50,000 IUs Of Vitamin D To Improve Conditioning + Combat Supplements w/ Andy Marley (SSOF Ep 58)

Andy Marley1:24

And I think it also depends on where you live as well. So in Dundee, we're at 57 degrees north, where we get next to no sun at all. In fact, we don't actually make any vitamin D between October and May from our skin, so from exposure to UV radiation.

And for people who are living in latitudes where they don't get a lot of UV exposure, then I would suggest higher dose. If you're living more near the equator, then you could probably get away with a lower dose to get the same effect. But what's important is getting your plasma vitamin D levels up to this optimum.

Now, that's up for debate as well. We don't really have any solid consensus on what is an optimum vitamin D status, and it has to be dependent on the person and where they reside. So in Scotland, I'm more lean towards a high dose, mainly because I tend to get 50,000 IUs in one go once a week, not every day, but one go once a week. Because I, and I know many other people, they suck at taking things every day.

It seems to be easier for people to take things once a week rather than trying to take 4,000 to 5,000 a day. That's the other option, that's perfectly fine as well.

James de Lacey3:29

Gotcha. So if someone maybe wanted to test themselves in their vitamin D levels, I'm not sure what the recommended range is. But as you're saying there, that potentially that recommended range may not be optimal or might be lower or higher than it should be?

Andy Marley4:01

Yeah, so most of the health bodies—so for example, in Scotland that's the NHS, would be the health body here—they will, if you feel like you're deficient, they will test for it. But they'll use the Institute of Medicine cutoffs, whereby less than 30 nanomoles per liter is deficient, 30 to 50 is insufficient, and 50 is sufficient.

But the Endocrinological Society and some other research in the field actually say that 50 nanomoles per liter should be the cutoff to be classified as being deficient, 50 to 75 nanomoles per liter would be insufficient, and more than 75 is sufficient. And in fact, even some people say that athletes should have vitamin D levels of more than 100 nanomoles per liter.

But we don't have any evidence to kind of substantiate those claims. It's more hypothesized that athletes tend to have higher metabolic activity, higher protein turnover rates, therefore having more vitamin D will help with that. But we don't have any evidence to support that. Regardless though, 75 nanomoles per liter should be what we're all aiming for to get the maximum benefits of having this vitamin D.

James de Lacey5:00

Interesting. Okay, but even more, doesn't it help? Because vitamin D has a self-regulating mechanism. If you have too much in the body, the body will just convert it to 24,25-OHD, which is inactive more or less. So it's very hard to overdose on vitamin D?

Andy Marley5:33

I mean, it's possible you have to be pretty ridiculous with how you're supplementing. There was even one study where they accidentally gave someone, an elderly patient, 2 million IUs of vitamin D in one go. The complete mistake. And the only thing that happened to them was an elevated blood calcium level, which returned to normal after about a week.

James de Lacey6:03

Wow. Okay. Yeah, I was going to ask you about any long-term effects of high-dosing vitamin D, but it sounds like it's relatively safe. But how does skin color affect the dose? Are you needing to increase the dose above that? I guess I think that 50,000 IUs sounds like a regular, I guess maybe place to start regarding dosage per week. Does that change regarding skin color?

Andy Marley6:31

Well, with regards to skin color, again, it depends how much UV exposure you're getting. Because at the end of the day, when it comes to skin color, all it is is a buildup of a protein which protects you from the sun. That's all skin color really comes down to. That's why Caucasian people go to sunny beds and tan; it's a buildup of this protein.

So you find that people with darker complexions living in latitudes where you're not getting much sun exposure are at much greater risk of being vitamin D deficient. So those people, I would suggest they definitely want to be taking vitamin D.

But then it tends to be that if you start to supplement at a particular level, say 50,000 IUs per week in one go, then eventually the body will come into equilibrium anyway, because vitamin D has a half-life of about three weeks in the blood. So eventually everyone will just get up to that level. So just because you have a darker skin color doesn't necessarily mean you need to take more. Eventually you will get to that level.

James de Lacey7:00

Awesome. This is, I'm loving this new information because all my—I guess I used to supplement vitamin D quite a lot. I've been useless at it, as you mentioned, taking it every day, and you just end up forgetting. So I need to get back on my vitamin D, but I was only taking back in the day I was only doing like 5,000 IUs per day.

Andy Marley7:32

Was that daily?

James de Lacey8:00

Yeah, 5,000 IUs a day. I used to do the same thing. Yeah. And now I've got a 2,000 IU one, so now I know I'm definitely under-dosing. So I'm going to—oh, I just have to take two or three of them at once.

Andy Marley8:00

I'll do the same. Yeah, no, exactly. Also, it's also how you want to take it as well. Because people just take vitamin D with water because it makes sense—you have your multivitamin with water or whatever with water. But vitamin D is fat-soluble, so taking it with a source of milk, some full-fat milk, may actually help increase absorption.

Also, milk has something called beta-lactoglobulin in it, which also binds to vitamin D particles, which can actually help with getting it into the body. Plus, vitamin D has a major effect on calcium, so taking it with milk will actually make the vitamin D work a little bit better.

Because vitamin D, if you take it alone, it's not going to do anything. It has to undergo a whole bunch of different processes in the body. It has to go to the liver first to be converted via the CYP enzymes to 25-OHD, and that's what we measure for vitamin D status. But this still isn't doing anything.

From there, it needs to go to the kidney, where then it gets converted again to 1,25-OHD, which is the active form. And from there, it then needs to go to the tissues for it to do its job. But for it to be converted to the 1,25-OHD, you need magnesium.

If you're magnesium deficient, you're taking vitamin D, it's not going to do anything. And for those genomic effects I mentioned, you need zinc for that to work properly. So if you're zinc deficient, it's not going to work. So you need to think about it as a whole spectrum and not just the vitamin D. I mean, the vitamin D is great, but it needs to work with everything else because it's a precursor to a steroid essentially.

James de Lacey10:19

You often see milk fortified with vitamin D. I haven't actually looked at the label with how much vitamin D is in there. Do you know off your head how much vitamin D is typically in say a serving of milk?

Andy Marley10:19

In the typical serving of milk, there's not a lot. You're talking at IUs looking about 50 to 100 IUs. So you need to... yeah, it's very, very difficult to get enough vitamin D from the diet.

Then even then it gets even more murky because you look at vitamin D from plant sources, it becomes vitamin D2. Vitamin D from animal sources is vitamin D3, and that's the one that we make. So if you're going to have plants versus mushrooms, but then it's the inefficient version of vitamin D and the amount of mushrooms you need to eat to get yourself up to that level is probably as tall as me.

Other options could be eggs and liver, but again, how many people eat eggs and liver? A lot of people don't touch them. And oily fish is another one. Again, people don't touch them. So supplementation for basically everybody is something that I would recommend.

James de Lacey11:13

So what are some symptoms of vitamin D deficiency? Is that something that you would obviously notice day to day, or is it something too subtle that people don't really know?

Andy Marley11:13

In my experience, it's something that people don't tend to notice because it's such a long process to become vitamin D deficient. It's when people are losing weight, they maybe don't think that they've lost weight, then you've not seen them for two months, you go, "Wow, you've lost weight," and they go, "Have I? I haven't felt it." It's the same kind of thing with vitamin D.

But what we see with people who are vitamin D deficient is they tend to be a lot more lethargic. They don't tend to have as much vigor. We are also worried about bone health. So if people are constantly getting sort of fractures, that is an obvious sign of vitamin D deficiency. But there's nothing really that is, "Oh my God, you're definitely vitamin D deficient." It's much more of a subtle thing by and large.

James de Lacey12:08

So let's dive into some of your research around vitamin D and performance. So you've done a couple of studies around aerobic and anaerobic, I guess, performance within various tests. You want to dive into some of the results of those studies and kind of maybe some of the methodology around how you're dosing the vitamin D and what you're looking at?

Andy Marley12:38

So my studies on vitamin D were part of the PhD. Still trying to get some of the research from that published just now actually. The first one was in the European Journal of Sports Science, and we gave people either 50,000 IU, 80,000 IU, or 110,000 IU of vitamin D once per week for six weeks, and they were just told to go away and do their normal training.

So we got training diaries, we got food diaries so we can see exactly how much of the zinc, magnesium, calcium, omega-3, vitamin D that they were taking in from the diet. And we did some tests, obviously baseline and post. The only main drawback of the study was that we weren't able to assess vitamin D levels, mainly due to funding if I'm being brutally honest.

But what we saw was... what I should, before I go into that bit, what happened at first was there had a six-week period where they didn't take the vitamin D, they tested again, and then a six-week period where they took the vitamin D again, tested for a third time. And what we saw was that VO2 peak and wind gate levels actually seem to drop slightly, and this is done over the winter months in Dundee where there was no sun at all. And then following the vitamin D supplementation, it returned to the start of winter levels or was even a little bit higher.

So what we saw was that vitamin D had some kind of a direct relationship in terms of VO2 peak and wind gate power, which hadn't really been seen before. In terms of, because we did have that period without the vitamin D.

And I think it's probably something to do... well, there's a whole bunch of reasons. One of them being increased calcium sensitivity. So if you take vitamin D, it's been hypothesized that it allows greater calcium to be taken into the muscle and also potentially increased calcium release from the sarcoplasmic reticulum. More calcium released, more cross-bridges can form, therefore more muscular force could be produced.

But we also think that has something to do with mitochondrial function, because vitamin D, one of the genomic effects of it is it directly upregulates the expression of the proteins which are needed to create mitochondria. So this is then potentially then allowing more oxygen to be utilized to replenish ATP, therefore increasing VO2 peak.

And another mechanism is that vitamin D potentially has a direct influence on either red blood cell count and the quality of the red blood cells. That's one of the kind of main things that we looked at. So we saw that taking vitamin D actually increased hematocrit and potentially has a slight reduction in plasma volume, meaning that we can get more oxygen saturation into arterials. Because oxygen transport is a very limiting factor for measures like VO2 max and VO2 peak.

So if you can get more oxygen transported, therefore you can reutilize more oxygen, coupled with more efficient mitochondria, more mitochondria, meaning we can improve aerobic performance. So that was the first study.

And then the second study that's been published was combining it with sprint interval training, because we love sprint interval training. It's very much our jam. And again, vitamin D had an additive effect to sprint interval training, because I think the sprint interval training has a lot of complementary mechanisms to vitamin D.

So sprint training can also increase calcium sensitivity, can increase neural output, neural drive, all which can increase power. Sprint training can increase VO2 peak and VO2 max. Then you combine that vitamin D again, people who are potentially insufficient or deficient up to more optimal levels, can then allow greater training to occur, which realizes better adaptations, therefore increasing overall fitness parameters. So I think it's an interesting thing.

And the other study which we're trying to publish just now was looking at hill sprints and battle ropes in the summer combined with vitamin D. And again, we saw that vitamin D had a beneficial effect in terms of reductions in power loss, repeated sprint ability tests, and increased in power throughout each sprint and sprint ability test, as well as increasing strength.

We also added to that, what we did was we got a Smokerlyzer that can tell how much carbon monoxide is in the breath. We found a paper that seems to suggest that if you know hematocrit, hemoglobin, and carbon monoxide levels, you can predict the lifespan of the red blood cells. And what we've seen is that vitamin D seems to have a protective effect on red blood cells, so they weren't dying as quickly, whereas following sprint interval training we saw a reduction in red blood cell lifespan. So it seems to be definitely some kind of protective effect in terms of the red blood cells that vitamin D is exerting.

James de Lacey18:12

Before getting back to the podcast, I want to let you know there's a link down in the description for the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground community. You can get all the help you need for your combat sports training. You get every single Sweet Science of Fighting training program, online course, and you get access to a range of coaches within the private Discord community. So go check that out, and back to the podcast.

Wow. Okay, so sprint interval training plus vitamin D is the ultimate stack.

Andy Marley18:37

Yeah, it's really, really good. If you are deficient, then you're doing yourself a disservice. So you're not going to be getting all the benefits you can from your sprint interval training, where if you're sufficient, then you're going to be maximizing the benefits you can get.

James de Lacey18:37

So you mentioned with the study you're looking to get published, they were doing hills and battle ropes in the summer, so they're doing them outside in the sun as well as supplementing with vitamin D. Is that something you would recommend for people to take vitamin D during the summer if they are maybe outside a lot, still just as an insurance?

Andy Marley19:07

I don't think it would be a bad thing. There was a study in 2007 by Binkley, and they saw that 51% of people who had a high score for sun exposure were vitamin D deficient. So there seems to be a lot of individual variability there. So what are people doing? What are they wearing when they're going outside? How much time are they working? Time they spend outside? How much sunscreen do they use? How much is exposed while you're doing exercise outside?

Even often combat athletes, as you'll know, they have hoodies and trackies and hats on, so even if they are outside in...

The sun, they're not could actually be getting any UV exposure really apart from on their face, which isn't enough. So it definitely wouldn't be a bad thing. Maybe reduce your dose slightly if you are concerned, but overall you can take this all year round.

James de Lacey20:05

Perfect, that's awesome. So the recommendation then would be 50,000 IUs per week. You can either split that into daily doses, or you can split it into one dose per week, and that should be enough to bring you to those optimal levels to see performance benefits down the road.

Andy Marley20:36

Yeah, absolutely. If you're doing it daily, obviously your total weekly dose of vitamin D will be a bit lower because you take one large dose, some of it will be excreted in the lipoprotein fraction. If you're taking a smaller dose daily, like say 4,000, 5,000 a day, which still would add up to 50,000 throughout the week, you'll get the same benefits. So it depends what you prefer to do.

For me, I suck. I forget to take things all the time. I'm asthmatic. I barely take my inhalers. I always forget. So for me, doing it once a week, as long as I get it done the week, it seems a lot easier for me to do.

James de Lacey21:04

Okay. And then you should take that with a meal with fat in it?

Andy Marley21:04

Either have it with a meal, so either with a breakfast or a nighttime as part of your dinner, or take it with some kind of full-fat milk. The important thing is, if you're going to have the meal, have an actual meal. Vegetables and pulses and meats and all that kind of thing, because that's going to give you the zinc, magnesium, and potentially the calcium as well that you need to get the vitamin D to be working properly.

If you don't have those things there, you could take as much vitamin D as you like, within reason of course, but it's not going to have all the same effects.

James de Lacey21:53

Okay, perfect. And I wanted to jump down the zinc and magnesium route, because I guess they are often supplements that push for people to take. But let's start with magnesium. There's, I don't know, five different types of magnesium you can get. Dosages range. So do you want to maybe just jump in? If someone's going to take magnesium, how much would you recommend someone take?

What type of magnesium is best for them to take? And is that something you need to get, I guess, blood test or tested for to see if you are deficient to know? Is there, just like vitamin D, is taking too much going to be detrimental, or potentially not harmful like vitamin D?

Andy Marley22:20

Things like magnesium and zinc, which are metal-based, they are more likely to have negative side effects with that, whereas vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin. I've always said there's the body's mechanism which will regulate itself, whereas it's much easier to overdose on these kind of minerals.

But literally just getting up to the recommended daily allowances of these zinc and magnesium is enough for most people to get the benefits that they need. In terms of taking supplements for them, I don't tend to bother. Having a normal, I would call a normal diet, so eating your five, at least five portions of fruit and veg, eating an array of meats and everything, that's enough. You don't need to go into these ZMA supplements, which give people the trippy dream. It doesn't really do anything. But yeah, having, it's very, very boring in that sense, just have a normal diet.

For most people, combat athletes who don't eat anything, so yeah, for sure. ZMA is funny because ZMA was huge maybe around a decade ago, within the whole fitness scene and supplements.

James de Lacey23:21

But I haven't heard of ZMA for years. It must be something that's just not pushed anymore.

Andy Marley23:21

No, I don't, I've not really seen it being pushed at all. I remember trying it once to see what I was like, because when I was younger, didn't know any better. So, I'll give this a try. It's meant to be amazing for all this stuff. And it did nothing but gave me weird dreams. That was literally it. I slept quite well, to be fair, so I suppose that's something. But no, I wouldn't bother taking supplements for zinc or magnesium, providing you're having a good diet. You're fine.

James de Lacey24:17

Are there any other supplements that you typically recommend for combat athletes, or just general athletic performance and health?

Andy Marley24:17

When it comes to supplements, I think the first thing you have to remember for most people is that they are a supplement, which I know it's a stupid thing to say. But a lot of people, they will just buy whatever has been pushed on Instagram, whatever the massive guy at Jim's been taking, regardless the fact that he's pumping loads of, dbol and test into himself. You think, oh yeah, if I take this creatine, I look like that. I was like, no you won't. You need to have a lot of syringes to look like that.

So the first thing is, are you getting enough from your diet first? I think Graeme Close wrote a good paper on it. It was the food first, but not food only approach. And I have to say, I do agree with it. If you are able to get everything you can from your diet, then you don't need to supplement. However, because we can't get enough vitamin D from the diet and we don't get enough from the sun, that's something that's worth supplementing.

Omega-3 is another one. Most people don't eat enough oily fish, and if you were to eat enough oily fish to get all the benefits of omega-3, then I'd also then be worried about mercury poisoning. So omega-3 is something I would recommend. Beta-alanine, that's someone else I like to recommend to people. It definitely doesn't hurt. And you do get beta-alanine from meat, but again, especially combat athletes, they don't touch a lot of red meat a lot of the time, especially when they're coming to fight camp.

So that's the only problem with that is you get the tingly fingers and the face and everything. A lot people really don't, I hate it, but I do recommend it.

I would love to be able to recommend creatine to athletes, because I think creatine, it definitely won't hurt in terms of joint health. You're getting more water retention. That would only be a good thing for joint health. But then when you come to make weight, that then becomes a problem. Also, the other thing with creatine is 30% of people don't respond to it anyway.

So we have to again look at the diet. Are you getting enough red meat? Then you don't need creatine. If you're a combat athlete, do you need creatine? Well, probably not. You'll be worried about making weight at that point, especially if you're quite far out from your wake-up class.

But my three main ones are probably beta-alanine, vitamin D, and omega-3.

James de Lacey26:46

Now let's just go down that omega-3 route, because again I have my fish oils here, but I always forget to take them each day. So yeah, how much? So I think people get confused when they look at the fish oil bottle, because they look at the bottle and they say, oh, it's one gram. But it's not actually one gram of fish oil, because there's the EPA, DHA value you need to look at on the bottle.

So maybe dive into what people should look for on the label when they're looking at the EPA, DHA values versus the capsule size, and then just generally dosing recommendations around that.

Andy Marley27:12

So the first thing you want to do is have a look at how much oil is in the capsule or per 100 grams, whatever it is, and then have a look at how much EPA, DHA is in it. And then from there you'll see how much filler oil there is. And this is a big thing. Often a lot of these supplements, especially the cheaper ones, have a lot of this filler oil, which will do nothing.

And if anything, it may actually negatively impact your health. It probably won't make you work as efficiently as it could do. So you are looking to try and get capsules which have as much actual fish oil as possible.

In terms of dosing for me, I tend to take about 2 to 3,000 milligrams of omega-3 per day, and that seems to work quite well for me, which is kind of much standardized for most of the research anyway. Taking any more than that might give you some gastrointestinal problems. Taking any less than that, you probably won't get all the full benefits.

And interestingly, omega-3 combined with vitamin D might actually help with red blood cell deformability. So what I mean by that is, whenever the blood's going through the vessels, it has to kind of merge its way through. So there's a bit of flexibility. If you take omega-3, that can actually help with the red blood cell deformability. Combining it with vitamin D might actually help that as well. So again, you see again that these supplements, they're all interacting with each other to have some kind of effect in the body.

And I think this is where a lot of people kind of go wrong, as they look at a supplement in isolation and they don't necessarily think about how it's interacting with other foods that they're eating, how it's interacting with their training, how it's interacting with their sleep.

So there's another reason why omega-3 is included in my top three that I would recommend.

James de Lacey29:05

Nice. Okay, now that's good. So yeah, most people listening, I think if you've looked at an average bottle, for sure.

It would be like a 1 gram capsule with like 180 milligram EPA and then like 120 milligrams of DHA, and it's only 300 milligrams in one gram capsule. So you got 700 milligrams of soybean oil or whatever other cheap oil they throw in there, whatever that they've made.

Andy Marley29:29

Yeah, because a lot of these things are mass produced and they for cheapness, which is a big problem. And because it's often done so cheaply to try and make a profit on it, it's actually negating the quality of what it is people are taking.

So over here we've got Holland and Barrett, so never buy your Omega-3 from Holland and Barrett, which is like the big health food shop, because it's cheap and crap. It doesn't do anything. All try and get good sources if possible.

James de Lacey30:00

Yeah, it's funny because if you were going to take two to 3,000 milligrams of EPA DHA on a 300 milligram capsule, you'd be taking like what is it, 6 to 10 capsules, which is 6 to 10 grams of total fat with 70% of it coming from another random oil source. So you're kind of just mixing it all up.

Andy Marley30:29

Yeah, and that can, and then people say I've got upset stomach. I'm like, well, that'll be why. Because your body is just going like, well, what's going on here? You're basically just taking pure fat, like drinking olive oil at that point. So it's get rid of it.

James de Lacey30:29

Nice. And then I wanted to get your take on multivitamins as well. I think people use it as almost like a catch-all dietary food insurance. Is that something you would ever recommend someone to take? Is there value in taking a multivitamin, and if so, if not, is there something they should look for with the multivitamin? Which is one is better than the other?

Andy Marley30:58

So again, for most people I would tend to say they don't need them if you're having a good diet, if you're having the minimum five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, et cetera, et cetera.

When it comes to, you need to be looking at, for example, vitamin D. Like the vitamin D in multivitamin is next to nothing. It's nowhere near enough. Also have a look at the amount of caking agents that you've got. A lot of these things, they'll probably interfere with the ability of the gut to break everything down into like the food matrix to then actually absorb it.

So most multivitamins, because they are basically these capsules which are mashed together, you're not actually getting anything from them. If you are going to be taking multivitamin, and for some people that might be okay, like again I've, I don't recommend it, I have seen people who are on very low calorie diets who are basically only having protein shakes. Again, that's often to try and make weight for matches. They will take multivitamins to try and help their health. I would never recommend that, but I've seen it.

If you are going to be taking multivitamin, then you're better to use the capsules which actually will dissolve and have the various vitamins and minerals in a powder form within the capsule itself. Unfortunately, people don't like these because they're expensive. For like a one month supply could be £30, £40, whereas you can get a three-month supply of the cheap ones for like a fiver. And that's where people go wrong. They're not willing to really invest in them.

But overall though, it's not something I tend to recommend, provided of course that you're eating properly.

James de Lacey33:04

Nice. And you mentioned beta-alanine as well. How do you recommend people take that?

Andy Marley33:04

So I would suggest that this thing people take beta-alanine before they work out because it's often included in pre-workout. It makes them feel like something's working.

James de Lacey33:04

Well, and that's why I think that's why it's there.

Andy Marley33:04

But beta-alanine is like creatine. It accumulates in the tissues. So if you take it at any point in the day, then you'll eventually in three weeks get benefits.

Now I think the research on beta-alanine is a bit lacking just now because I think the idea being is that, well, beta-alanine, you take it, then it gets absorbed to the tissues, becomes carnosine, and that helps with muscle buffering. But the thing is, this idea of muscle buffering, like I don't believe that hydrogen ions themselves are all that big in fatigue. It's more about the accumulation of inorganic phosphate that causes fatigue.

So what we have seen, that beta-alanine does seem to have some kind of a positive effect, but I think the mechanism which has been suggested is wrong. I think it has something to do with reactive oxygen species and rates, look like colosus, but that's just me hypothesizing off the top of my head just now.

James de Lacey34:14

Yeah. Yeah, I think John and Andrew mentioned it last week.

Andy Marley34:14

Yes. Yeah, yeah. So as John quite rightly said, most of the studies which look at fatigue, when they look at skinned muscle fibers, one, the muscle fiber is skinned. Secondly, it's at 5 degrees Celsius, which isn't what our bodies are at. And most of these papers, the few papers which have actually looked at muscle closer to body temperature, have shown that a drop in pH doesn't influence fatigue all that much.

It really is all about this accumulation of inorganic phosphate, which then binds to calcium, which then stops the muscle contracting. Because if calcium can't bind to the troponin, then again, there's no change in shape of tropomyosin. The myosin can't bind to actin, can't get the crossbridge forming. Or the more you try to contract the muscle, the more ATP is getting used, which means there's more hydrolysis of ATP to ADP, inorganic phosphate. Inorganic phosphate, that causes it.

So okay, that's kind of long-winded answer there. But I think beta-alanine does seem to work, but I think the mechanisms need to be investigated in more detail.

James de Lacey35:20

I think from the review I read, you need like, I think it's a total of 179 grams of beta-alanine accumulated over 2 to 10 plus weeks to see small improvement in performance. So you need to basically take it consistently. I think it's some, I think the dose can range massively though. I guess it depends how well you tolerate the tingling, because as you mentioned, if I have beta-alanine, it starts in like my head and it works its way down to my feet, and it's probably the most horrible thing that comes across.

Did you know you can represent Sweet Science of Fighting while you're training? We're more than just a membership. We also have rash guards and shorts. If you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see that we have the Sweet Science of Fighting 2.0 shorts, and we also have the Sweet Science of Fighting short and long sleeve rash guard. There's another design coming soon, but you can get those on xmartial.com, and you can go down the description and you can find that. And back to the podcast.

Andy Marley36:22

Isn't it? Well, I find some, I tend to take it in the morning, and if I take it in the morning and I have a coffee, I actually start to feel a bit sick afterwards. I have to separate it completely from any kind of caffeine that I'm taking. Yeah, it's disgusting.

But yeah, you tend to, for me I would suggest taking about six to seven grams of beta-alanine per day. That's what I put to most people. So have it a day. Now you can break that up into, for example, two grams at three different points throughout the day to try and reduce the tingly feeling, or you can take it in one big go and just kind of get it over with.

James de Lacey36:48

That's what I do. Yeah, I'll just get over with. I don't need to worry about it again.

Andy Marley37:17

But yeah, like honestly, it boggles the mind that many people go, oh I take this, because they've got some kind of Jack3D style drink. And they think that because their heart's going like that and because they got this tingly feeling that they're ready for the gym. It's like, no, you're just giving yourself some kind of myocardial infection there.

But if you're just taking it regularly every single day, that's what's going to give the benefits. Even then you won't see any benefits for about four to six weeks. But it's still something which is useful for combat athletes, especially who are having to do periods of really high intensity activity, then low, then high, then low. And it does seem to help with that.

I suppose, of caffeine, I suppose that's another thing I would suggest, okay, going off on a different tangent just there. Yeah, earlier on about what kind of supplements I take, caffeine is a good thing to take, provided of course you don't overdo it. Make sure you measure it in milligrams and not grams. There's been plenty of stories of people taking gram scoops of that stuff and ended up in the hospital, so definitely don't do that.

James de Lacey38:13

Well, it's actually become a little bit more difficult to research caffeine now. They will not let you do caffeine studies now for a lot of the universities.

Andy Marley38:42

Oh, really?

James de Lacey38:42

Yeah, because of what happened. I think it was one of the universities in England. Again, that's what happened. I think they, it was a practical for an undergraduate course, and they were meant to give like 3 milligrams per gram body weight, then see what happened in the exercise test. But they measured out three grams, and the students had to go rushed to the hospital, and it all went horribly, horribly wrong. Three grams per kilogram of body weight.

Andy Marley39:09

Oh, but that would have been like a mountain of powder. I don't know what they did. I don't know how they managed it, but they did it really, really badly. And like I said, the students were probably drinking it going, this doesn't, I don't think this is right. But yeah, they had...

James de Lacey39:36

To get rushed to the hospital. I think they almost died, actually. So yeah, make sure that you measure milligrams. But for me, having a couple of coffees before train is usually enough, does enough for me.

Andy Marley39:36

Yeah, caffeine's an interesting one. There's a really good paper where they looked at caffeine responders and non-responders with that—I can't say the name of the gene because there's a bunch of letters and numbers, CYP something something something—and if you possess this gene, you're a caffeine... was it slow or fast metabolizer? I can't remember now which way it worked. But either way, if you're a slow metabolizer of the caffeine, you tend to have negative effects to it: slower time trial performances, feeling a little drowsy, things like that, versus the opposite—someone who's a really high responder, they see increases in performance using caffeine.

James de Lacey40:00

For myself, I'm an in-between. Sometimes I don't know, because it depends how much I take, I think. Sometimes I'll feel tired after taking it if I have too much, I guess. But I guess another way to offset is using alanine, right? They have a synergistic effect. You get alanine as another—I guess as a synergistic effect with caffeine—to help bring yourself down and remove the jitteriness. I'll use that sometimes as well so I don't feel so anxious after a monster or something.

Andy Marley40:27

Well, and that's the thing, though: understanding how these different foodstuffs and supplements work together to give you the goal that you need. I think very often, even in people who I know who are registered nutritionists or sports nutritionists or whatever you want to call themselves, they look at the supplement in isolation very often. They don't think about how it interacts.

I think that's going to be a relatively big thing in sports nutrition research coming up soon: how do these other things interact with each other? Because at the end of the day, we're living beings. We don't take things in isolation. We eat meals. So what we do is we try and figure out: if I give you this chemical—because that's all sports nutrition is, you're giving people chemicals and seeing what's happening to them—if I give you this chemical, what's happening? And you're trying to isolate: this chemical is doing the thing.

But, as you said, in real life that's not how often it works. You have meals. So I think it's important now, moving forward, to look at ways of... right, so we see that caffeine works, okay it doesn't work for these people, but maybe if we took it with this then it'll work for these people. Or we've got vitamin D—it's not working, so we have to take it with this other stuff.

Beta-alanine—okay, it doesn't work for these people, maybe if we took it with this, this will increase the potency of it. I think that's going to be the way: start looking at the interactions between different supplements will be quite important in the future.

James de Lacey42:26

Interesting. You also—we briefly touched on creatine as well—and you mentioned about responders and non-responders. I'm definitely a non-responder. I've been taking it for 10 plus years. My body weight doesn't change whether I'm taking it or not, nothing. But what's your—I don't know—what is the current consensus or your theory around why someone would be a non-responder? Is it just dietary related, or is it maybe dose related?

Because 5 grams, 3 to 5 grams, is kind of the dose prescribed regardless of the size, gender, whatever it is. Is there something where maybe different people need to take more creatine, less creatine? Or is it just because once you've reached that kind of threshold within your diet, it doesn't really matter?

Andy Marley42:56

People have different amounts of creatine they can store in the tissue. And if you have a diet which is high in red meat, then you're probably not going to have any real benefit from taking creatine. Whereas if you're a vegan or vegetarian, then taking creatine would probably be a good thing for you. So I do think there's a highly individualized response, and which is all the way to the physiology—how much you can actually store—and then secondly, what is your diet composed of.

I know myself, I don't eat all that much red meat because I can't be bothered cooking it half the time. I usually fish in the microwave and that's usually me quite happy.

James de Lacey43:55

Fish in the microwave? Oh yeah, yeah. Absolutely, I am that lazy.

Andy Marley43:55

You know what that reminds me of? There's a dude—I love watching full day eating videos. I don't know if I mentioned that on this podcast before, just on YouTube. And there was this fitness dude, and he was just got so sick of eating his food he would put rice and fish in a blender and then drink it as a shake.

James de Lacey43:55

Okay, I'm not that bad.

Andy Marley43:55

Was that the fish and the rice cake guy? Remember? Yeah. Yep, that makes me crack up. I don't think... much, probably not, no.

James de Lacey44:17

Oh man. But yeah, back to the creatine as well. So different people, I guess, store it differently. What's your take on some of the creatine research outside of performance? Because creatine's kind of been linked to potentially as a cognitive protector, protecting against other things like that. Is any of that evidence strong enough to kind of go down those roads at the moment?

Andy Marley44:54

For me, no. I've seen some papers that say if you're concussed or you have some kind of traumatic brain injury, that brain creatine levels will plummet. But I haven't really seen anything yet which convinces me that taking creatine will then help with, for example, traumatic brain injury. Because again, it doesn't really seem to make sense to me.

When you take creatine, most creatine is absorbed sort of intracellularly. So why then would taking creatine after the injury's already happened then help with recovery from traumatic brain injury? It doesn't seem to make sense. I think, my opinion, what seems to happen is that you have a traumatic brain injury, the body goes into shock, in other words, everything starts to move straight away to try and go, 'what's happened?', quite simply. Which then means that will then have the drop in—basically phosphocreatine—because the body is trying to return itself to homeostasis very very quickly.

Doesn't necessarily mean that creatine itself will have some kind of an effect whereby we can increase our recovery rate. At the moment I put that field of thinking in the same field as the CBD supplementation. Well, let's go down that road.

James de Lacey46:03

Doesn't make sense. Yeah, let's go down there. Because CBD is probably—probably in the combat sports world it's that, and maybe CrossFit—is probably where its biggest markets are right now within sports. Do you want to maybe dive into some of the—maybe some of the more—I'll call it dodgy, let's just call it dodgy—maybe claims around CBD? People will say it helps with sleep, helps with recovery, etc. etc. Why or why not does CBD do or not do that?

Andy Marley46:39

So we do have a cannabinoid system, and the thinking was that you take some kind of CBD, that it will then interact with the system, therefore having a positive physiological benefit. But then people were saying it's going to help with cancer and it's going to cure all this and that. But it doesn't make sense because you look at the cancer example: some tumors are fueled by fat, some are fueled by carbohydrates, some are more endocrinologically based, in terms of estrogen level stuff.

How is cannabidiol meant to help with that? There's no pathways I can think of which directly relate them all. It doesn't seem to make sense.

People saying it helps with recovery. Now when you look at recovery, we think of peripheral fatigue versus central fatigue. So the closest thing I could think of is that you took cannabidiol, maybe it'll have a central fatigue... But even then, the thing which has the kind of effects in the brain is the THC, which has been removed from the CBD oil. So how is cannabidiol meant to influence things like serotonin and dopamine signaling in the brain, which is the kind of the hallmarks of central fatigue, when you've removed the THC? Again, physiologically it doesn't make sense.

Also, I'd be very much against it because where's all this THC getting... well, not THC, where's all this CBD getting made? Can you guarantee that the THC has been removed? If you get drug tested, yeah, what you say? 'I'll take a CBD supplement from CBD or us down the road.' Well, it's not been batch tested, it's not been Informed Sport tested. So you're more likely to get a positive doping violation.

And in fact, all the studies that I've seen so far which have looked at CBD as a recovery tool—now we're talking about recovery, don't mean recovery from injury, we mean the ability to perform exercise to a similar level following some kind of exhaustive test—none of the studies have actually shown that CBD actually helps with that. Because physiologically it doesn't make sense. They can't do it.

They're different mechanisms you're talking about recovery, okay? How much ATP do you have resynthesized? How much phosphocreatine have you resynthesized? How much lactic acid have you cleared? How much glycogen have you replenished? How much glucose do you have free just in the plasma? Have you returned to homeostasis? How quickly have you returned to homeostasis? How is CBD meant to help with any of that? Again, again, it doesn't make sense.

James de Lacey49:58

If anyone's listening to this using, I think people still take, I think it's a placebo thing because they see relatively high level athletes with CBD oil on their banner and they think, "Yeah, I've been taking this and my recovery is fantastic. I feel really good." And I'm just thinking, well, how do you know that CBD? How do you not know that I just give you some olive oil? How do you know?

Andy Marley50:28

It truly is really like a big placebo effect for a lot of people I think. Well, it's a big market. The money in that market is huge, so they can pay a lot to sponsor. If anyone who knows anything about affiliate marketing as well, they pay big, big commissions on sales of CBD. So yeah, that market is just huge and growing.

And obviously as they tap into the sporting world and get athlete influencers on board and stuff, it just gives it more credibility in the general, I guess, social circles and population, and it starts to become a little more mainstream as that's the message being sold. And then people obviously start to use it themselves, and as you mentioned that placebo effect and everything.

James de Lacey50:59

But I guess is there anything wrong with someone taking it and thinking they're getting an effect? I mean, other than the drug testing portion, if maybe if not competing, but that's an interesting debate as well where something is placebo, someone perceives it as working, so why would you stop them?

Andy Marley51:27

For me, if you think it's working then fine. If you feel happy doing that and you're not getting drug tested and you're not causing any harm to anybody, whatever you do you. It's like jumping into the cold showers after training. It's probably not going to do all that much, but if you feel better for it because people do feel a bit euphoric afterwards, then fine. It's not going to necessarily harm you.

Gio Gloss has some papers on CBD for recovery, and again there's not much physiologically that's happening. But if people are feeling better for it, then fine. However, if you are an elite athlete and you do get drug tested, I would highly warn against it unless you can absolutely guarantee that the CBD has had all the THC removed and you won't get a positive drugs test. Then it's probably not worth it for most people.

James de Lacey52:31

Yeah, and plus the empty wallet after spending 50 to 100 bucks on a small bottle, which is what went to last, what, a month, something like that?

Andy Marley52:31

Yeah, yeah, I think it's a month supply. It's crazy, but people are paying it. People are happy then, fine, each their own.

James de Lacey52:31

Perfect. I think that's all the supplement questions I had for you, Andy. But if people wanted to follow you, see what you're doing with your research, learn more from you, where can they do that?

Andy Marley53:00

So I'm on LinkedIn, and I got Instagram last week, so that's exciting. So just literally type my name into Instagram. You'll find me. I am on Facebook as well, but if I don't know you I'll probably say, "Who are you?" I'm trying to be a bit more active on these kind of things, so I'm going to be posting up into the Facebook groups like the NSCA stuff, the Combat Sports Education page, places like that.

I am on the Abertay research thing as well, not that I check it all that often, but I am there. But no, LinkedIn is probably the official way to go about it. Yeah, just drop me an email. I'm going to have to answer any questions. Anyone does have any questions, wants to disagree with me on anything, then that's totally cool. That's a good thing about science. It's very self-regulating, I like to think. As soon as something comes out, people can disagree with you, and then if they prove you wrong then okay, fine, fair does.

Yeah, I quite like it that way. But yeah, just however you want to reach me, feel free.

James de Lacey53:58

Perfect. And we'll throw all those links down in the description anyway when we upload this in the podcast format in a couple of weeks. But thanks for coming on, Andy. I really appreciate it.

Andy Marley54:24

No, thank you so much again for having me.