Is anyone here a nutritionist or sport medicine doctor?

I have several questions about value of sport beverages for mountain bikers. There are several kinds of beverages on the market: endurox, gatorade, creatine etc...

Are these beverages actually improve biker performance? or
Are they just marketing gimmick?

Is is safe to take creatine to increase my muscle mass for biking? I really don't want to be body builder.

What nutrition supplements can I take to gain weight without detrimental consequences?

Hi picard120

I would forget about all the so called performance enhancement sporting beverages, they are pointless. A banana, a marmalade roll and some diluted fruit juice is much more beneficial and cheaper also.

As for building up the leg muscles, leg muscle mass has nothing what so ever in Mountain bike performance because it is essentially an aerobic sport. Its all about how efficient your cardio vascular system is i.e. your resting heart rate and the maximal oxygen volume of your physiology. i.e the maximal power output versus your weight.

I wouldn't bother with the creatine stuff either, fish and chips tastes better and has more nutrients also.

If you have a balanced diet you don't need any nutrient supplements either.

I'm not a nutritionist, or sports med doctor....

Creatine, make sure your kidney function is fine first.

I tend to agree wtih bentirran. Most of the point of sports drink is to get electrolytes into your body quickly, instead of pure water. As most of us know, overloading on just water can lead to a hyponatremic state, which can kill ("water toxicity"). As long as you take some food, a powerbar, whatever, water is just fine to drink.

From personal experience with my own weight lifting, I've found that if I work out enough that I'm starting to build muscle, I'll crave protein. I've been known to eat a protein bar (one of those 22g Power Bars), 2 eggs, and about 1/2 lbs. of ground beef after a work out. It only happened a few times, but the muscle definetely appeared.

Anecdotally, I knew a few of the football players in high school that used the stuff from GNC, and it seemed to work fine. Muscle building, though, is done through weight resistance, not necessarily aerobic work. So unless you plan on lifting weights in addition to cardio, it'll probably just waste money.

Does the GNC stuff have steroids in them?

I want to bulk up a bit without looking like the governator. I am just too skinny.

Is it safe to eat raw eggs for protein source?

Hi Picard120

I've been to the GNC website. I doubt very much that the supplements shown on their website contain such powerful metabolic drugs such as steroids. I would also strongly state that taking steroids without medical supervision is extremely dangerous to your long term health no matter what anyone says. Steroids can seriously affect the heart, liver and kidneys and make you go a bit mad.

Taking any performance enhancing drugs when competitive cycling is pointless anyway. It is called cheating and its use has severely damaged the image of competitive cycling. There has been many a promising young cyclist that has died in their sleep taking drugs such as EPO without constant medical supervision. In fact I have known some clean international competitive cyclists, including a world hour record holder and an international track sprinter who have despaired at the situation with drug abuse in the sport that they have given up competitive cycling because they feel it is not worth it anymore.

It used to be safe to eat raw eggs, but now unless you know where they are sourced, the eggs can be contaminated with salmonella. This is the result of industrial farm practises. In the United States I doubt if anyone’s diet has a protein deficiency unless they were Vegan. I would suspect that most have multiple times the daily requirement of protein in their diet. Adding addition protein either in the form of raw eggs or body building supplements will only cause problems for the digestive system i.e constipation. Therefore I would forget about all the nutritional supplements, drugs and gym folklore about how to eat. Just concentrate on good quality organic nutritious food, eating plenty of fruits, vegatables and porridge oats and limit the amount of red meat to one or two meals per week by increasing the amount of fish you eat. Also the less processed food you consume the better. So enjoy your food, being a cyclist you should be able to eat lots without getting fat.

There's a big difference between legitimate supplements and metabolic drugs. A lot of people have totally unrealistic expectations when it comes to nutritional supplements. You can eat a ton of protein and you won't turn into an Arnold unless you follow a strict workout plan. But if you're training very hard then your nutritional requirements are going to be much higher than those of an average Joe. Hence taking proper supplements in addition to a sound diet will allow you to train harder and develop a stronger physique. On the other hand, if you train hard but your diet is inadequate your body will break down, you will end up sore and your performance will suffer.

As others have pointed out, you will not gain any mass if all you do is cardio (cycling). It takes strength exercises, either weights or bodyweight, to build up mass. Doing excessive cardio will actually reduce your mass, fat as well as muscle. That's the reason why marathon runners are so thin.

If your workouts involve a lot of cycling you should definitely eat a lot of protein to help rebuild your muscle fibers. But if you want to gain functional mass, reduce aerobic work (slow, long distance) and do shorter but more intense anaerobic workouts (sprints, fartlek, intervals, Tabata) maybe 3x a week. Combine with strength workouts and you will notice a considerable improvement in strength as well as stamina. Anaerobic work in fact improves your aerobic capacity as well but not the other way around. This supposes you are in a pretty good shape already and follow a good diet. Taking supplements such as protein, a good weight gainer (complex carbs, protein), maybe multivitamins if necessary might help a lot, especially if you are a naturally lightly built person with a fast metabolysm.

Creatine is no wonder supplement. It improves your short term anaerobic endurance somewhat, giving you a slight boost for a few seconds of intense exertion. When boxing I could notice a small improvement in performance as boxing is about short bursts of very strenuous activity. Though in the long run I think it's a fairly worthless supplement for boxers. Weight lifters may benefit more from creatine, especially on lower rep sets. If you decide to take creatine make sure to do research first and only buy powder. Liquid creatine is unstable and for the most part doesn't work. The real advantage of creatine for building mass is that it allows you to lift heavier weights, hence build more muscle. As a side effect it also temporarily makes your muscles look bigger because it charges the muscle cells with water so to speak. But once you stop taking creatine (usual creatine cycle takes about 8 weeks) then these superficial gains will disappear with water loss. Which isn't really important thought as it's only cosmetic and does not in itself produce any functional gains.

Anyway, you will not become a bodybuilder unless you train and eat like one. Understand what the supplements are all about and use them if you have a valid reason to. You also need to understand the difference between functional and nonfunctional mass. Bodybuilding produces a lot of hypertrophy but not much in the way of real strength gains. If you are concerned about functional muscle (eg. performance sports, cycling, weight lifting, martial arts) do not obsess with increasing your mass but rather strive to improve your strength and stamina while following a good wholesome diet. Good physique will follow.

Lots of good advice from Tom_L, but I would caution just one thing. That is the differences between aerobic and anaerobic workouts. It is true that anaerobic workouts will improve stamina and strength, but there should be a point attained in the level of aerobic workouts before moving on to anaerobic activity.
Most road cyclists starting out will have trouble achieving more than 25 miles in a work out session and will feel completely exhausted at the end and may even take 2hrs to complete. This is because their heart muscle is not developed enough to cope. Their heart blood volumes are at a level the majority of general population has. Aerobic training will slowly increase the size of the heart over a period of 2-5 years to the point where the heart blood volume is roughly twice that of the beginner when he/she first started out cycling. Resting heart rate will fall from the average of 70-80 to 40-50 BPM. Anaerobic training should only really be started once a base aerobic fitness level is achieved because anaerobic training has the effect of increasing the heart wall thickness rather than its volume. I would say that aerobic base level training would be been achieved once you are capable of cycling 60 miles under 3 hrs or 25 miles in 1 hr.
Competitive cycling will give you plenty of opportunities to carry out anaerobic activity, but without the foundation of the aerobic base, you will achieve nothing in competitive cycling, because you will probably give up competing before you are ready to take on others in a competitive race.

Much agreed, that's an important point. Intense anaerobic workouts are very hard and should not be attempted unless you have a solid foundation.

Hmm, well, creatine will help add some bulk, but you really have to make sure that you get enough water in your system if you are going to dose creatine enough to make a difference. You will also likely want to be consuming more pottassium (those bananas and potatoes), you might look at getting something called nu-salt which is pottassium chloride as a replacement for table salt.

I would caution against raw eggs as well. Besides the salmonella threat, you don't need all that cholesterol added to your system. There are good egg substitutes out there that are a lot safer pathogenically and also no fat and no cholesterol.

As far as consuming fish goes, I would caution that you be very suspicious of where the fish comes from. Unless you have a very reliable source, you face a siginificant risk of chemical contamination. Shellfish also are higher in Cholesterol. Before I eat any fish, I find out where it was caught, where it was processed, and how it will be prepared. If it is farm raised anything fish, forget it.

Also, be careful about eating chicken breasts. You would be surprised how much cholesterol there is in a chicken brest.

Man, eating has never been so scary.

As long as you follow up with a shot of olive oil and a glass of red wine, the cholesterol will be under control