need to train our body to perform optimally. But what if I told you you could also train your gut to perform optimally? Now, I'm not talking about like eating a ton of hot dogs like Joey Chestnut and that Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest. That's just darn gross.
I'm talking more about the strategic consumption of carbohydrates as it relates to ultra-endurance events and how you can train your gut to be able to basically utilize and digest more carbohydrates to keep blood glucose levels elevated and help you going and stronger for longer. So, how do you train the gut? Now, if you're consuming about 30 grams of carbohydrate per hour for races under two hours, you probably don't have to train your gut. And the same thing goes up to about 60 grams of carbs an hour, when you're doing like a two to four-hour-long race.
But once you get above that, your body prefers multiple carbohydrate sources and can utilize up to 90 grams of carbs an hour, which is a ton of carbohydrates that a lot of people won't be able to handle really well unless they trained the gut to be able to do so. So, here is the quick and dirty on how to train your gut if you're an ultra-endurance athlete. And I'm going to pull up my research paper here so I get it exactly right for you.
So, here's how you do it. Periods of at least one month consuming a diet of at least 6.5 grams carbohydrates per kilogram body weight per day, of which 1.5 per kilogram body weight is consumed during training sessions. So that's a lot, a lot of carbohydrates. So if you do this for about a month, your gut will probably adequately change.
Now, when you get in the races, you want to start consuming up to 90 grams of carbs an hour after about hour 2.5 to 3. Before then you can probably do 30 to 60, but then you're gonna want to bump it up to 90 grams of carbs an hour with those ultra-endurance events. Again, so your body has the glucose/energy to fuel muscular contractions in endurance exercise. So, that is all I have on training the gut.
And other news, I'm going on vacation next week. When I'm back in Iowa, I'm going to be shooting a few videos. One will be pretty interesting about my story as an endurance athlete, and how I all got started running and biking, and then how that kind of led me to what I'm doing now, which sometimes I don't even know what I'm doing. So we'll have some videos from when I'm gone on vacation. And that should be pretty interesting...tell a little, few stories.
You'll probably see me drinking a lot of beer, possibly shooting some guns. So, stay tuned for that as well. All right, my endurance friends, that is all I have for today. If you want other videos like this on endurance training, nutrition, and supplementation, subscribe to the EndureElite YouTube channel or head on over to the EndurElite blog at www.endurelite.com. Get social with us on Instagram, and our Facebook training and nutrition club page. And until next time my endurance friends, stay fueled, stay focused, stay fast, and stay informed.
