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How to cycle faster downhill
For cycling success no stone is left unturned. Diet is optimised, training is blitzed and kit fettled. Yet technique for cycling faster downhill and in corners is often overlooked. With a world of free speed on offer and all for no extra physical effort you can easily harness the twin powers of momentum and gravity [...]
Why are all these athletes puking the same colour?
Time for some sports nutrition fun as we ponder the biggest questions in endurance sport, including just why this random selection of endurance athletes are all sharing a frighteningly similar colour of vomit…A quick warning before we proceed. This piece contains graphic images, and is best not read while eating.Below you’ll see a variety of [...]
Eating cr*p - why professional athletes have terrible nutrition
You would imagine any athlete at the top of their game, particularly in endurance sports, would have everything spot on. Training, rest, kit, mindset and of course, nutrition. We've heard so much about 'marginal gains' in today's sports arena it seems impossible to believe elite athletes and teams would leave any stone unturned in the [...]
Beat the heat - how to ace training and racing in the heat every time
You may spend your wet winter sessions dreaming of blue skies and sunshine, but training and racing in the heat has its own challenges - and the higher the mercury rises, the harder they get. Excess heat is a huge (and avoidable) cause of underperformance. Fortunately, with a little simple preparation you can hammer your [...]
How ordinary sports nutrition got stuck in the 80s
The 80s had it all. Tie-die, neon, synth pop, hair metal and eurodisco and, for the first time, exercise became a thing for everyone. Joggers pounded pavement while road biking, mountain biking, marathons and triathlons hit the mainstream. Here, sports nutrition was born. Sport has come a long way since, yet ordinary sports nutrition is [...]
Pro Cycling's Dirty Secret
Cycling is great for the environment - pedal about your daily business and you can smugly slash carbon emissions at a pedal stroke. And the Tour de France is cycling in all its majesty, winding its way through some of Europe's most stunning natural landscapes. But, there is a big skeleton in pro cycling's cupboard...Plastic. Absolutely [...]
Endurance: How smiling improves exercise performance
If we’re smiling when running it not only shows that we’re enjoying ourselves, it could also help us perform betterIn a recent post on training motivation, 33Shake co-founder Warren melded a quote from Irish endurance legend Gerry Duffy - “You don’t have to train, you get to train” - with the Latin phrase ‘memento mori’, which means [...]
Heartbeats per mile - a better fitness measure than heart rate?
Endurance athletes are used to using heart rate per minute to monitor training, but new evidence suggests measuring heartbeats per mile could be even better…When you want to know how expensive your car will be to run, you ask about its miles per gallon, not its miles per minute, right? So why not take a [...]
Salbutamol, asthma and the Tour de France’s missing marginal gain
When I was a kid no one knew what salbutamol was. Having been diagnosed as asthmatic aged four and given two inhalers - one of which was salbutamol - I got used to explaining to teachers exactly what I was puffing on in class, and why. Today, everyone knows what it is thanks to more [...]
Three signs you need to eat during exercise
Standard fueling dogma for endurance sports says you must eat before you’re hungry otherwise the wheels will fall off and you’ll collapse in a sweaty, crying heap somewhere just shy of the halfway mark.This is excellent advice. If you are a sports nutrition company…Because when athletes follow this advice they consume a LOT more product [...]