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When it comes to sports supplements, despite some great marketing, it’s hard to find many that are a) effective for most people, most of the time, b) safe and c) affordable enough to continue taking long term. It is pretty easy to drop a few hundred dollars on a new stack, but did you know one of the most well researched, safe and generally effective sports supplements could be in your pantry right now? If you are keen to maximise peak power output and over your banana bread baking phase, it could be time to put that sodium bicarbonate AKA baking soda to use for performance purposes.
For those who don’t bake, sodium bicarbonate (bicarb for short) is a common ingredient used to help cooking rise. It has also been used experimentally as a sports supplement for its acid buffering properties since the 1930s. Between then and now, research has fairly consistently established that bicarb is one of the few supplements worth considering for its ability to enhance peak anaerobic power and capacity in sports where high power outputs are required. In fact, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) named bicarb as one of only five sports nutrition supplements worth taking in their 2018 sports nutrition consensus statement.
So how does it work? When we exercise at high intensities hydrogen ions are produced as a (normal and necessary) by-product of energy breakdown and over prolonged periods these acidic ions can build up and contribute to muscular fatigue. Sodium bicarbonate is a salt that gets broken down into sodium and bicarbonate when mixed with water forming an alkaline solution able to assists the body’s natural buffering system. Our body has an inbuilt bicarbonate buffering system in place to ensure that blood pH remains balanced, however, supplementation with exogenous (external) bicarbonate can slow the build up of hydrogen ions and thus increase time to fatigue for an athlete.
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