I don't know about this product in particular, but people used to ingest sodium bicarbonate before short events as a lactate buffer. I thought most people switched to sodium phosphate for longer duration events.

So had this in my inbox today:

https://www.maurten.com/products/bicarb

Here in Spain it’s €74 a box - For FOUR servings!?

What’s this all about then? Never seen bicarbonates being mentioned before.

Bicarbonate is converted essentially instantly to CO2 by carbonic anhydrase. Now we can debate whether it’s the Na concentration instead, but this strikes me as marketing mumbo jumbo. Now if we had oral THAM…

Meant to help with performance up to 1%. So waste of money for everyone apart from those trying to peak at the upper ends of sport. Close to a 3 hour marathon? Maybe use it twice in practice and on race day. Maybe save you up to a couple of minutes. But is it worth that cost? Pro sports where money/titles etc is on the line and it makes sense.

The arrows in the equation point in both directions

The arrows in the equation point in both directions

If there is one thing Maurten has dialed in, it's their branding and marketing.

so, FTR, this is old/old news.
I've done the research and actually done the experiment a while back as well, since I was curious. The rec was 0.3 mg/kg and I weigh about ~70kg, so I went with about 2 grams of bicarb in about 4 big glasses of G2. It's a lot-

I planned it on Saturday, a day when I usually do a few short bike sprint races and then an hour race, so it was my usual Saturday race day.


On the plus side, I can say that for me, it improved my ability to do repeat sprints but that was about it. I did not test breath holding or crazy stuff like that. It did not change my ability to hold one hour power. It did not change my max sprint power and I tried several times during the races to go all out. I raced two or three sprint bike races on the day @ 1 hr and ~3 hrs and did another the next day.

I had the perception that I was still fatigued as I was doing these short sprint races as usual, but surprisingly, I was still able to hold almost the same pace and power for each of the several consecutive races. If I remember correctly, my best race was a super sprint bike race the next day. That was unusual for me. In the past, my performance had a definite steady decline with each subsequent race.

On the down side, it makes you very bloated. It was hard to drink so much of it and I mixed it with G2 and could likely have gone a bit more concentrated. Definitely moves the bowels! I retained water and my weight went up and stayed there for several days.

All in all-not worth it as a performance benefit unless chasing a very short race effort and one might load in the evening on Day 1 and race in the morning on Day 2.

The world tour teams use it in TTs and TTTs.

Thanks Rob, I still wonder how the effect of neutralizing stomach acid, and the associated generation of carbon dioxide can impact the stomach homeostasis? In general the strong acidic environment of the stomach is important for digestion, secondly the bile released in the duodenum is intended to neutralize the acid that passes from the stomach, again upsetting the normal process if the materials passing are neutral. All of this means you probably need a significant over supply of bicarbonate to have it remain as an ion in the bowls. I can then understand it moving into the blood stream as bicarbonate ions but the other things do bother me. Yes I agree it is proven that bicarbonate does make it to the blood stream, that is easy to test and prove, the how always bothered me and your explanation is helpful in that area for sure. I am not sure the small benefit is worth all of the negatives. Certainly not for the average athlete, but maybe different for those where a 0.6% improvement is the difference in 1st to 3rd place in a race.

I do wonder if the Maurten "soup" gets around many of the issues you mentioned above.

That was supposed to be the AMP Lotion pitch too. They have pixie-dust levels of sodium bicarbonate in the gel (relative to the levels required for effective oral ingestion) with the theory that their super delivery mechanism super efficiently ferries it through the skin and somehow into blood.

I do wonder if that's the case, or if it's just marketing.

Their website doesn't give quantities of sodium bicarbonate. As a matter of fact they give an empty ingredient list

Yeah, I was just inferring pixie dust levels based on the low volume gel applied compared to the Cocaine Bear volume of pure sodium biocarbonate needed for effective oral ingestion.