Articles

By Dr. Luke Bucci, PhD

Discover how your body turns every carb source into glucose in order to generate ATP and power muscles. Also learn why increasing ATP production is much (much!) more complicated than simply gobbling up glucose.

By Dr. Luke Bucci, PhD

When used correctly, branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) help improve exercise performance after hours of grueling effort. Late in the race, deep in the training session – those times when you need an extra reserve of energy the most.

By Dr. Luke Bucci, PhD

This is the second installment in a series on the reimagined EFS and a mind-over-matter compound that makes perfect sense for maximizing your brain’s control of your exercise performance: Suntheanine® L-theanine.

By Dr. Luke Bucci, PhD

This is a first-in-series feature on the reimagined EFS, focusing on a mind-over-matter compound that makes perfect sense for maximizing your brain’s control of your exercise performance: L-theanine, or more specifically, Suntheanine® L-theanine.

By Dr. Luke Bucci, PhD

Riding indoors is also radically different from riding outside. 

In this blog installment, we share tips for how to approach fueling, recovery, and maintaining a mental edge during indoor training.

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!

Research shows the brain plays a significant role in fatigue and exercise tolerance. Our latest formulations of EFS and EFS-PRO expand the focus beyond simply supporting your body to buttressing up mental toughness—often the final hurdle an athlete has to overcome whether they’re training alone or competing.

The most common complaint fielded at First Endurance about endurance training is cramping, known officially in scientific literature as Exercise-Associated Muscle Cramping (EAMC). 

The Glycemic Index (GI) is a characteristic of carbs in different foodstuffs that affects choosing what carbs to use during long-term exercise. Since glucose is by far the main sugar in the bloodstream, glycemic index tracks the change in blood glucose levels for 4-6 hours after eating on an empty stomach, and it’s measured by administering 100 grams (about a quarter pound) dry weight of a specific carb source. The area under the curve for the rise in blood sugar from 100 grams of glucose is defined as a GI = 100.

By Burke Swindlehurst

So, you’ve been hearing a lot about this “gravel” thing lately, amiright? Color yourself intrigued. Indeed, gravel is on the tip of seemingly everyone’s tongue, and by now you’ve heard enough to know that there’s a lot to consider when looking to tackle this emerging genre of events.

We typically associate amino acids with rebuilding muscles and post-training recovery, so why are amino acids important for immune function? Because your immune system operates differently from muscles, nerves, and other organs; it uses amino acids as energy, even preferring them to glucose and fats.

The immune system’s major amino acid fuels are glutamine and the branched-chain amino acids leucine, isoleucine, and valine, which we’ll just lump together as BCAAs for this blog. Because of their known importance for immune cells, research has focused on these amino acids and immune function in long-term, strenuous exercise.