Swimming vs athletics debate

The debate continues: Some of your comments on swimming and athletics world records

Yesterday's and Monday's posts have certainly inspired some really great comments. Thank you to all of you who have thrown your opinion into the 'ring' and added to the debate on the athletics and swimming world records.

The limit to world records: Yet another predictive model

Speaking of world records, a very interesting study was announced today - it is a (yet another) model that looks at the limits to human athletic performance. This is about the fourth one this year, some have said we've almost arrived at the human limit, others have somehow suggested that man should run 100m in 6 seconds!

This particular study predicts, among other things, that the Men's 100m world record will one day hit a limit at 9.48 seconds, and that the marathon record could improve by 4 minutes 23 seconds.

It also suggests that the WOMEN's 100m world record could drop as low as 10.19 seconds. Now, I'm open enough to give the first few predictions a chance, but when I consider that final prediction, that women will run a full 0.30 seconds FASTER than a record which has stood for 20 years and is seriously suspect with regards to doping, then I lose a great deal of confidence in the validity of the predictions.

I haven't had the time to look through the study and its predictions in great detail, but I am aware of it, and I will certainly post in more detail on it during the next few days, perhaps early next week. My first reaction is that it's another case of "can't see the wood for the trees", much like the ridiculous statement by Prof Peter Weyand that humans should run 100m in 6 seconds because Cheetahs can (the same Prof got involved with cheetahs of a different kind when he lent his "expert" opinion to the defence of Oscar Pistorius)...!

The debate on athletics world records

The debate on world records is appropriate, given our last few posts, and so I'll keep the theme alive next week when I look at that latest round of predictions. For today, however, because many people don't read the comments to the posts (they either receive the post by email or just read once and don't return often), I thought it would be an interesting change to actually post some of the comments, in the name of facilitating a bit of "two-way" conversation (as much as is possible through a post-comment format!). And, I have to confess, it gives me an easy post on a lazy Friday afternoon!

So here are some the excellent posts and comments we've received, with my brief comments in maroon. Thanks again!

From Scott:

That strength in swimming is important should be obvious when looking at an elite swimmer’s body. The ability to move efficiency through the water is, by expert consensus, even more important. A case in point would be Janet Evans, all forty odd kilograms of her when she raced, and the long standing records she set. Another example would be Michael Phelps’ extraordinary kick which comes about because the extreme hyper flexibility in his ankles and knees are unmatched by his peers (Mark Spitz, incidentally, enjoyed hyper flexible knees).

My personal theoretical model of efficiency has efficiency playing a relatively minor role in the lower power output ranges (I’m thinking here of a higher power to displacement ratio along the lines of gymnasts) but growing steadily as power output increases (and power/displacement drops). At some point, however, perhaps at the point where water resistance starts creating turbulence and the related drag, a significant drop in the benefits realized from additional power is seen and efficiency jumps to become the overwhelming dominant factor in determining ultimate speed. Admittedly my only justification for this rests on the fact that doping has proven far more efficient for women compared to men, and the fact our closely related genetic cousins the great apes, far more powerful than we could ever be, can’t swim at all. It may well be weak but it is a model that parallels some of the facts, including why strength doping seemingly has a lesser impact on swimming than athletics (at least for males).

This all leads to the statements I’d like to make (again just my own opinion):

1. I don’t think pool technology has advanced in any significant manner since 2004 Athens;
2. Inge de Bruijn’s records are considered by many to be a product of doping;
3. The new swimsuits are acknowledged by virtually every expert not under contract as a Speedo “consultant” to be the cause of the recent avalanche of world records;
4. The current debate is whether the new swimsuits are, in fact, devices and therefore illegal under pre-existing rules (not unlike IAAF’s banning of “stored energy” running shoes);
5. It has been submitted by many the one thing which can indicate a device is at play is seeing certain individuals benefit more from the item in question than others (i.e. a tool which compensates for a specific deficiency). Increasingly elite coaches are identifying the impact of the new suits is not evenly spread as certain swimmers have clearly gained an advantage, and that those swimmers can be identified by body type and known weaknesses; and
6. If this is true (and this opinion is growing by leaps and bounds amongst the swimming community) then any record set using these suits would be illegal under the rules existing at the time and therefore would be struck from the record books.

One can see why this controversy is getting very close to the boiling point.

From mcgrathe: A sobering look at the records in women's athletics

I especially got drawn in by the question of the credibility of the athletics records. Clearly (in my opinion) Dibaba should be the record holder over 5 and 10K on the track, but the 10K record is so far fetched, nobody even thinks about it anymore. It's difficult to know what to do in cases such as this though. Can you just decide to throw out all the dodgy records in the sport? Unfortunately, in Women's track & field, there wouldn't be much left.
Having a trawl through the records, it looks very very bad.
100m - FloJo - dodgy record
200m - FloJo - dodgy record
400m - Marita Koch - 1980s eastern bloc & well documented
800m - Jarmila Kratochvilova - always in the shadow of Marita Koch - enough said..
1500 - Qu Yunxia - 1993 turtle blood performance set in Beijing...
5000m - Dibaba - probably wouldn't have got near the record except that up to the mid '90s the 3K was the championship event and Wang Junxia set that in Beijing as well
10000m - Wang Junxia, 5 days before her 3K record and 42s faster than the old record. Still 23s faster than anyone else ever.
S'Chase - Gulnara Samitova. Similar to the 5K, new enough to probably be clean
100H - Yordanka Donkova, 1980s eastern bloc
400H - Yulia Pechonkina - could this be a clean record?
Shot - Natalya Livovskaya, 1980s eastern bloc - 4 furthest throws ever?
Discus - Gabriele Reinsch, 1980s eastern bloc
Javelin - Barbora Spotakova - same as 5K and S'chase as a new javelin was introduced in '99. The old record was Petra Felke (E Germany in the '80s)
Hammer - Tatyana Lysenko - her furthest ever throw doesn't count because she was caught on drugs.

Maybe this is why so much is made of Isinbayeva in the Pole Vault - it is a long time since a woman has come along capable of delivering WR or near WR performances on a regular basis at Grand Prix meetings.

It's an impossible problem to fix though. Even if you wipe all records older than say 15 years, you still end up with a few dodgy records. The 2nd fastest time over 100m belongs to Marion Jones for example. None of the top 10 shot putters are believable. Yet it would be great if records were returned to where athletes truly believe they have a shot at breaking them. At the moment, only a handful of women can have any notion about getting close to a WR in any event.

And a final one from Derek, providing an interesting (and certainly very valid) counterpoint to the swimming debate.

I think swimming is enjoying much more popularity today, because of the suits. People who never cared about the sport before ( like me) are now paying attention (like me) and people who never have watched Olympic swimming in the past (like me) are all of a sudden became very interested in watching the sport (like me). The way I see it, is that comparing athletics records to swimming records is a little like comparing apples to oranges. When a world record is broken in a sport, it is good for the sport, because it brings more media attention, and possibly opens the “pool” of perspective athletes. It’s impressive when a world record in athletics falls, because we know, like you’ve mentioned, that many are tainted. This is also one of the reasons why, in many cases we automatically (and blindly) suspect that the person who broke the record is doping. The human logic, correct or incorrect, thinks that, if the previous record was set with dope, then the athlete who broke it must also be doping.

On the other hand, in swimming, it’s a slightly different story. We know that the records are broken because of “the suit”, assuming that doping isn’t a factor of course, and as we discussed, maybe the playing field isn’t too level at the moment because of the price of the suit and sponsor contracts. My argument is that in the case of swimming, we are talking about technology. The price of technology always falls with time. What was once too expensive for small nations will be completely accessible before the next Olympics. Sponsorship shouldn’t be a problem, because they (companies besides Speedo) will try harder to develop something that will give it competition. I may have the names mixed up, but I understand Arena came out with a suit called the LZR, but it couldn’t match the Speedo suit. They were under pressure to come out with a suit quickly. They didn’t have time to develop to their capability because they were losing sales. I wouldn’t be surprised that they were unaware that Speedo was developing their suit. Now that the Olympics are over, they have more time to do research and come out with a better suit that will (hopefully) give some competition to Speedo.

Another reason why I think the swim suit is good is because no one can deny that it is good that the drug influenced records from the ‘80’s are gone. I would much rather have “swim suit” induced records than a drug induced record! That being said, I’m waiting for a huge break through in shoes so that we can cleanse the athletics record books!

That being said, I think FINA needs to take a better look at their rules so that something like this doesn’t happen again. I don’t think they should take ALL of the blame though; it’s pretty hard to guess the future. I am aware that they had the chance to do something about it when they met back in the spring I thing It was.

On a different subject, you said “…Usain Bolt in Beijing, and the east African runners (whether these are drug-assisted is another story entirely!)” I would sure like to hear your opinion on this subject!

As for that final request, well, let's leave that one for a rainy day! We did discuss Usain Bolt's performance in the context of doping at the time, you can read that article here (it got some hostile debate going - here's to opening that up again!). As for the east Africans, I may be naive, but I know that most of them train in areas without electricity, and without electricity, you don't have fridges and technology to store drugs, and so I suspect (without proof, entirely based on the people I know within Kenya and Ethiopia who are involved with their best athletes) that they are clean. But that debate is for another time!

Ross

Swimming vs athletics

World records in swimming compared to records in athletics - interesting observations

Two days ago, I did a post looking at the absolute "cleansing" of the record books in the sport of swimming this year. 70 records in 2008, 66 Olympic records in the recent Beijing Olympics, and swimmers who began the year as world record holders (think Alexander Popov) suddenly find themselves outside the top 10 in that same event by the end of August! It has been an unprecedent explosion in the sport, one which I do believe is bad for the credibility of swimming.

That post got some good feedback and questions, and hopefully prompted some thought about the causes. There are some who have claimed that this astonishing "record-rush" is the result of better training and better athletes. Yet that implies that swimming legends like Alexander Popov, Pieter van den Hoogenband, Ian Thorpe, Janet Evans, were "inferior" only a few years ago. The problem is the timing, not necessarily the concept - evolution in training, generation of better athletes, only works when you look back over many years.

For example, we can compare the current marathon world record holder, Haile Gebrselassie, to Jim Peters, who held it in the 1950s, and then it's appropriate to say "better athletes and better training". The fact is that great swimmers who were world record holders at the start of 2008 (like Alex Popov) are now not even in the top 10 in their events! Better training, which by nature tends to evolve slowly, especially in a mature sport like swimming (this is not BMX racing with rapid growth opportunities), doesn't demote you from best EVER to outside the top 10 in a few months.

So I firmly believe that the suit is a large part of the "problem", whether it's a placebo effect or a real one (I believe it to be real) is another debate. But the latest news is that the USA are pressing FINA into banning the full body suits, and as mentioned the other day, the big swimming nations might yet step in to 'save the day' for swimming.

The influence of doping: Swimming flies under the radar

One interesting aspect of this debate is that little mention is made of the possible impact of doping in swimming's record-explosion. If it was cycling or athletics, the noise would be far louder, the accusations far more frequent and much more intense.

I have no doubt that doping happens in swimming, just as it does in all sports. But massive doping scandals are conspicuous by their absence - the Chinese swimmers of the 1990's are perhaps the most recent large scandal. Jessica Hardy missed the Olympic Games for a positive test, Ian Thorpe defended himself for an alleged EPO positive, but other than this, I can recall few high profile cases.

I suspect that a big part of the reason for this is that doping is far less beneficial for swimmers than it seems to be for track and field athletes. This is not simply a bald assertion, it is a conclusion drawn from the analysis of world records, which I discuss below. So before leaping onto the attack, consider the follow story, told by numbers:

World record evolution and what it means for doping

The table below shows the average age of the world records in men's and women's swimming events at the closing of the Beijing Olympic Games. They are the same tables I showed in the previous post:

• In men's events, the average age of world records was 1 year, 1 month.
• For the women, it was 8 months. That was thanks to the incredible events of Beijing, where a total of 21 world records were broken.
• The result is that when the 32 events are combined, only 4 of them have records that are older than three years.

Now look at the same analysis for athletics (both track and field):

• For men (a total of 21 events) , the average age of track and field records was 8 years and 11 months
• Of the 21 records, 16 are older than three years. The age has actually been greatly reduced by Usain Bolt's Beijing performances, because he took out a 12-year old record (MJ in the 200m) and also helped the relay team break a 16-year old record.

On the women's side, it's even more pronounced:

• The average age of world records is 14 years and 9 months. That is an incredible 22 times older than the swimming records (14 yrs 9 mths compared to 8 mths)!
• 18 of the 21 records are older than three years

The graph below shows this comparison:


So what does this mean? Some observations and ideas

The more astute among you (and we know that all of you are particularly astute!) have by now scanned those athletics tables, and you will have noticed the number of records that date back to the late 1980s and early 1990s - men's and women's field events in particular are dominated by records set in this period. I think it is unquestionably known that athletes of the 1980's, especially in women's athletics, were quite "reliant" on anabolic doping products!

In fact, across both men's and women's athletics, it is only really the men's track events where any world records have been set in the last ten years, and those are courtesy first of Usain Bolt in Beijing, and the east African runners (whether these are drug-assisted is another story entirely!)

Implications for swimming

So what does this have to do with swimming? Well, you've by now already come to the conclusion that athletics records are so "old" because they are influenced heavily by doping that was undoubtedly pervasive in the 1980s and early 1990s.

But, the question you might ask, is "Why do the swimming records not reflect the same pattern?" It is again difficult to argue that the swimmers of the 1980's and early 1990s were NOT doped. We know that the eastern Bloc nations, in particular East German athletes, were heavily into drugs at this time - this applies to both swimmers and athletes. Yet the drug-induced records from the pool are now long gone, ancient history, replaced by the records set in the "new era", thanks to newly designed swimming pools, training methods and, in particular, swim suits.

There are many possible implications and arguments about this. I believe it suggests that the impact of technology in swimming dwarfs that of doping. This is clearly not the case in athletics, because records exist that may survive forever - can we ever expect to see a woman run under 47.60 seconds for 400m, for example? Perhaps "forever" is too strong a word, but what is certain is that the track and field records have withstood all the improvements in equipment and training since the 1980s.

Swimming, on the other hand, has leapt forward, and I do believe that this is an indication that doping is far less significant to swimming performance, which is the statement I began this analysis with. The reason for this, I believe, is that swimming is such an "inefficient" activity (even the world's best swimmers are only 7 to 9% efficient, I'm reliably informed), that any technology that reduces drag in the water has an enormous effect on performance. On the other hand, drugs which improve strength and power (as the drugs of the 1980s would have done) may have a far smaller effect, with so much of the gains being lost to the inefficient swimming stroke.

This is an oversimplification, and the obvious argument is that doping may be very effective, but is "masked" by the added introduction of technology. If they've been doping for years, technology would still move the event forward when it is introduced. I'd be keen (as always) to hear your views and opinions on that statement.

Is track and field lacking credibility in a different way?

The final point, an extension from the previous post, is that if swimming lacks credibility because its records are broken almost at will, then does athletics lack credibility when some records are so superior that it may take two or three generations to come close?

One might argue that in the case of women's athletics in particular, world records are equally meaningless, just as they are for swimming, though for a very different reason. If I was a female 100m runner, I'd certainly be more than disgruntled that the world record in my event is almost 0.5 seconds faster than most women will ever run. That is perhaps just as bad.

I have a feeling that IF FINA does ban the suits, we may, in 20 years time, find that swimming is in the same situation as athletics is today - its world records are "meaningless", simply because they are so out of reach that rather than being a trivial subtitle to the race (as they are now), they are a remnant of a previous time, where doping (technological or pharmaceutical, depending on the sport) was rife.

Ross

Swimsuit controversy

Swimming's credibility crisis: How FINA's blind eye is affecting the purity of the sport

The Beijing Olympic Games have come and gone. And with them, aided by technology including a uniformly deeper pool, improved wash-off areas, and high-tech swimsuits, so have 70 world swimming records this year.

In fact, swimming now suffers from such a dramatic credibility crisis that a race in which a world record is NOT broken is a disappointment. I dare suggest that you will be able to recall such a race in Beijing (though you may have to try hard, because there were not many). If an Olympic Gold was one without a world record being broken, it was met with rather disappointed silence.

Olympic fever - how bad was it?

The table below demonstrates just how easily records were broken in Beijing.

Out of a total of 32 events (16 men's and 16 women's), an incredible 21 events had world records broken a total of 25 times, and 66 Olympic records were set. Only ONE SINGLE Olympic record managed to survive for men and women. It was a complete clearing out of the Olympic (and World) record books.

That is, in my opinion, a problem for the sport of swimming - 70 world records in one year, and 66 Olympic records in one Games is not a symptom of a credible sport. I'm sure that some will disagree, but bear in mind that these 70 records are only the times of the WINNERS. There were races in Beijing where the first 5 finishers were swimming faster than the old world record! The South Africa 4 x 100m relay team, for example, swam almost a second faster than they swam only four years earlier to win gold in Athens, and they finished seventh!

Swimming records - an endangered species

Admittedly, there are other factors involved, and people will argue that this is a positive sign of progress. But consider the following:

The 100m freestyle record first went under 48-seconds in 2000. And then for eight years, 48-seconds was the magical "barrier" which only one man could break (Peter van den Hoogenband). Since the start of 2008, ELEVEN men have swum faster than 48-seconds. The result is that legends of the sport, whose position in all-time lists was secure, are suddenly line items in the swimming record books, forgotten and displaced almost overnight thanks not to improved swimmers, but improved technology.

That this should happen is not the problem - Paavo Nurmi and Jim Peters, two great long-distance runners from the past, can hardly expect to remain in the record books given the advances in technology over the last 50 years in their sport. The problem is the pace with which it has happened. Within one year, records have been forgotten, and the swimming world record is now an endangered species. And that is not good for the sport.

The lifespan of a swimming record

To look at this a little more objectively, I looked at the AVERAGE AGE (in days) of world records in the swimming events. The tables below show the age of men's and women's world records on the day that the Olympic Swimming events began. The arrows on the left hand side show which events had their records broken in Beijing (these records are then "aged" zero days old for this analysis), while the red arrows on the right show the records that had stood for longer than 2 years going into the Beijing Olympics.



For the men's analysis, the average age of the swimming world records BEFORE the Beijing Games was 680 days. As a result of the carnage in Beijing's Water Cube, it fell to 382 days (because 11 events had their records reset to zero days). There are now only THREE records older than 2 years - the 100m Butterfly (Ian Crocker), the 400m Freestyle (Ian Thorpe) and the 1500m Freestyle (Grant Hackett).

On the women's side, it's even worse. The average age BEFORE Beijing was 921 days, though that was massively skewed by one record - that of Janet Evans in the 800m freestyle. That record was broken in Beijing (by Rebecca Adlington), and the result is that a female swimming record now has an average age of only 247 days. In other words, women's swimming records have on average been set in the last year. Only one record is older than 2 years - the 8 year old record of Inge de Bruijn in the women's 100m butterfly.

You may still believe this is not a problem, and that is, I guess, personal choice. The essence of the sport is the competition - the race - and so the times are the fineprint, you may argue. Does it matter that a gold is won in a time that does not rewrite the record books? Perhaps not. But as someone who comes from a track and field background, where world records are special and meaningful, swimming really does face a crisis of credibility. It can certainly not boast about a meeting in which 66 records are set - that's not progress. Rather, it makes a mockery of the past, or the present (depending on your point of view).

Who is to blame? FINA, quite simply

So the obvious question is who do we put this down to? And the answer, as we have actually been saying this whole year (this is a topic we covered extensively in the build-up to Beijing), is FINA, swimming's governing body.

FINA showed very weak leadership when first presented with the issue of the Speedo Swimsuit, and they have followed this up with even worse leadership on subsequent suits. You can read one such example here - it talks about the Rocketsuit, which very openly promises to make swimmers more buoyant. The article is well written and direct, and I agree entirely with its conclusion: "the sensible thing for FINA to have done would have been to call for a moratorium on suit approval so that sensible debate can ensue..."

The founder of the company that makes the Rocketsuit is quoted as saying "The Rocket Skin has already been used in triathlons for non-wetsuit legal races and we have seen performance advantages of up to 6 seconds per 100 meters and 1500 meter races done in 87 degree water with no issues of overheating". I feel safe in suggesting that this is probably marketing hype speaking, and we won't see a 42 second 100m freestyle in this suit!

But the point is, the technology exists, and FINA failed miserably to impose its admittedly weak laws on suit design back in April when they met about the suit. Now they must face the consequences. The trouble is, they don't seem to care.

Fortunately for swimming, some people do. The big nations, notably Australia and the USA, are actually pushing to have these suits banned, and hopefully, they'll carry enough clout to do something. Otherwise, every single time a big meeting is held, we'll see a repeat of the Beijing result, and swimming's world records will move from one meeting to the next with little chance of survival. Again, that may be fine with some. I find it hard to swallow...

Ross

P.S. Looking at those lifespans of the swimming world records raises some interesting thoughts, and perhaps you've already begun wondering how swimming compares to track and field? Never fear, I've done that analysis too, and I'll post on that next! And it throws up a few very interesting implications! So join us then!

No need to swallow?

Rinse your mouth out with sports drinks - it beats water...!

Once again, apologies for the absence - our posting frequency has fallen right off the charts, and we're down to an embarassing one per week! The end of the year tends to bring with it a log-jam of work, as all the outstanding work from the previous 10 months is suddenly squeezed into the final two months of the year! Combined with "post-fatigue", I'm tempted to say that like Olympic athletes, we're in the off-season period!

Also, very little seems to be happening in the world of sport, unless you count cricket and rugby, but there are already about a billion blogs and articles being written about those "small" sports, so I thought it best to leave them alone!

Instead, I came across a very interesting study this past week, which is actually a repeat of a study that was first published in 2004, in which simply rinsing the mouth with a glucose-containing drink (like Gatorade for those in the USA, Powerade/Energade for SA) improved performance during a time-trial lasting about one hour. You can see the abstract for the orginal 2004 study here, and the latest one here.

The 2004 study - rinse with a carbohydrate drink, not water

In the 2004 study, cyclists had to complete a given amount of work in as fast a time as possible. This is important to note, because as we've discussed previously in our series on fatigue, the MODE of performance trial can influence the conclusions drawn quite substantially. In both these studies, the cyclists were able to freely select their work-rate and slow down or speed up in response to the swishing around of the carbohydrate drink or the water.

The figure below shows the performance part of the research study, and summarises its results:


So, the rinsing with the malto-dextrin solution improvement performance by almost 3%, quite independently of the usual metabolic effects of glucose on performance. That is, our usual thinking would be that glucose is superior because it is rapidly metabolised, converted to energy, and delays the onset of fatigue. This study clearly challenges that, for a number of reasons.

First, the performance trial is quite short - the theory that glucose ingestion has a profound effect on performance is particularly true for long-duration exercise, where the depletion of liver or muscle glycogen may be possible. That said, there is some evidence that glucose ingestion improves performance even during much shorter exercise trials, which is difficult to explain because only a small part of your energy comes from that ingested glucose when you do shorter, high intensity training - that was one of the reasons this study was done in the first place.

Also, in this study, the performance of the cyclists was better on CHO from the very first quarter of the trial. So when performance is broken down, it turns out that you go faster within the first few seconds, and that clearly has nothing to do with metabolic effects.

Another important point is that the malto-dextrin solution was chosen because it is colourless and non-sweet, which means it's less likely to be obvious to the subjects when they're on it - this would otherwise introduce the possibility of a large placebo effect. It turns out that some subjects did pick up the difference: Four of the nine cyclists guessed they were on the CHO-trial, based on taste and viscosity. Of these four, three improved, one did worse. I guess the placebo effect can never be ruled out, but it does seem to have been controlled as much as possible in the study.

Increased central drive - feedback from the mouth, output to the muscles?

So what then is the explanation? Before that, a couple of cautionary words. Firstly, this study did NOT show that rinsing the mouth is better than swallowing the solution. It simply compared rinsing with CHO to rinsing with H2O. It is not, therefore, an excuse not to drink glucose-containing drinks during exercise! (the second study discusses this a bit more).

However, what it does do is help us understand how shorter exercise might be improved by carbohydrates. The authors of this study speculated that there are receptors in the mouth, which are stimulated by the CHO-drink (but not by water), and then trigger centres in the brain that then increase the central drive for exercise.

Those who've followed our site for a while now will recall our Fatigue Series, in which we described how it is the brain that regulates performance, by controlling muscle activation in response to various cues (like heat, oxygen availability etc.). This CHO-finding would fit in with that kind of thinking - the brain receives information from the mouth that glucose is available, and it allows an increase in muscle activation.

The ultimate outcome of this is that the perceived exertion is regulated, and performance is a function of that regulation. In other words, athletes pace themselves according to how they feel (this is obvious, I'm sure), and the rinsing with CHO changes that perception, which allows them to cycle faster, and thus achieve the same perception at a higher power output (again, read the Fatigue Series for more discussion on this)

If you think about it, this is really the ONLY way to explain how power output and hence performance are improved when you swish a drink around in your mouth. It cannot be metabolic, only sensory. And sensation (or perception) is, as you may recall, the key component of this regulatory system where the brain monitors perceived exertion and performance. Think also of the last time you went for a run or ride in very hot conditions, and what the first drink you had afterwards felt like - it's instantly pleasurable, and that's because of feedback to the brain, a different kind of physiology from the classic thinking that something in the body has gone "wrong".

The second study: Repeating the finding

This one study could be dismissed as a spurious finding, but it has just been repeated, in a study that has yet to be published but is available online. It followed an almost identical method to the first, so we won't bore you with the details, but will point out that it differs in that this second study also looked at ingestion of CHO and H2O.

The figure below summarizes the design and main finding:


So, a repeat of the finding that rinsing with the CHO-solution improves performance compared to rinsing with water (this time by almost 4%). There was not, however, a difference between ingesting the same CHO-mixture and drinking it, and nor was there a difference between rinsing and ingesting.

A couple of interesting points about this study - they did not use a malto-dextrin solution, but rather a commercially available sports drink, which means the sweetness/taste issue could be a factor. Quite why drinking the solution did not have an effect is difficult to know - it would have to pass the mouth and presumably trigger the same sensations as if it was rinsed. That remains an unknown.

However, the key point, a repeat of study 1, is that the subjects rode at the same Perception of Effort (or RPE), for a higher power output in the CHO-rinsing trial. Once again, this would suggest that the brain picks up the "reduction" in effort as a result of the glucose in the mouth, and the cyclist rides harder, with the result that the perception increases to the desired level at a higher overall performance level. It supports the notion that the sensation and perception are the regulators of performance.

A third study in the "sandwich" - no effect in runners

Finally, I must make mention that a study in 2007, between these two, did the same thing in runners and found NO DIFFERENCE - that is, rinsing with malto-dextrin did not improve performance in a 45-minute running trial. Is it a running vs. cycling difference? Or something related to habitual diet, a placebo effect? I suspect it may be related to the intensity, and the "cluster" of signals that determine how the athlete paces themselves. Running and cycling differ with regards to the eccentric loading on the muscles and joints, and I suspect this might be a key difference, negating the effect of the signals from the mouth. Difficult to know.

Perhaps a discussion for another day!

We'll hopefully post sooner than next weekend!

Ross