Articles

By Josiah Middaugh

After 25 years, the XTERRA World Championship was moved from Maui, Hawaii to Molveno, Italy. XTERRA has been gaining steam in Europe for the past decade and especially elite racing has really taken off in the past few years. The change was bittersweet, but I am excited for the sport and I was really looking forward to a mountain world championship in the Dolomites.  Without racing in Europe for several years it was hard to gauge how I would slot into the deeper, more competitive Eurocentric field.  

By Kiel Reijnen

Place one of the individuals on your team as far up the results sheet as possible. That’s the goal in professional road racing. It’s simple, clean and easy to measure (of course doing so is complicated, full of variables, some controllable, others less so). That was my default mindset as I transitioned from road racer to gravel privateer. It wasn’t until some “bad luck” struck during Unbound last year that I realized how flawed dragging that approach around with me really was. 

Keeping your immune system fully stuffed with all the helper nutrients (MVMs) and with a few other dietary substances they like is essential for keeping your immune system at its peak, which is critical for keeping you at peak performance. A tremendous amount of research has been conducted on the role of MVMs and their nutrients to understand how they affect your immune system. After sifting through that universe of studies, we came to certain unalterable conclusions.

MultiV – our “basic” MVM (Multiple Vitamin-Mineral with additional nutrients) – has been updated, rebalanced, and made over to be even more powerful than before, with significant changes based on the latest nutrition science and experiential feedback. Read on to see why the new MultiV is Bigger, Better, and Badder, giving you a superior foundation for health and exercise performance.

By Matt Hanson, EdD

Obviously, the Ironman World Championships is the one event each year where I want to be at my best. To me, this continues to remain the most important day of the year, and the entire season is geared around trying to set up the best performance possible on this day.

The course itself makes preparation and approach tricky, because the conditions of the Ironman World Championships are almost always going to be brutal. You have to be prepped for heat, humidity, high winds, and choppy water.

One of the most frequent questions we get is: How many carbs do I need to take during my long-duration events, races or training lasting more than three hours? The prevailing wisdom has long been set at 30-60 grams per hour (120-240 calories/hour), and usage directions for EFS & EFS-PRO are based on this time-tested range. But emerging research suggests athletes can ingest more and more carbs per hour: 90-140 grams or 360-560 Calories. That’s 1.5 to 19 times MORE carbs than the endurance experts have agreed upon for years!

The idea that habituation reduces caffeine’s effect on exercise performance is a myth that has been perpetrated by years of investigator reporting bias, unsupported anecdotal comments, and ambivalent study designs in many peer-reviewed articles over the years.

The real story is that no matter how much caffeine you normally ingest daily, taking it before and during exercise will still produce tangible performance benefits – or, in scientific terms, it’ll still be ergogenic. You will still run faster, farther, longer, burn more fat, spare more glycogen, and perform better physically if you ingest caffeine before exercise. Your physiology and biochemistry still respond favorably to caffeine and always have. So keep it up!

By Matt Hanson, EdD

The use of caffeine has become common practice among endurance athletes. It’s well accepted that caffeine can not only improve performance, but it can also reduce the perceived exertion during an endurance event as well as possibly masking some of the pain involved with strenuous exercise. However, one thing that does not seem to be fully clear among endurance athletes is the dosage of caffeine which is necessary to give us the desired outcome.

Is caffeine a nootropic? 

Short answer: YES! Calling caffeine a nootropic is a no-brainer; it’s the poster child, most prolific, and – arguably – best nootropic.