Optimising Race Day: FLYCARB Supports Bicarbonate Testing with Great Britain Rowing

The FLYCARB team recently visited the Redgrave Pinsent Rowing Lake to support a day of bicarbonate testing and education with elite British rowers. 

The standard racing distance in rowing is 2,000m, which is set to shorten to 1,500m at the LA 2028 Olympics. For the elite men it is an effort of between 5 and 7 minutes. That means Olympic rowing sits right in bicarbonate’s ergogenic sweet spot of around 1–10 minutes: this is the high-intensity zone where sodium bicarbonate has been most extensively studied and shown to deliver performance gains of up to 3%. When layered on top of the fundamentals: training, good nutrition and smart race preparation, bicarb could be the extra percentage that makes the difference.  

Bicarbonate supplementation is already a familiar tool within elite rowing, and several athletes have incorporated FLYCARB’s BICARRB into their pre-race routines, including the men’s four that won gold at the 2025 World Rowing Championships.

Our visit was an opportunity to support the squad with more individualised testing, helping athletes and coaches move beyond standard timing protocols and better understand each athlete’s personal bicarbonate response.

Individual Optimisation of “Time to Peak”

At the highest level of sport, marginal gains can make the difference between standing on the podium, and bowing out in the heats. As part of the testing day, athletes took Mango BICARRB, our most popular flavour and an Informed Sport Certified product and their individual response was tracked. Periodic blood measurements were taken to understand blood bicarbonate concentration over time.

This “Time to Peak” testing helps identify two key pieces of information: how strongly an athlete responds to bicarbonate, and when their bicarbonate levels are likely to peak. Together, these insights can help athletes refine their race-day fuelling strategy and time their intake more precisely.

We also discussed practical strategies for using bicarbonate across multi-day regattas and during competitions involving several races in a single day, where repeatability and recovery between high-intensity efforts become especially important.

The session provided valuable individual data for athletes and coaches, helping inform how bicarb can be used as part of a carefully planned race-day routine.

A huge thank you to Gaz, Will, Fergus, the wider coaching team, the athletes, and support staff for making the day run so smoothly.

We look forward to seeing the team in action this summer!