Want to Finish Faster? Here’s How Bicarb Helps

Josh Elston-Carr Josh Elston-Carr

In endurance sports, outcomes are often decided in the closing stages of a race. Think Kelly Holmes or Mo Farah tearing down the home straight!  Here, the difference between success and failure depends on our ability to produce high power under fatigue.

A study by Dalle et al (2021), published in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, provides clear evidence that sodium bicarbonate directly enhances your sprint finish!

What the Research Showed

The study involved trained cyclists completing a 3-hour simulated race, immediately followed by a 90-second all-out sprint, a realistic proxy for race scenarios.

The athletes consumed bicarbonate at 0.3g/kg, as recommended by our BICARRB calculator.

The results showed:

  • 3% increase in mean sprint power following the 3-hour effort

  • Increased lactate accumulation and utilisation capacity during the sprint

  • Significantly elevated blood bicarbonate and pH prior to the final effort

In a race scenario, a 3% gain in power output is huge. Here’s what it could mean for your race strategy…

Bicarb Performance Strategy

The study shows that in addition to improving performance with ‘fresh legs’, that bicarbonate enhances anaerobic output under accumulated fatigue. In other words, it directly improves our performance in realistic race scenarios, helping us better respond to

  • Late-stage surges

  • Breakaways

  • Final sprints

Crucially, the improvement in power output was associated with a greater utilisation of the extracellular buffering pool (the buffering provided by the bicarb!), which was shown by larger reductions in blood bicarbonate and higher lactate concentrations during the sprint. 

Here, more lactate is a good thing. It means the athletes were able to go ‘deeper into the red’, because they were able to buffer the acidic part of lactic acid (hydrogen ions) more effectively.

The Takeaway

The research confirms what many athletes feel and have reported back to us: bicarb helps them close harder and sprint better, it provides an ‘edge’.

When a race reaches ‘crunch time’, it's physiology, not just psychology, that determines the outcome. 

Ready to feel the boost? Head over to our shop now.

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