How Chocolate Can Help Your Workout

So, first we learn of all the ways coffee can increase performance - and now, sweet mother of god, scientists discover that small [SMALL!] amount of dark chocolate can also increase time to fatigue and performance. Nice...

For those who worry that fitness requires nutritional denial, there is good news, with caveats. Auspicious new science suggests that chocolate can have a surprisingly large effect on the body’s response to exercise, although not in the ways that many of us might expect, and certainly not at the dosages most might hope for.

Researchers have known for some time that chocolate has healthful effects, and recent epidemiological studies have shown that people who regularly indulge in moderate amounts of dark chocolate are less likely to develop high blood pressure or heart disease or suffer strokes. But chocolate’s potential role in exercise performance had not been studied, or probably even much considered, until scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and other institutions gave middle-aged, sedentary male mice a purified form of cacao’s primary nutritional ingredient, known as epicatechin, and had the mice work out. Epicatechin is a flavonol, a class of molecules that are thought to have widespread effects on the body.

The mice were given small liquid doses of epicatechin twice a day. A separate control group of mice drank equal amounts of water.

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Both groups were divided into two. Half of the animals in each group began a light exercise routine, which consisted of strolling on a treadmill for a short period each day. The regimen was not meant to get the animals into tiptop shape, only to get them moving. After 15 days, all of the animals completed a treadmill test, during which they ran to exhaustion. The researchers also biopsied the animals’ back leg muscles.

By and large, the animals that had been drinking water were the first to give out during the treadmill test. They became exhausted more quickly than the animals that had received epicatechin. Even the control mice that had lightly exercised grew tired more quickly than the nonexercising mice that had been given epicatechin. The fittest rodents, however, were those that had combined epicatechin and exercise. They covered about 50 percent more distance than the control animals.

The muscle biopsies offered some explanation for their dominance. The muscles of all of the animals that had been given epicatechin contained new capillaries, as well as biochemical markers indicating that their cells were making new mitochondria. Mitochondria are structures in cells that produce cellular energy. The more functioning mitochondria a muscle contains, the healthier and more fatigue-resistant it is.

The leg muscles of the mice that had been given epicatechin and exercised displayed far more mitochondrial activity than the leg muscles of the control mice. Even the mice that had drunk epicatechin and not exercised contained markers of increased mitochondrial health, suggesting that the flavonol prompts a physiological reaction even among the sedentary. But that response is greatly heightened by exercise, no matter how slight.

Exactly how epicatechin intensified the mouse muscles’ response to exercise is not yet known, but “it seems likely that muscle cells contain specific receptors for epicatechin,” said Dr. Francisco Villarreal, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the authors of the study, which was published last week in The Journal of Physiology. Epicatechin binds to the receptors and “induces an integrated response that includes structural and metabolic changes in skeletal and cardiac muscles resulting in greater endurance capacity,” the study concluded.

Mice are not people, though, and it remains to be seen whether the fitness-boosting effects of epicatechin will be identical in humans, especially since most of us would be getting the substance not in purified liquid form but in chocolate. “Processing destroys epicatechin,” Dr. Villarreal said, so heavily processed milk chocolate contains almost none of the flavonol, while cacao-rich dark chocolate has far more.

And even for those who adore dark chocolate, there is a catch. “A very small amount is probably enough,” Dr. Villarreal said. Extrapolating from his group’s mouse data, he said, five grams of dark chocolate daily, or just a sixth of an ounce — about half of one square of a typical chocolate bar — is probably a reasonable human dose if your aim is to intensify the effects of a workout.

Sadly, “more is not better,” he continued. “More could lessen or even undo” any benefits, he said, by overloading the muscles’ receptors or otherwise skewing the body’s response.

But given human nature, microdoses of chocolate may be impractical, underscoring the difficulties of using nutrition to bolster fitness. Dr. Villarreal’s colleagues regularly filch from his cache of dark-chocolate bars, he said, and despite his admonitions, they invariably finish the entire thing. “I keep telling them that’s too much,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. They want to eat the whole thing and,” no matter what the expert tells them, “they do.”

Coffee: Part 2

here is an article I found on the triathlon site "LAVA" - worth reading...next, I will let you know what has been found to also help improve performance [aside from Viagra]: choc-o-late!!

Refill, Please: Caffeine's Performance Benefits

Four ways your morning brew can make you not only faster, but fitter

Here's some good news for all of you who frequent coffee shops after your weekend workouts. Caffeine is a stimulant consumed by approximately 90 percent of the population on a regular basis and is considered to be an ergogenic (performance enhancing) substance. It is by far the most popular drug available and can be found in everything from coffee and tea to chocolate, sodas and energy drinks. Half of all American adults are reported to consume at least 300mg of caffeine a day, and most use it to keep the neurons of the brain firing to get through the work day!

While caffeine can assist you at work, its benefits for your next race are even more promising. Caffeine has been shown to improve muscular performance, decrease the perception of exercise effort, sustain alertness and cognitive function, and increase fat breakdown and carbohydrate oxidation. It has even been shown to enhance recovery by assisting the body as it restores muscle glycogen. Here are four ways your morning best friend can benefit you as an endurance athlete, and especially in races.

Photo by Rex Roof

1. Increased power output: Caffeine enhances nerve cell activity (how frequently our nerves are firing) which increases muscle power output. By increasing how frequently our nerves are firing, caffeine increases the number of muscle fibers that can be recruited to perform and sustain higher levels of power output. Additionally, regardless of whether you lift weights for muscular endurance or strength and power, caffeine has been shown to increase the muscular work you can generate for the type of lifting you are doing. As a result, greater gains from the weight room can be achieved and hopefully translated onto the racing course.

2. Dopamine production: Our ability to maintain these high levels of muscular performance is even further enhanced by caffeine’s ability to increase dopamine (a substance in the brain) which activates the pleasure centers of the brain. Dopamine helps you sustain alertness and cognitive function; an extremely important benefit for any triathlete-especially in the middle of a long course event when you have to stay motivated.

2. Increased metabolism: Fat mobilization is increased and our body’s ability to use carbohydrates becomes more efficient when ingest these macronutrients with caffeine. This helps keep the energy coming during the many hours of training and especially on race day.

4. Recovery: Caffeine’s role in performance comes full circle by helping to restore muscle glycogen following glycogen-depleting training sessions. Also, ingesting caffeine in the 24-48 hours after a muscle damaging exercise session or race can minimize the pain and muscle tenderness that accompanies this sort of new and novel work for the body. By reducing the amount of pain and soreness, athletes typically can return to training at their desired intensity much sooner following a tough race.

How to use caffeine

Everyone responds to caffeine in a different manner so learning your body’s response and optimizing your doses is critical to taking advantage of all its benefits. Often athletes find the benefits of caffeine to be greatest in competition when consuming only the minimal amount necessary for training, and saving the maximal dose for the big day. Timing the right dose of caffeine is the key to optimizing its use.

For training sessions or races that are less than one hour (i.e. that 10k you decided to jump in to keep training fun and stimulate your competitive side) consuming up to 3 milligrams of caffeine per kilogram of body weight will work for most people (see table below). Studies have shown that upwards of 6-10 milligrams per kilogram of body weight can be consumed if caffeine is well tolerated. Regardless of the dose that suits you the best, caffeine is most beneficial when ingested in the hour to 30 minutes before competition. In events longer than one hour, such as long-distance triathlons and marathons, consume your pre-race dose in the hour to 30 minutes before and then add approximately 15-30mg of caffeine every 45 minutes thereafter to sustain the desired effects. The form here doesn’t matter much, and most prefer a variety of caffeine sources throughout a long race including caffeinated gels, sports drinks, flat cola or a pill taken with a non-caffeinated carbohydrate/electrolyte beverage.

For the endurance athlete, caffeine is a promising ergogenic aid that can enhance performance and accelerate recovery. Knowing your body well and learning its response to caffeine will help you identify the optimal dose necessary to benefit your training and competition. So grab your cup of Joe … it’s time to train!

Caffeine content of common products, in milligrams*

Dunkin' Donuts, brewed, 16 oz (480 mL): 143-206

Generic brewed, 8 oz (240 mL): 95-200

Generic brewed, decaffeinated, 8 oz (240 mL): 2-12

Starbucks Espresso, 1 oz (30 mL): 58-75

Starbucks Vanilla Latte, 16 oz (480 mL): 150

Black tea, 8 oz (240 mL): 40-120

Starbucks Tazo Chai Tea Latte, 16 oz (480 mL): 100

Coca-Cola Classic: 35

Diet Coke: 47

Red Bull, 8.3 oz (250 mL): 76

Ben and Jerry's Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, 8 oz (208 g): 84

Hershey's Special Dark Chocolate bar, 1.45 oz (41 g): 31

!

Coffeee: 9 Performance Boosting Reasons to Drink Up

The idea of using caffeine to improve workout performance is hardly new. For more than a hundred years scientists have been studying the way the compound (considered the most widely used drug in the world) affects athletes. But lately there’s some surprising new evidence that while caffeine works wonders, it’s not in the ways or amounts you might think. Here’s how.

1.    You don’t need a lot to get a good response. Although early research had athletes taking up to 13 mg/kg of body mass (that’s 884 mg for a 150-pound person, or about 12 shots of espresso!) new studies show you’ll get a boost from as little as 1-3 mg/kg of weight (68-204 mg of caffeine), or about the amount in a small to large drip coffee. Even at that level, research shows performance during endurance exercise can improve by 20 to 50 percent compared to a control group. And among world-class cyclists (where as little as 1 percent improvement in performance can be the difference between winning and losing) a 100-mg dose improved performance by 4 percent; a 200-mg dose improved it by a total of 8 percent.

2.    It works for lots of different types of athletes—but not all. Hundreds of studies document the speed and endurance benefits of caffeine for cyclists, runners, and rowers. Even tennis players were found to improve hitting accuracy, speed, and agility when they caffeined up before hitting the court. But there’s been little evidence that caffeine can help sprinters, and in fact some research shows that with very-high intensity sprints (20-30 seconds) there’s actually a decrease in performance.

3.    It’s an awesome painkiller. Experts used to think using caffeine somehow spared muscle glucose but now the evidence points squarely to its effect on the nervous system. “It’s as if you snipped the fibers in the muscles that tell the brain how tired you feel,” explains Lawrence Spriet, Ph.D., a professor of exercise physiology and the chair of the Human Health and Nutritional Science program at the University of Guelph, Canada. Numerous studies show caffeine also lowers perceived exertion, or how difficult an exercise feels—so you can work longer and harder without feeling as worn out.

4.    It works even if you’re already addicted to your morning Joe. “The effects between users and nonusers is really quite small,” says Spriet. If you want to maximize the response, you can consider skipping your a.m. pick-me-up for a day before the event but beware the withdrawal symptoms (headache, nausea, and a big case of crabbiness.)   

5.    It’ll give you a bigger boost if you take it mid-way through your race. “The classic caffeine dosing used to be 45 to 60 minutes before an event, but that’s not always the rule,” says Spriet. Since many athletes are pumped with adrenaline at the start of a race, getting that caffeine jolt isn’t quite as important early on. “If you take it half- or midway through, it can help get you through those last few miles.”   

6.    It won’t make you dehydrated. Nutritionists used to preach that coffee, colas, and other caffeinated fare were diuretics. Not true, says Spriet. “That’s pretty well been laid to rest. If you drink a lot of water, you’ll pee more. If you drink a lot of a beverage with caffeine, you’ll pee just as much.”  

7.    It can be taken in many forms. For athletes, the simplest way to get caffeine pre-event is usually in a beverage (like coffee, tea, or cola) and mid-event through products like energy gels, chews, bars, and drinks. There’s even caffeinated gum and a host of beauty products like soap, bubble bath and breath spray. “Form doesn’t seem to really matter, although absorbing it through the skin probably isn’t as efficient,” says Spriet.

8.    But avoid energy drinks during your workout or race. “We don’t usually recommend them because they have a high level of carbohydrates, which can interfere with how efficiently water gets absorbed into your system,” says Spriet. A drink like Red Bull, for example, is typically 12 percent carbs, while a beverage like Gatorade is only about 6 percent. “The minute you start adding carbs you slow down hydration, and ultimately that will have a much bigger effect on performance than caffeine.” 

9.    It’s not for everyone. In some people, even small amounts can cause headaches, dizziness, GI distress, nervousness and anxiety. And in high doses almost all of us will get these side effects. “Some people can only take a little and some a lot—you have to experiment to see what’s right for you. It’s extremely personal,” says Spriet.

More Ways to Cheat - figures

So, if you read the post I posted yesterday [see below, Aug 2 - with a HOT chick smoking a Coheba to catch your eye], you will know that scientists are currently working with (and on) an experimental drug - S107 - that may delay, if not offset, muscle fatigue and deterioration; of course, certain athletes [CHEATS!!!] are now likely using it as a performance enhancement (suspicions abound it was even used in Beijing!). What I initially read as a great breakthrough to help turn back the clock, well, as always, people look for the easy way to succeed.

damn - is nothing sacred.

The article here below is from the "Royal Society of Chemistry" ['cause ya, I have no life].

Outwitting the doping cheats of the future

Ned Stafford/Hamburg, Germany
Biochemists at the German Sport University in Cologne have developed an anti-doping test for a drug candidate in early development that may counteract muscle fatigue and potentially enhance athletic performance. They believe that it might already have been used by athletes, possibly in the last summer's Beijing Olympics.

The test can spot benzothiazepine - the core chemical structure of the potential drug candidates JTV519 and S107. These compounds have been tested in mice, but not yet humans, for treating heart abnormalities. A paper published early last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences described increased endurance of mice with both drugs.

Benzothiazepine is the core chemical structure of JTV519 (top) and S107

'If it works in mice it would also work in humans,' says Mario Thevis, from the university's centre for preventive doping research. He told Chemistry World that after seeing this paper he and colleagues at the university's institute of biochemistry - which is accredited for doping analysis by the International Olympic Committee - decided it would be worthwhile to develop a test to detect the compounds.

The compounds stabilise protein channels that would otherwise 'leak' calcium from muscle cells during strenuous exercise. Calcium is needed for muscle contraction and this 'leaking' effect weakens the contractions and is a causal factor in muscle fatigue.

The first step in developing a new test was to obtain samples of the drugs, whose structures have been published. 'We gave our organic chemistry department the structures and they said, "We can do that for you",' he says. The process is simple, requiring four or five steps and lasting about a week, and could easily be accomplished in an underground doping lab selling to the black market, he adds. 

The team characterised the compounds according to weight and molecular structure. With this information, they formulated a molecular 'fingerprint' to detect the compounds at concentrations as low as 0.1 nanograms per millilitre in urine or blood using high resolution mass spectrometry, which Thevis said was their main tool. Details of the team's work were published in the journal Drug Testing and Analysis.

If the World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) adds benzothiazepines to its prohibited list, Thevis says his team's test could be tagged onto the existing testing regime used around the world within about 'one day.'

The Beijing Olympics officially were relatively drug free, with only six athletes caught for doping during the games and three other suspected cases identified after the games closed. However, some believe many athletes were using performance-enhancing drugs that could not be detected using standard tests.

Noting that many doping agents used by athletes are drugs developed by pharmaceutical firms for legitimate medical treatments, Thevis says 10 years ago doping tests normally detected only drugs already approved for sale. But as doping prevention officials have intensified efforts to keep tests as up-to-date as possible, cheating athletes and the doping black market have attempted to find drugs earlier in the development process.

Asked whether he believes S107 was used in the Beijing Olympics, Thevis says: 'I cannot exclude that it was used in the Beijing games.'

In an interview with Chemistry World, Olivier Rabin, science director at the WADA, says that S107 'is certainly in our scope of interest.' The drug is, however, still in early development, just entering Phase 1 trials, and is a few years from market this is if it actually makes it to market, he adds.

Normally, but not always, WADA would not seek information from the pharmaceutical firm developing a potential doping drug until Phase 2 trials, he says, adding that the drug is still being formulated in Phase 1 and therefore subject to change.

Referring to S107, he says: 'It is being discussed by the (prohibited) list committee. A decision will be taken as we move along.'

Maybe We Can "Stall" Time...

Study explains why muscles weaken with age

For those people who hope to run long into their old age, new research out of the U.S. may offer some hope to help keep those muscles strong no matter how old you are.

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center say they have discovered the biological mechanism behind age-related loss of muscle strength and identified a drug that may help reverse this process. Their findings were published in the Aug. 2 online edition of Cell Metabolism.

As people age, skeletal muscles tend to wither and weaken, a phenomenon known as sarcopenia. Sarcopenia, which begins to appear around age 40 and accelerates after 75, is a major cause of disability in the elderly. Exercise can help counter the effects of age-related muscle loss, but there are no other established treatments.

According to the new study, conducted in mice, sarcopenia occurs when calcium leaks from a group of proteins in muscle cells called the ryanodine receptor channel complex. These leaks then trigger a chain of events that ultimately limits the ability of muscle fibres to contract, says study leader Dr. Andrew R. Marks. In fact, it’s very like muscular distrophy.

“This is a completely new concept — that the damage that occurs in aging is very similar to what happens in muscular dystrophy,” says Dr. Marks, “thus as we age we essentially develop an acquired form of muscular dystrophy.”

Both the aging process and the genetic defect responsible for muscular dystrophy cause an increase in the production of oxygen free radicals, highly reactive and harmful molecules. “Our data suggest that this sets up a vicious cycle, in which the free radicals cause ryanodine receptors to leak calcium into the cell. The calcium poisons mitochondria — organelles that power the cell — leading to the release of even more free radicals. This, in turn, causes more calcium leakage. With less calcium available for contraction, the muscles get weaker,” says Dr. Daniel C. Andersson, another author of the study.

The study also points to a possible therapy for sarcopenia: an experimental drug called S107, developed by Dr. Marks and his colleagues. The drug acts to essentially prevent this calcium leakage.

In the study, 24-month-old mice (roughly the equivalent of 70-year-old humans) were given S107 for four weeks. The mice showed significant improvements in both muscle force and exercise capacity, compared with untreated controls. “The mice ran farther and faster during voluntary exercise,” says Dr. Andersson. “When we tested their muscles, they were about 50 per cent stronger.” The drug had no effect on younger mice with normal ryanodine receptors.