Latest / Find Your Edge: Training, Nutrition + Longevity for Endurance Athletes / How to Prevent GI Distress in Endurance Athletes [Replay] Ep 159
Transcript
- 0:37Coach Carlie: Hey y'all, and welcome back to the Find Your Edge podcast.
- 0:40Coach Carlie: I am so excited that you are here.
- 0:43Coach Carlie: Today we're talking about gut health, but this time gut health specifically for athletes during exercise.
- 0:51Coach Carlie: So if you don't do endurance sports, that's okay too.
- 0:55Coach Carlie: You might get a couple of pearls out of this, or certainly if you've heard some of your friends discussing this, this might be an episode that you might want to pass along to them.
- 1:04Coach Carlie: So if you know someone, or if you've ever had to sprint to the Porta John mid-race or felt so nauseous that you couldn't take another gel or another sports drink, you're not alone.
- 1:16Coach Carlie: GI distress is one of the most frustrating and complex issues in endurance sports.
- 1:23Coach Carlie: And today we're diving into what causes it, how your gut health plays a role, and what you can do about it.
- 1:28Coach Carlie: Don't forget that all of this is included in our fueling and hydration boot camp, which you can find in the show notes.
- 1:37Coach Carlie: So, first of all, what is GI distress or gastrointestinal distress?
- 1:42Coach Carlie: Some of the most common symptoms you may experience or know someone telling you about nausea, bloating, cramping, and I don't mean cramping like my calves are on fire or my quads are cramping.
- 1:56Coach Carlie: This is cramping like in your belly area, in your abdominal region.
- 2:01Coach Carlie: Diarrhea certainly is a common one, reflux or urgency to make your way to the Portigon.
- 2:07Coach Carlie: Or, as my kids' favorite word, you gotta poop.
- 2:11Coach Carlie: You know what I'm saying?
- 2:12Coach Carlie: So check this out.
- 2:15Coach Carlie: Some studies have indicated that as many as 93% of long-distance drug athletes have experienced at least one GI symptom.
- 2:24Coach Carlie: That's pretty much everybody.
- 2:26Coach Carlie: That's pretty much all you guys out there.
- 2:27Coach Carlie: That's insane to me.
- 2:29Coach Carlie: So what and this is also why I have a job.
- 2:32Coach Carlie: So more specifically, serious GI problems were reported by 43% of those athletes, with 7% of people having to abandon, or basically DNF.
- 2:42Coach Carlie: So another study found that 31% of Iron Man triathles and 14% of half Iron Man or Ironman 70.3 racers experience severe GI symptoms.
- 2:55Coach Carlie: Y'all, I feel so terrible for you and don't want you to have game-changing GI symptoms.
- 3:04Coach Carlie: This is something that, yes, it's complex and yes, it's frustrating, but some of these things are fixable.
- 3:11Coach Carlie: All right, so let's get into what could potentially be some of the causes of distress.
- 3:18Coach Carlie: So, number one, overeating or chugging fluids or just consuming too much all at once while you are exercising.
- 3:28Coach Carlie: So let me remind you, during exercise, especially high intensity, or if you're really pushing your body a long way, like an Iron Man, especially if you've only trained, say, up to five or six hours, and then you're going for 12, 13, 14, 15 plus hours, that is a long time for blood to be shunted away from your gut, which means that basically your gut is kind of like one big tube from tip to tail.
- 3:57Coach Carlie: That the amount of blood that your body, because your body needs energy to digest, the amount of blood that is being sent to working muscles, is reduced, reducing your ability to digest as effectively as you can.
- 4:16Coach Carlie: Thereby you're probably gonna have some intestinal issues, especially lower GI.
- 4:21Coach Carlie: And I sort of separate them into upper and lower GI regions.
- 4:26Coach Carlie: So lower GI might be the more sort of bloating sensation or needing to run to the portagon, upper symptoms, upper GI symptoms are more like the nausea, um, feeling overly full, or maybe even vomiting.
- 4:42Coach Carlie: So your gut gets overwhelmed when you consume too much all at once.
- 4:47Coach Carlie: It's kind of like I like to use the analogy of sitting down on your bike or during your run and having like Thanksgiving dinner.
- 4:56Coach Carlie: What are you gonna want to do?
- 4:58Coach Carlie: Like stop and take a nap because your body's like, okay, I need some extra time and energy, literally energy, to digest all of this.
- 5:07Coach Carlie: So your gut basically gets overwhelmed.
- 5:10Coach Carlie: And then you might experience nausea, you might experience some level of sloshing, you may even have to vomit or just generally slow down.
- 5:18Coach Carlie: So, pro tip there, make sure that you are consuming your fluids and foods.
- 5:24Coach Carlie: And when I say food, that could be anything from fig newtons to gels to uh anything that is going to provide an excess amount of calories.
- 5:35Coach Carlie: So take your time, sip slowly in order to avoid overloading your system.
- 5:43Coach Carlie: That helps by allowing gastric emptying, so the ability of your stomach to empty into your small intestines, which is where the real magic happens and all of that energy is able to be absorbed and sent to working muscles.
- 5:59Coach Carlie: All of that happens more consistently if you sip and consume steadily rather than in these large gaps.
- 6:09Coach Carlie: So, like if you're taking 90 minutes before you have anything and then you have too much, it's just gonna overload the system.
- 6:16Coach Carlie: All right.
- 6:17Coach Carlie: Another one is race day anxiety.
- 6:20Coach Carlie: Poor Carly, who is our sports psychologist.
- 6:23Coach Carlie: I love to center all my folks who are pooping excessively on race day, and she's like rolling her eyes at me.
- 6:30Coach Carlie: But honestly, the gut is so deeply tied to your brain and your body's fight or flight response.
- 6:42Coach Carlie: So when you get really nervous, so that those race day jitters or those that race day anxiety kicks in, your body is like, okay, cool, we're running from the tiger now.
- 6:54Coach Carlie: That's great.
- 6:55Coach Carlie: I need to empty myself out, like right now.
- 6:58Coach Carlie: So then you're taking several chips to the Portageon, probably having some level of diarrhea.
- 7:03Coach Carlie: That is a normal response.
- 7:06Coach Carlie: Another response is sometimes people will get constipated.
- 7:09Coach Carlie: It's almost like, nope, I'm holding on to it.
- 7:11Coach Carlie: Let's go.
- 7:11Coach Carlie: Let's let's roll out.
- 7:13Coach Carlie: So it's so interesting to me the difference in our specific responses to stress.
- 7:22Coach Carlie: So one of the things that you can help is using things like breath work, like visualization.
- 7:28Coach Carlie: This is literally what Carly does on a day in and day out basis of helping people with sports psychology so that they can be more grounded, more centered, and check it out.
- 7:40Coach Carlie: Then you also digest better.
- 7:43Coach Carlie: What?
- 7:44Coach Carlie: So amazing how those tools can really help with race day anxiety.
- 7:48Coach Carlie: All right.
- 7:49Coach Carlie: Another thing, and you've probably heard this before: unfamiliar foods or new products on race day.
- 7:55Coach Carlie: You're like, hey, check it out.
- 7:57Coach Carlie: There's this brand new gel that the race has that I've never tried before, or it just happened to be there, or my training buddy gave me this thing.
- 8:07Coach Carlie: It's always best to test any of your products or any of the foods that you're going to be doing prior to race day.
- 8:17Coach Carlie: So, in other words, train your gut just like you train your body.
- 8:22Coach Carlie: So consistency is key.
- 8:24Coach Carlie: Getting used to all of the different textures, all of the different flavors, and whether your body is actually going to accept whatever it is that you're putting in your body.
- 8:37Coach Carlie: All right, next up sugar overload or sugar alcohol overload.
- 8:44Coach Carlie: This is a more interesting one that I will see more commonly in athletes rather than just the general population, is too much fructose.
- 8:57Coach Carlie: There is something called fructose intolerance.
- 9:00Coach Carlie: And oftentimes you're going to have symptoms outside of exercise, but sometimes you may not until you get to be exercising.
- 9:09Coach Carlie: And now you're consuming all of these foods and gels and products with excess free fructose.
- 9:17Coach Carlie: And what I mean by free fructose is that it's literally stated on the product as fructose.
- 9:26Coach Carlie: Now, fructose is a magical thing because, for an from an exercise perspective, because once those glucose transporters in your body get saturated, we need another avenue to get calories to your muscles.
- 9:43Coach Carlie: And one of those ways is via fructose.
- 9:46Coach Carlie: So finding that right balance that is not going to throw your body overboard with too much fructose, which oftentimes will create this bloating sensation.
- 9:59Coach Carlie: You may have some uh diarrhea and it can be not great or just GI chaos is what I like to call it.
- 10:07Coach Carlie: It can be uh crazy.
- 10:10Coach Carlie: So, yes, it's helpful to use multiple carb sources, so like glucose and fructose and multixtrin or dextrose and fructose, that kind of thing, so that you can saturate different transporters in your body.
- 10:22Coach Carlie: But consider options that might be a little bit more whole foods-based, or adjusting the ratios of that glucose to fructose option.
- 10:35Coach Carlie: So play around with different things and we help you in that process in our fueling and hydration boot camp.
- 10:42Coach Carlie: So there's other things that, like I just mentioned, that we discuss in the fueling and hydration bootcamp.
- 10:49Coach Carlie: And even uh digging deeper on our live calls, we talk about everything from caffeine, including the genetics of caffeine, uh, NSAIDs, infections, toxins, and even menstruation.
- 11:01Coach Carlie: So those are all the things that you can learn more about and see if that's more specific to you in our fueling and hydration boot camp.
- 11:11Coach Carlie: All right, the one that probably most people don't like to talk about, but GI distress isn't just about race day, it's about gut health.
- 11:21Coach Carlie: So you may have heard some of the terms like leaky gut, dysbiosis, inflammation, all of those things impact how you feel and perform.
- 11:31Coach Carlie: So if you are not taking care of yourself outside of exercise, that you're not getting your recovery nutrition, that you're not getting your fruits and vegetables, that you're not getting your good quality protein and all of those things that are making us be an amazing human and an athlete, then you know that you are not going to perform your best.
- 11:55Coach Carlie: So stress is another massive one.
- 11:57Coach Carlie: I know I talked a lot about that in our gut health podcast.
- 12:00Coach Carlie: So I'll link back to that one so that you guys can dig deeper into that with our stain acronym that we like to talk about, which is stress and toxins, adverse food reactions, infections, and nutritional imbalances.
- 12:16Coach Carlie: Those are all the things that we like to look at from a functional health perspective, tying that into functional nutrition for athletes.
- 12:24Coach Carlie: So, stress and poor food choices and lack of diversity in your diet is going to equal an unhappy gut.
- 12:32Coach Carlie: And that can be easier said than done, right?
- 12:36Coach Carlie: The concept of, oh, I need to eat so many different types of fruits and vegetables on a regular basis can be hard when you're making so many other decisions.
- 12:45Coach Carlie: So the gut-brain connection can also affect your mood and your motivation.
- 12:51Coach Carlie: I mean, have you ever felt like, oh gosh, I just don't want to train today, or I don't really want to do anything today?
- 12:58Coach Carlie: So that may be related to the quality of food that you're putting in your body and also giving you quality sleep.
- 13:08Coach Carlie: Timing of your food is a really big one that relates to GI distress as well during exercise.
- 13:14Coach Carlie: If you're not allowing your body to absorb appropriately through the night, that could even be an issue.
- 13:23Coach Carlie: So your fueling plant isn't just about calories or isn't just about carbohydrates, it's about digestion, it's about absorption, and it's also about long-term health, which is why we created our longevity nutrition coaching program for athletes just like you who want to dig a little bit deeper into what is my blueprint, not only for exercise, but also for health and performance.
- 13:53Coach Carlie: And what are some of the things that you can do more specifically to benefit you?
- 13:59Coach Carlie: So I will link to that below in the show notes.
- 14:02Coach Carlie: Our longevity nutrition coaching program is so amazing and can really transform not only your performance, but certainly your long-term health.
- 14:12Coach Carlie: So here are some strategies that may help you if you are somebody who's experienced GI distress.
- 14:18Coach Carlie: So before training, so prior to training, make sure that you keep meals somewhat simple and predictable, which I think is also interesting that I come off of getting some diversity on your diet.
- 14:31Coach Carlie: You might have to do some tweaks because then it's a matter of if you're doing an elimination diet and then a reintroduction plant, that can be, oh my gosh, can be such a hot mess.
- 14:41Coach Carlie: So if there are so many different things that you're like, I don't know what's causing it, keep a log.
- 14:48Coach Carlie: I cannot emphasize this enough.
- 14:51Coach Carlie: The more symptoms that you can track on a regular basis, then we can start to look back and say, ah, this may be a culprit.
- 15:01Coach Carlie: Let's take an action here.
- 15:03Coach Carlie: So simplify the meals in the meantime to at least adjust and log those symptoms.
- 15:10Coach Carlie: And then you can start reintroducing more complex meals.
- 15:14Coach Carlie: And I know this is a big one, but definitely manage your stress.
- 15:18Coach Carlie: I cannot emphasize enough how much stress plays in to your gut.
- 15:25Coach Carlie: I mean, it's so massive.
- 15:27Coach Carlie: So if you are not working on your breath work, if you're not working on meditation, I highly recommend you start.
- 15:33Coach Carlie: And you don't have to start with, oh my gosh, I'm gonna have to be sitting on this yoga mat for an hour.
- 15:39Coach Carlie: No, start with even just one minute of deep breath work, which is really, we'll call it five breaths, five deep slow inhalations and deep slow exhalations.
- 15:52Coach Carlie: That's one minute.
- 15:53Coach Carlie: That is one place that you can start, certainly prior to race day, prior to training, or long distance events that maybe you've not done before, or training that, because that's the whole point of training, right?
- 16:06Coach Carlie: Is building your body physically and mentally to be able to go further or go harder, right?
- 16:15Coach Carlie: During training, make sure you use a tested fueling strategy.
- 16:20Coach Carlie: Again, this goes back into logs, logging your symptoms.
- 16:23Coach Carlie: So this is a something that we provide in the fueling and hydration boot camp, is giving you a sweat log.
- 16:30Coach Carlie: This is not just to manage your pre and post weigh-ins so that you know how much fluid that you need to be taking, but it's also an opportunity to manage your different fueling options that you have tried, that you want to try, and then an entire rating system so that if you go back to something, you can look in your notes and say, Oh yeah, I tried those fig newtons on that one run and I felt really good.
- 16:58Coach Carlie: Or rice krispies just didn't work really well for me, or that gel was too chunky, or whatever the case may be.
- 17:05Coach Carlie: We've got an entire tool to use so that you can manage what your fueling options have been, so that you can write out that strategy.
- 17:16Coach Carlie: Also, don't forget to space out your intake so that you can have that consistent gastric emptying.
- 17:24Coach Carlie: And then on a daily basis, make sure that you're supporting your gut health with consistent hydration.
- 17:31Coach Carlie: And when I say hydration, I mean good old-fashioned water, not necessarily with anything else fancy in it, but good water, making sure that you're getting good quality protein, making sure that you're getting your fruits and vegetables, and maybe even some fermented foods if those are things that work best for you.
- 17:51Coach Carlie: So when in doubt, test and don't guess.
- 17:55Coach Carlie: So if you are consistently having these GI issues, there's additional testing that you can do, whether it be from your primary healthcare provider, your GI doc, or even working with us to do some more specific stool testing, to do some food sensitivity testing and gut healing protocols.
- 18:15Coach Carlie: I will say, especially for you triathletes out there who might be swimming in some different types of waters, sometimes we see some parasites that can be lingering.
- 18:25Coach Carlie: And some of these things can stick around for a while.
- 18:28Coach Carlie: So another piece of that logging is when did these symptoms actually start?
- 18:33Coach Carlie: Did that actually start after you got back from a trip to Hawaii or after you had a specific race or something that may be a clue to say, okay, this may be more specifically what's going on to you.
- 18:48Coach Carlie: Anyway, so a lot of pieces to go with that.
- 18:52Coach Carlie: So GI distress, just as a reminder, doesn't have to be part of your sport story.
- 18:58Coach Carlie: So with the right plan and a little gut love, you can go from port of potty panic to podium confidence.
- 19:04Coach Carlie: So we've helped hundreds of athletes just like you, and we'd love to help you too, whether it be in our fueling and hydration boot camp or doing some one-on-one work or joining our longevity nutrition coaching program.
- 19:17Coach Carlie: So if you found this helpful, I would love it if you could share this with a training buddy who may be visiting the Porter John a little bit too much, who's had some of those tummy troubles.
- 19:28Coach Carlie: We would love to help them as well.
- 19:30Coach Carlie: Thanks again for listening, and we will catch you next week on the Find Your Edge podcast.