Think you can’t get strong and thin at the same time? Think again.
To Lose Weight While Getting Stronger on the Bike, Make Lactic Acid Your Friend, Not Enemy
We cyclists are all too familiar with the effects of lactic acid. Pain in the legs, panting, blowing up. Lactate does it all and it’s rarely good. Much of our time on the bike is spent pushing up our threshold for lactate, either by keeping it away longer in long efforts or dampening its inhibitory effects in short bursts. But it turns out that lactate isn’t all bad. Canadian researchers from Wilfrid Laurier University recently found that lactate could be a bit of a magic potion as you try to lose weight for next year’s cycling season. It suppresses appetite post-exercise and could help you stop that post-ride splurge. Here’s how and why.
Before this research, we knew that high-intensity exercise could dampen appetite, but we didn’t really know how it did it. The direct ticket to decreasing appetite is decreasing a little known hormone called ghrelin. This tiny molecule is secreted by cells in your GI tract and causes you to feel hungry. We don’t have any direct method to turn off ghrelin (other than eating), but there are a few indirect ones that high-intensity exercise brings about. Thanks to these researchers, you can now add lactate to the list. But how did they figure it out?
They split their participants into two groups, one ingested a placebo before exercise and the other ingested a sodium bicarbonate solution. Sodium bicarbonate has been shown to increase lactate accumulation by allowing people to work just a bit harder when they take it. It can do this because it raises the pH of the blood, making lactic acid not burn as much as it is created. After taking these drinks, participants completed 10 x 1 minute sprints at 90% of HR max followed by 1 minute of recovery. After the workout, researchers took blood samples and tested the amount of ghrelin present in each group. More ghrelin = more hunger, so the group with the least ghrelin should be getting the most appetite suppression. And indeed, that’s what happened! The athletes who took sodium bicarb (so had more lactate) before cycling had less ghrelin in their systems at 60 and 90 minutes post-exercise than the placebo athletes.
One last cool thing about the study: it was a double-blind, crossover study. The gold standard. This means that neither the participants nor the researchers knew who got the bicarb and who got the placebo, and that the group who go the bicarb one day got the placebo on another and vice-versa, so it was tested in both groups.
What does this mean for you?
Well I’m glad you asked. This is a new method that you could use to help suppress your appetite and lose a bit more weight this winter as we all hunker down to wait for the spring season. Traditional weight loss in cycling consists of long, slow rides in the “fat burn” zone. There are a few problems with that: first is that the “fat burn” zone doesn’t really exist. There are exercise intensities where you burn slightly more fat than others, but the difference isn’t huge and very personal. Everyone’s different in how they utilize fuel. And second, not everyone has time to take four and five hour rides on nothing but coffee like Hinault used to do. We’re busy and we’re not pros. We’ve got other things to do. This is a more efficient avenue to the same goals. If you’re riding into work or getting some efforts in at lunch, add some high intensity, lactate heavy work to the regimen. Combine that with trimming back or skipping a meal, and you’ll be in caloric deficit before you know it.
References
- Vanderheyden, L. W., McKie, G. L., Howe, G. J., & Hazell, T. J. (2020). Greater lactate accumulation following an acute bout of high-intensity exercise in males suppresses acylated ghrelin and appetite postexercise. Journal of Applied Physiology, 128(5), 1321–1328. https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.00081.2020
Luke is a cycling coach and physiologist from Richmond, VA who rides and races bikes all over the country (though not right now). He’s an expert on the body in motion and its response to exercise and loves to share his knowledge with others. Find him @LukeHollomon everywhere.
