Go with Your Gut
A new review validates "gut-training" to help better handle during-event feeding.
Once a year, my co-conspirator Kevin and I collaborate on something called the Burrito Challenge in honor of Steve Edwards, who passed away a few years back from lymphoma. Some of you may know Steve as co-creator of the iconic workout series P90X. I knew him as life-long friend and mentor with whom I shared many passions, including (but not limited to) cycling and burritos.
The Burrito Challenge is an epic 60-to-100-mile bike ride “fueled” by five-to-six burritos from various notable SoCal Mexican joints, specifically selected to completely sandbag our progress. We sprinkle in a few steep hills timed to follow especially filling burritos.
We invite all of our friends to join us; we usually have a handful of takers. A certain amount of money is donated to charity for every burrito that goes down and stays down. Only one person has ever thrown up. (Me. It was really more of a vurp.)
Kevin shares this love for bikes and that most grandiose of Mexican dishes. When I say we “collaborate,” it means I say, “Hey Kevin, we should do another burrito challenge.” Kevin combs the internet for a list of the most enormous burritos in LA and spends hours on Strava building a cycling route to hit all of them. We then do the route and I get all the credit because Kevin lacks my desperate need for validation. Everyone wins.
Because I’m theoretically savvy in the ways of nutrition, when people hear about the Burrito Challenge, they often ask, “What the hell?” I shrug and explain that, if you want to see the stars, sometimes you need to hit yourself in the head with a hammer.
Kevin and I sometimes justify our annual debacle as “gut training,” the practice of deliberately overfeeding during exercise to help your digestive system learn how to handle food with less gastric upset. Gut training is also believed to improve carbohydrate uptake so that you can go longer without bonking.
In reality, gut training is to the Burrito Challenge what weightlifting is to dropping a 100-pound kettlebell on your head. Completed, it requires consuming in excess of 6,000 calories, many of which are protein, fiber, and fat, and enough sodium to make the Dead Sea taste like tap water by comparison.
But the stars…
Recent science on gut training.
My point is that there are better ways to gut train. I lay out a strategy in my book, The BWR Guide to Eating Like a Semi Pro, that is well-established in endurance athlete circles. Because I’m an advocate, I was chuffed to read a review this year in the journal Sports Medicine that really brings the practice into focus. Sort of.
The article is titled “The Effect of Gut-Training and Feeding-Challenge on Markers of Gastrointestinal Status in Response to Endurance Exercise: A Systematic Literature Review.”
It defines gut-training as a “structured intervention” and a feeding-challenge as “acute intake.” They both show promise. In other words, you can have a scheduled plan or you can just randomly up your during-exercise feeding and potentially get results.
The study looked at five databases, found 304 studies that fit the bill, and narrowed that down to eight studies actually worth including. This made for a pretty limited pool of data to draw from, but the authors still feel it’s safe to say that gut-training and feeding-challenges appear to have these benefits:
They improve gut discomfort during exercise.
They may reduce carbohydrate malabsorption in response to feeding during exercise.
They reduce the incidence and severity of exercise-associated gastrointestinal symptoms, mostly in your tummy.
They enhance glucose availability.
They enhance direct exercise performance.
However, science hasn’t really figured out why these things happen. Also, the authors feel that more research needs to go into establishing exactly how to gut-train.
Another thing I found interesting was that the research focuses on carb intake when, in the real world, athletes tend to eat a combo of carbs, fat, and protein—so it would be nice to see more research on various combinations of macronutrients.
How to gut train.
Because the research just validates what a lot of athletes and trainers already know and doesn’t really present any hard recommendations, the underlying message is that if you want to know if something works, try it yourself.
Here’s recap of my recommendations from the BWR guide that you can use as a template:
Have a feeding plan.
Train with a full stomach.
Overdo the carbs during training.
Simulate race conditions and race feeding plan.
Beyond that, pay attention to what works and doesn’t work. If you want to build a formal plan, great, but as the review indicates, an unstructured approach may also benefit you.
The key to personalized nutrition is paying attention to how your body (including your brain, by the way) responds to various inputs. Just keep in mind that gut training is supposed to feel a little gross—not six burrito gross—but still gross, because you’re learning to adapt.
I’d love to hear your feedback on this one. How do you go about gut-training? What’s worked and what hasn’t? Let us all know in the comments below!