GUT INSTINCT

Pro cyclists now perform strategic ‘gut training' to boost their energy production, stomach comfort and athletic performance. We reveal how it could help you too

-  Mark Bailey

What do athletic Tour de France cyclists and mustard-chinned competitive hotdog eaters have in common? Not much, you might presume. Okay, cyclists gobble plenty of bars and gels during races, but they don't scoff gluttonous amounts of fatty grub like American Joey 'Jaws' Chestnut, who holds the Major League Eating (MLE) record for necking 76 hot dogs in 10 minutes. There is one colourful similarity: Tour winners wear the yellow jersey, while Chestnut earned the MLE's fabled 'Mustard Yellow Belt'. But what really unites these wildly different sports is the new scientific concept of "gut training." While competitive eaters train their guts to handle huge volumes of food, pro riders take a more nuanced approach, performing gut training to boost how many carbs they can oxidise, in an effort to optimise their cycling performances.

"Gut training" may sound like a euphemism for shedding some belly blubber, but the strategy - utilised by teams such as Ineos Grenadiers - focuses instead on the critical role of the gut in energy production. In a paper in the journal Sports Medicine entitled *Training the Gut For Athletes,' sports nutrition expert Dr Asker Jeukendrup wrote: "The gastrointestinal (GI) tract plays a critical role in delivering carbohydrate and fluid during prolonged exercise and can therefore be a major determinant of performance."

Dr Patrick Wilson, Associate Professor of Exercise Science at Old Dominion University, Virginia, and author of The Athlete's Gut (VeloPress), says sports scientists are now more in tune with the vital role of the gut: "As we've understood a lot about muscle adaptation, heart adaptation and all the body systems that underlie sports performance, there's been increasing interest in other peripheral organ systems that support that type of performance."