💪 The everyday athlete newsletter #27

👋 Hey.

Welcome to issue #27 of The Everyday Athlete Newsletter. Thanks for being here.

Here are my 3 favourite ideas, learns and resources to help you improve your performance this week (4 min read):

💊 Proven performance supplements for the everyday athlete

You don’t need supplements to perform. But they can help.

There’s a million out there.

But only 5 with enough evidence to be backed by the International Olympic Committee:

• ☕️ Caffeine
• 🥄 Creatine
• 🧂 Sodium bicarbonate (baking soda)
• 🧬 Beta-alanine
• 🥬 Nitrate

If you’re not an elite/pro athlete, sodium bicarbonate, beta-alanine and nitrate probably aren’t necessary for your day-to-day.

But keep ‘em in mind if you’re super active. Or training hard for a big event (if that’s you, I’ll dive into them in a future newsletter).

Caffeine (duh) and creatine on the other hand, are a couple big levers we can pull for our performance.

1. ☕️ Caffeine

We know caffeine charges us with energy, focus and endorphins. Which is great for our day-to-day performance.

But in physical activity, it also reduces the perception of fatigue and boosts anaerobic and aerobic performance.

The research suggests a 3-8% improvement.

It seems to benefit everything from strength to endurance (but the longer the activity the bigger the benefit).

Caffeine hits everyone differently. But the benefits seem to start at around 1-3mg/kg of body weight (that's 80-240mg for an 80kg human). And go up to 6mg/kg.

It can vary wildly, but your average coffee has about 100mg. Same with military gum.

Get it in you 30-60 minutes before activity.

Note: Our caffeine tolerance increases when we have it often. So if you hit multiple coffees a day, might be worth tapering off before a big event.

2. 🥄 Creatine

Creatine supplies energy to working muscles.

A small amount of creatine is made naturally by the body every day. Seafood and red meat also give us a bit. But not at levels to get maximum benefit.

So this powdered supplement might be a goer.

It’s been shown to:

• 🏋 Improve short-term strength and power (in efforts less than 3 minutes) by about 10%
• 💪 Increase muscle mass, strength and power over time (when taken consistently)

But even day-to-day supplementation of creatine helps:

• 💥 Lower exercise inflammation
• 🧠 Brain function: improve memory and focus + create and protect nerve cells + (emerging research suggesting it can even) fight against neurogenerative diseases like Alzeihmer's and Parkinson's

5g/day is the recommendation.

You can get a small amount of water retention in the muscles from it.

That's why I never really liked it. It’d blow me up like a balloon. Extra body weight I figured (probably wrongly now looking at all the research 🤦) was slowing me down...

But the research is fairly conclusive. It’s safe and effective.

Something I’m now considering for the brain benefits (which seem to be seriously impactful).

More on the other 3 supps soon ✌️

🏃 Exercise snacks

Exercise snacks are super-short high-intensity efforts. Done every few hours throughout the day.

With some early but impressive research to support it helping:

• 🩸 Curb blood sugar and insulin after a meal
• 🪑 Reversing the effects of sitting at work
• 🫁 Cardio fitness

100% effort for 20 seconds.

Squats. Stair climbs. Or with equipment if you’ve got it.

Time-efficient and sweat-free.

Might be worth getting 'em in your day.

🥎 The benefits of foam rolling (but not what you think)

Foam rolling is a proven performance tool.

Maybe not as much as the companies selling them want you to think. But still effective.

It can increase range of motion before activity (great injury prevention).

And if done consistently for over 4 weeks, it can improve your range of motion over time.

But when it comes to recovery and reducing soreness, the research is more mixed.

Personally though, I back it.

I find jumping on the roller a few times a week helps knock out the kinks you get from training and life.

But I’ve never used it as a sleep tool…

See foam rolling is like a massage.

So (when done at the right intensity) is quite relaxing.

In fact, there’s research that measured peoples' heart rate variability before and after rolling.

And found foam rolling can shift us from a sympathetic (fight/flight) to a parasympathetic (rest/recovery) state (!)

Another study showed participants had:

• 😟 Lower anxiety
• 😥 Lower cortisol (stress)
• 😃 Boost of serotonin

Which can all help us get to sleep and sleep better.

So, 5 mins of foam rolling. The takeaways:

• 🔥 (Combine it with dynamic stretching) for a good warm-up tool
• 🗓 Do it consistently for a month and there's some longer-term range of motion benefits on offer
• 😴 Can get you into relax mode for better sleep

P.s. That last study also looked at the effects of massage. If anyone knows how to be a participant in future massage studies, please let me know 🙋 😂

That's it!

Have a great weekend 🤙

Matt

P.s.

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