Creatine and Bicarbonate - A Worthwhile Combination: Supplements Exert Great Individual and Small Combined Effects on HIIT Performance Test in Nine Well-Trained Men

Creatine and Bicarbonate - A Worthwhile Combination: Supplements Exert Great Individual and Small Combined Effects on HIIT Performance Test in Nine Well-Trained Men

baking soda bicarbonate creatine high volume mean power peak power performance sodium bicarbonate total volume total work volume

The results of a Wingate test cannot be translated 1:1 to any sports.

You will probably remember my article about the combination of creatine and bicarbonate. Mixing both is basically what the producers of "buffered creatine" supplements do. Albeit with amounts of bicarbonate that may affect the uptake of the latter and offer benefits if you have to load as fast as possible, but won't have individual performance effects (learn more).

Other studies I've likewise covered in the SuppVersity News in the past showed both significant as well as borderline significant and non-significant beneficial effects of combining creatine and bicarbonate for a performance enhancing double-whammy in trained individuals.

You can learn more about bicarbonate and pH-buffers at the SuppVersity

The Hazards of Acidosis

Build Bigger Legs W/ Bicarbonate

HIIT it Hard W/ NaCHO3

Creatine + BA = Perfect Match

Bicarb Buffers Creatine

Bicarbonate Works for Most(!) Athletes

Against that background it is not surprising that a recent study by Griffen et al. (2015) found similarly ambiguous results. The study investigated the effects of creatine and sodium bicarbonate coingestion on mechanical power during repeated sprints. To this ends, nine well-trained men (age = 21.6 ± 0.9 yr, stature = 1.82 ± 0.05 m, body mass = 80.1 ± 12.8 kg) participated in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, counterbalanced, crossover study using six 10-s repeated Wingate tests.

Before each of the performance tests, the participants ingested either a placebo (0.5 g/kg of maltodextrin), 20 g/d of creatine monohydrate + placebo (Cre), 0.3 g/kg of sodium bicarbonate + placebo (Bi), or coingestion  (Cre + Bi) for 7 days, with a 7-day washout between conditions. Participants were randomized into two groups with a differential counterbalanced order. Creatine conditions were ordered first and last. The participants individual mechanical power output (W), total work (J) and fatigue index (W/s) were measured during each test and analyzed using the magnitude of differences between groups in relation to the smallest worthwhile change in performance.

Figure 1: Subject allocation.

Yes, the washout period could be a problem: With only nine participants you have to do crossover study, but in view of the results of previous studies (McKenna. 1999), which report washout times of 4 weeks, the scientists would have been on the safer side if they had planned for a washout of 28, not just 7 days. Now you may argue that not all subjects started "on" creatine, so that the residual effect could average out. The problem, however, is that the significance of the results of a study with only nine participants gets impaired with every subject who was in a creatine group before being randomly assigned to one of the placebo + X groups, so that the researchers would have had to order all the creatine conditions last, not one first and the other last, as it is depicted in Figure 1 and described in the full text of the study.

As the data in Figure 2 tells you, both, the creatine (effect size (ES) = 0.37–0.83) and sodium bicarbonate (ES = 0.22–0.46) supplementation, resulted in meaningful improvements of all three indices of mechanical power output compared to placebo. Now what we are really interested in, though, is what the combination of the two did...

• In general, the coingestion provided "small meaningful improvements on indices of mechanical power output (W)" (Griffen. 2015) 
• The previously mentioned advantage was yet only seen when comparing sodium bicarbonate (ES = 0.28–0.41) with the combination treatment; a similar beneficial effect was not seen compared to creatine alone

This does obviously mean that the addition of bicarbonate to creatine did not result in meaningful increases in power output in this particular exercise test.

Figure 2: The only relevant advantage of combining both creatine and bicarbonate was seen for the total work done (orange bars, see orange arrow); this however is also among the most relevant measures for real athletes (Griffin. 2015).

What it did do and that's what we actually take bicarbonate for is to "provided a small meaningful improvement in total work (J; ES = 0.24) compared with creatine" (Griffin. 2015) - or, in other words, anyone who does not just one, but several all-out sprints (and that's almost every athlete) will see a small but meaningful performance increase, one that may make the difference between victory and defeat (see Figure 1, orange bars).

The increase in PGC-1a expression you get if you do HIIT w/ sodium bicarbonate and the correspondingly increased stimulus for mitochondrial biogenenesis is a hitherto often overlooked benefit of "baking soda" supplementation | learn more

Disappointing? I would not say so, which significant improvements in response to both supplements and a potential "game changing" increase in the total work the subjects were able to perform on the cycle ergometer during the repeated Wingate tests, both supplements have proven their efficacy and the potential benefits of combining them. Benefits the Griffin et al rightly call "small", but "meaningful" in the conclusion to their recently published paper.

The fact that these benefits may not be as exorbitant as some of you may have hoped for does not imply that the combination of creatine and bicarbonate supplements is useless. In view of the overall small study size (low number of subjects even for a crossover study), the problem with the washout and the specificity of the exercise - who knows what the results in the gym or on a football field would have looked like, thus, future studies are warranted | Comment!

References:

• Barber, James J., et al. "Effects of combined creatine and sodium bicarbonate supplementation on repeated sprint performance in trained men." The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research 27.1 (2013): 252-258.
• Griffen, C., et al. "Effects of Creatine and Sodium Bicarbonate Co-Ingestion on Multiple Indices of Mechanical Power Output During Repeated Wingate Tests in Trained Men." International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 2015, 25, 298-306.
• McKenna, Michael J., et al. "Creatine supplementation increases muscle total creatine but not maximal intermittent exercise performance." Journal of Applied Physiology 87.6 (1999): 2244-2252.

Sodium Bicarbonate a Performance Booster for Only 66% of the Athletes? Study Shows Individual & Variable Responses from Zero to + 30% Increase in Maximal HIIT Workloads

Sodium Bicarbonate a Performance Booster for Only 66% of the Athletes? Study Shows Individual & Variable Responses from Zero to + 30% Increase in Maximal HIIT Workloads

baking soda bicarbonate high intensity high volume HIIT NAHCO3 performance sodium bicarbonate

Even though, the study at hand confirms that NaHCO3 doesn't work for everyone previous studies show it's worth trying.

You will probably have asked yourselves, whether I had already forgotten about sodium bicarbonate and the performance enhancing effects of pH buffers, right? No, I didn't, but unfortunately, many researchers have... well, many, but not all researchers. Gabriela Froio de Araujo Dias and her colleagues from the University of Sao Paulo, for example, have just released a paper in which they describe the intriguing results of the first bicarbonate study that was specifically designed to (a) determine within- and (b) inter-individual variation that could potentially compromise the magnitude of an effect that's determined based on averages (e.g. if you use bicarb three times and have performance increases of 0.4%, 5% and 0.3% it will look less effective).

You can learn more about bicarbonate and pH-buffers at the SuppVersity

The Hazards of Acidosis

Build Bigger Legs W/ Bicarbonate

HIIT it Hard W/ NaCHO3

Creatine + BA = Perfect Match

Bicarb Buffers Creatine

Beta Alanine Fails to HIIT Back

In the corresponding experiment, the scientists had 15 physically active males (age 25±4 y; body mass 76.0±7.3 kg; height 1.77±0.05 m) complete six cycling capacity tests at 110% of maximum power output (CCT110%) following ingestion of either

• 0.3 g/kg body mass of sodium bicarbonate (SB | 4 trials) or
• alcium carbonate placebo (PL, 2 trials).

Just in case you're wondering: Calcium carbonate has no reasonable buffering effect as it will not, as you can see in Figure 1 affect the pH, bicarbonate levels of base excess of the blood in the way bicarbonate does. It is thus the standard choice in corresponding experiments.

Figure 1: Line graphs for blood measurements (mean ± 1SD) at Baseline, Pre-exercise, Post-exercise and 5-min post-exercise. Panel A displays pH; Panel B displays bicarbonate; Panel C displays base excess; Panel D displays lactate. PL trials are represented by dashed lines and SB trials are represented by solid lines (de Araujo Dias. 2015).

As you may already know from previous SuppVersity articles on bicarbonate, the increases in blood pH, bicarbonate, base excess and lactate you see in Figure 1 are important to tell what exactly triggers the net effect of using baking soda as a pH buffer. What every athletes will yet be more interested in, though is whether the buffer allowed the recreationally active men who participated in the study saw statistically significant increases in the total work done (TWD) during the 110% high-intensity cycling capacity test, or not.

Learn more about Serial Loading!

You have problem "stomaching" NaHCO3? If you feelm, like some of the subjects in the study nauseated or even get diarrhea when you ingest a large bolus of sodium bicarbonate at once, try the Serial Loading Protocol from Dreher's 2012 study I discussed in an older SuppVersity article about sodium bicarbonate. That should work even for the most sensitive tummies. That's still no guarantee that it'll work, though, and would - just as the study at hand shows it for the regular bolus administration require some experimentation.

As you can see in Figure 2, the average subject saw the highest improvement in the last of the four trials (7%); an improvement of which statistics tell us that it says that there's 93% chance of general substantial improvement - with lower values for the other trials.

Figure 2: Rel increase (%) in total work (figures over the bars indicate likelihood of relevant benefits and relative increase, e.g. for bar 4: "It's 93% likely that the 7% increase displays a real-world relevant performance increase) - left; Total work done during SB trial as function of total work done during PLA trial - right (de Araujo Dias. 201).

Apropos "other trials", when the scientists removed the subjects who reported sick during trial 1 and trial 3, the results of trial 1 suggest a "likely" benefit (81%) and those of trial 3 a "possible" (50%) benefit. The notion that whether you benefit or not can / will depend on how well you tolerate the bicarbonate solution would also be confirmed by the data in Figure 2, right. The latter is a plot of the ratio of total work done in the sodium bicarbonate trial #4 vs. the control trial; a plot that easily tells us who saw benefits and who didn't because all "winners" are above, while all "losers" are below the transverse line. And since the distance to said line is a marker of the performance increase, you can also see that even among those who did benefit, the benefits ranged from hardly measurable as in subject #7 to a whopping 30% increase in total work done during the high-intensity cycling capacity test in subjects #12.

25g of Baking Soda Will Up Your Squat (+27%) & Bench Press (+6%) Within 60 Min | more

Bottom line: If you belong to the unlucky 33%, who were represented in the study at hand by the 5 subjects the scientists found who didn't benefit in any of the four sodium bicarbonate trials, you could probably still try the serial loading protocol and if that doesn't work either, simply accept that "SB may not always improve exercise" (de Araujo Dias. 2015).

On the flipside, though, you must not give up on baking soda if you didn't see improvements in your first trial, either. Eventually, the data from the study at hand also shows that even in those who benefit the benefit can sometimes be small or even non-existent.

As a trainer or trainee, you should thus keep in mind that sodium bicarbonate, baking soda or NaHCO3 must be taken on multiple occasions in order to categorize yourself or your clients into non-responders and potential responders and excellent responders | Comment on Facebook!

References:

Nine Short Workouts (AM+PM) p. Week Yield Extra Strength, Size and Performance Gains Compared to Volume Matched 3-Day Split, All Differences are Non-Significant, Though

Nine Short Workouts (AM+PM) p. Week Yield Extra Strength, Size and Performance Gains Compared to Volume Matched 3-Day Split, All Differences are Non-Significant, Though

AM/PM bodybuilding build muscle exercise science fitness fitness model frequency high volume lose fat performance training science training volume workout frequency workout routines

15 min in the AM, 15 in the PM = Win? For many of you that may sound laughable, but according to a recent study from the University of Copenhagen it is at least as effective as three "mammoth" workouts-sessions per week.

What kind of trainee are you? Do you hit the gym thrice a week, spend two hours there and crawl out of the gymdoors totally exhausted? Yeah... Well that means you're not the fitness model guy, who trains twice a day for 15-20 minutes only and swears that this is the only way to do it?

After all these questions you're probably asking yourself if the answers you gave in your mind were good or bad for ya? Right? Well, eventually, both forms of training can be equally effective. If we take a closer look at the non-significant study outcomes in a recent paper by scientists from the University of Copenhagen (Kilen. 2015), though body composition and strength may in fact benefit more if you train more frequently - even if the total workout volume is the same.

No single workout routine works forever. Periodize to make continuous progress!

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Workout volume? Yes, that's the number of sets and reps. So, let's say you do three 45-minute training sessions weekly, including 1 strength on Monday, 1 high intensity cardiovascular (HIIT) session on Wednesday, and 1 muscle endurance session on Thursday, then those 3x45 minutes + warm-up exercise are your total workout volume.

In case that's what you're doing on a regular basis, you're training just like those of the 21 study subjects (10 men, 11 women; 25 +/- 3 years) with some previous training experience who were randomly assigned to the "classical" training program in the previously mentioned study by Kilen, et al. (2015). If you're rather the fitness model type, you may recognize your own training in what the other subjects did, i.e. a "micro training" program with a total of nine 15-minute training sessions weekly that were divided equally between strength training, high-intensity cardiovascular training, and muscle endurance training and performed in the AM and PM from Monday to Friday (there was no PM training on Friday, though, and cardio and strength were rotated | see caption of Table 1).

Table 1: Description of the two different training regimen (Kilen. 2015) | *To minimize the potential negative effect of concurrent cardio + strength training, MI performed 2 days of strength (Mon and + Tue) and 1 day of cardio training (Wed) in odd weeks, and 1 day of strength (Mon) and 2 days of cardio training (Tue + Wed) in even weeks.

Unlike the training frequency and rest between workouts, the strength training, HIIT and muscular endurance training sessions, themselves, were identical in both groups:

• Strength training consisted of leg exercises (deadlifts, lunges, step-ups, and 1 leg squats), with 1–2 warm-up sets and 2–3 target sets of 8RM, and upper-body exercises (pullups, dips, weighted push-ups, and 1 arm rows), with 1–2 warm-up sets and 2–3 target sets of 5RM. For progression, the exercises were adjusted using extra loading (sandbags in 1-kg steps) if the subjects were able to accomplish more repetitions than prescribed. If the subjects were not able to perform the number of repetitions prescribed, they performed as many as they could in proper form and finished the set conducting only the eccentric phase of the exercise. 
• High-intensity cardiovascular training (HIIT) consisted of running for 2 and 4 minutes at an average speed of 15.1 and 14.5 km/h, respectively, which elicited ;90% maximal heart rate during exercise. Micro training performed two 4-minute run intervals in the morning with 3 minutes of rest in between and four 2-minute run intervals in the afternoon with 1 minute of rest in between. Classical training performed three 4-minute and six 2-minute run intervals in the same training session with the same rest as MI in between. The training volume was evaluated and the only significant difference was running distance during 2-minute and 4-minute intervals, where MI ran significantly further than CL in each interval. 
• Muscle endurance training consisted of three 5-minute exercise sessions involving 5 different exercises performed continuously for 30 seconds with 30-second rest periods. Micro training conducted 3 sessions; the first was “easy,” the second “hard,” and the third “very hard.” Classical training conducted 9 sessions in the same order, starting over with “easy” on the fourth and seventh sessions. The exercises were weighted lunges (with a 20-kg sandbag); push-ups; shuttle runs; abdominal exercises ([a] regular sit-ups from a supine position with knees bent at 908, fists in contact with the ears and the lumbar arch supported by a folded towel, and [b] diagonal sit-ups from a horizontal supine position, outstretched hand to opposite raised foot, alternating); and back exercises ([a] back extensions on an incline bench and [b] kettlebell swings in a standing position). 

As Kilen et al. point out, "[a]ll training sessions were supervised by scientific staff, and subject attendance" as well as "[h]eart rate [...] during high-intensity cardiovascular training and muscle endurance training for the last 5 weeks of the training intervention" (Kilen. 2015) were recorded.

Figure 1: Relative pre- vs. post changes in all measures performance markers (calculated based on Kilen. 2015).

After the 8-weeks on the respective training regiment, a comparison of the pre- vs. post-training data yielded the following results:

• Increases in shuttle run performance were observed in both group, albeit with a higher significance as far as the pre- vs. post-difference is concerned in the classical training (CL) vs. micro training (MI) group (MI: 1,373 +/- 133 m vs. 1,498 +/- 126 m, p < 0.05; CL: 1,074 6 213 m vs. 1,451 6 202 m, p , 0.001).
• Significant improvements in peak oxygen uptake (3,744 6 +/- 615 mL/min vs. 3,963 +/- 753 mL/min | p < 0.05), maximal voluntary isometric (MVC) force of the knee extensors (646 +/- 135 N vs. 659 +/- 209 N | p < 0.001), MVC of the finger flexors (408 +/- 109 N vs. 441 +/- 131 N, p < 0.05), and the maximal number of lunges performed in 2 minutes (65 +/- 3 vs. 73 +/- 2, p , 0.001), however, were seen only in the micro = high frequency training group.

The question you may be asking yourselves now is: Why does the headline say that there were no significant differences? Well, the lack of statistical significance of the improvements in the classical training group does not suffice for a statistically significant between difference to the micro training group. Statistical significant inter-group differences did not exist either before or after the study. The scientists conclusion that

"similar training adaptations can be obtained with short, frequent exercise sessions or longer, less frequent sessions where the total volume of weekly training performed is the same" (Kilen. 2015)

is thus absolutely correct. The fact that statistical significance for the aforementioned study outcomes was achieved in the micro, yet not in the classical training group does still suggest that the high(er) frequency training regimen may have an adaptive edge... albeit in terms of study outcomes not everyone will deem practically relevant.

Figure 2: Neither the in-group nor the inter-group changes in body composition did reach statistical significance (calculated base on Kilen. 2015). At least in my humble opinion, though, they are still interesting.

Speaking of what people will deem relevant: We haven't addressed the changes in body composition yet. Why's that? Well, if we go by statistical significance, there were none. If we go by %-ages, though, the increase in lean and decrease in fat mass in the micro training, as well as the opposite trends in the classical training group add to the non-significant evidence that it may make sense to train more frequent and that - when all is said and done - total volume may eventually not be the only thing that matters... I mean, if you look at the data in Figure 2 it would - in defiance of the statistical insignificance of the changes - still seem as if the previously mentioned fitness model was right: For him or her, for whom improves body composition are the primary goal, his / her frequent AM/PM training regimen does in fact appear to be the training model of choice | Comment!

References:

• Kilen, Anders, et al. "Adaptations to Short, Frequent Sessions of Endurance and Strength Training Are Similar to Longer, Less Frequent Exercise Sessions When the Total Volume Is the Same." The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research 29 (2015): S46-S51.