Beta Alanine Fails to HIIT Back: No Increased Training Effect in Response to Nine 4x4 Min HIIT Workouts W/ BA Preload, But Evidence in Favor of Chronic Supplementation

Contemporary scientific evidence suggest that you have to pick the right type of (short intense) exercise if you don't want your beta alanine supplement to end up as another "false starter" in your closet.

In the past couple of weeks beta alanine (BA) has gotten some bad press, here at the SuppVersity. While some conspiracy theorists may already have smelled a personal vendetta of a sodium bicarbonate advocate like myself against its 'high tech competitor', the actual reason for the negative, or at least not necessarily exciting news is the exercise specificity of beta alanine (BA) supplementation.

The most recent BA study from the  University of Bern and the Swiss Federal Institute of Sport in Switzerland and the Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden is yet another rather disappointing BA study to support my previous assertion that the benefits for the average gymrat are largely overblown.

What did the researchers do

As Gross et al. point out, the aim of their two-part intervention study was to alter the physiological systems discussed above in ways that could improve severe exercise performance. In that, their hypotheses were that

1. 

   If we look at the results of previous studies, it appears that the question, whether BA ↪ promotes or ↪ blunts the ergogenic effects of baking soda does also depend on the type of exercise.

   ... HIIT, by improving VO2max and VO2 kinetics, would enhance aerobic energy contribution during severe cycling exercise
2. ... beta-alanine supplementation, by increasing intramuscular carnosine, would improve buffering capacity and reduce pH disturbance, or otherwise dampen muscle fatigue during severe cycling exercise; and 
3. ... prior supplementation with beta-alanine would allow for greater training load and better recovery during HIIT,which would enhance benefits of training on physiological determinants of severe exercise performance. 

As a seasoned SuppVersity veteran you know about the profound training effect of high intensity (if you don't educate yourself). You will also know / have expected that the 38-day preload in the course of which the participants consumed either

• * supplements were provided as 400-mg gel capsules and taken with the 3 main meals and before bed
  4 x 800mg/day "purified beta alanine"* (BA), or
• 4 x 800mg/day maltedextrin (PLA),

would increase the intramuscular carnitine stores of the participants in the BA group. What you don't know, however, is whether the eight endurance, team, or combat sport athletes in the active study arm would also display lower serum pH levels, experience less fatigue, and record greater improvements in VO2max than the remaining nine subjects in the placebo arm of the study.

Let's take a look at the results

I guess, it doesn't make sense to keep you on the tenderhooks any longer, so let's see what happened  during and after the obligatory nine 4 x 4 minute interval HIIT sessions on a cycle ergometer (10 min warm-up; heart rate 90-95% of max; 3min light cycling between intervals).

Simply taking your beta alanine supplements with food increases the absorption of BA more effectively than fancy "time-release" caps or tablets | read more

Chronic vs. cyclic BA supplementation: It is an interesting side-finding of he study at hand that 9 HIIT sessions and a 7-day rest-period can reduce the carnosine overload in the vastus lateralis and vastus internus (the teardrop muscle) by statistically significant 6.5% and 12.2%, respectively. This would mean that a chronic high intensity overload can very well induce significant reductions in carnosine levels within less than a month. A workout fanatic who wants to keep his muscles supersaturated with carnosine on all 365 days of the year should thus not follow my previous suggestion to do 6-weeks on, 4-weeks off cycles. In view of the results of the study at hand, I will yet leave it to you to decide whether you feel this is actually worth the effort / money.

The sessions were performed as follows: Sessions 1-3, 1 day rest, sessions 4-7, one day rest, sessions 8-9; and all participants had been following their habitual training and nutrition regimen during the 38-day "preload".

Figure 1: Changes in VO2max, peak power output, max. blood lactate, and power at second ventilatory threshold in from baseline (pre) to post-supplementation (before HIIT) and from baseline (pre) to the end of the study (after HIIT +7-days)

If you read the text in Figure 1, you will be aware that the changes the scientists observed in response to the exercise regimen look impressive, but lack statistical significance. In the end, the results are thus way less exciting than the relative performance increases in the 10 ± 5% range would suggest.

It is difficult to say if the overall effect size is the reason that there were no significant inter-group differences. Since there were not differences at all (not even borderline or non-significant ones), it is however unlikely that a longer study duration and correspondingly more pronounced increases in VO2Max, peak power and co, as well as the likewise identical post workout glycogen synthesis and muscle fiber cross-sectional area would have yielded a significant advantage on part of the BA supplemented trainees. The fact that the increases in skeletal muscle buffering capacity reached significance only in the placebo group, would even support the exact opposite hypothesis, i.e. more pronounced long-term adaptive effects without beta alanine supplementation.

The 2012 meta-analysis by Hobson et al. demonstrated two things (a) BA produces predictable performance increases only in the 60-120s range and (b) the overall effect size is much smaller than what most people are (mis-)lead to believe, when they read the advertisements... ah "write-ups" on the Internet.

What do we make of these results? In view of the overall rather disappointing results, I am not sure if you feel that the 1.3% increase in aerobic activity and -5% decrease in O2 deficit is convincing enough to subscribe to idea that beta alanine powered carnosine loading is a viable strategy to improve the adaptive response to long(er)-duration interval training (here "longer" is 4-min).

In my humble opinion this is not the case. Not necessarily because I feel that BA is a supplemental non-starter, but rather in view of its exercise- / duration-specificity, of which Hobson et al. wrote in their 2012 meta-analysis that it restricts the usefulness of beta alanine to sports where the overall duration of high intensity muscular contractions is longer than 60s, but shorter than 240s. This is a pretty narrow margin and even within this "performance zone" the mean effect size of 2.85% does not come remotely close to what you'd expect to see when you read the boastful promises in the "write-ups" of the supplement industry.

References:

• Hobson RM, Saunders B, Ball G, Harris RC, Sale C. Effects of β-alanine supplementation on exercise performance: a meta-analysis. Amino Acids. 2012 Jul;43(1):25-37.
• Gross M, Boesch C, Bolliger CS, Norman B, Gustafsson T, Hoppeler H, Vogt M. Effects of beta-alanine supplementation and interval training on physiological determinants of severe exercise performance. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2013 Nov 9. [Epub ahead of print]

HIITing Diabetes With the Hammer: 20min of Low-Volume High-Intensity Interval Training is Enough! + Metabolic Benefits and Optimum Interval-Format for Healthy People!

Figure 1: Number [in millions!] of prediabetics and diagnosed and undiagnosed diabetics in the USA according to data from the American Diabetic Association from January 2011 (ADA. 2011)

You probably remember Wednesday's news-item on high-intensity interval training (HIIT) for cardiac patients - as it turned out, even 2 weeks after myocardial infarction our central pump needs real exercise to get back in, or to get into even better shape. Today, I do yet want to go beyond infarction patients and address another, ever-growing sub-group of the self-perceived "victims" of the obesity pandemic, the type II diabetics.

About a month ago, J.P. Little and his colleagues from the University of British Columbia Okanagan published a study in the Journal of Applied Physiology (Little. 2011a), the results of which confirm (once again) the unpopular hypothesis that getting your ass off the couch in order to work it off in the gym hard (!) is the only way to treat a (largely) self-induced health condition that is plaguing 8.3% and threatening another quarter (79 million people with pre-diabetes) of the US population (ADA. 2011, cf. figure 1).

In the Little study (pun intended ;-), it took 8 type 2 diabetics no more than 60 minutes of intense exercise at 90% of their maximal heart rate (+another 60 minutes of rest in between intervals) to

[...] rapidly improve glucose control and induce adaptations in skeletal muscle that are linked to improved metabolic health

120 minutes (!) of which only 60 were spent doing 10x60s intervals on a cyclometer brought about changes, no pharmaceutical (or even supplement) will ever produce (without significant side effects). 120 minutes spread across 6 exercise sessions in the course of two weeks, i.e. 3 sessions of 20 minutes per week - probably 20 minutes the majority of the 8 overweight (BMI 32.6kg/m²) diabetics would otherwise have spent on their couch in front of the TV, or - with comparably small benefit - trampling away at 65% of their VO2Max on a recumbent bike. With intervals at 90% of their maximal heart rate, however, the

[...] average 24-h blood glucose concentration was reduced after training (7.6±1.0 vs 6.6±0.7 mmol/L) as were the sum of the 3-h postprandial areas under the glucose curve for breakfast, lunch and dinner (both p<0.05).

More importantly, though, HIIT training set the stage for future improvements by improving the capacity of the trainees mitochondria to handle / burn nutrients, with the >3.5x increase in GLUT-4 acticity indicating a profoundly increased capacity for glucose uptake and the +20% increase in citrate synthase activity indicating an increased capacity for substrate oxidation (energy usage) in the cellular power plants of the 8 diabetics (cf. figure 2).

Figure 2: Improvements citrate synthase, protein content of 70kDA subunit, complex III core 2 protein, complex IV subunit IV, mitofusion 2 and Glut-4 activity - all markers of mitochondrial capacity / efficiency - after 6 sessions of 10x60s cycling at 90% HRmax in 8 diabetic patients (data calculated  based on Little. 2011a).

These improvements, and this is a result from a previous study by Little's group (Little. 2011b), were - at least in part - a result of the effects HIIT has on mitochondrial biogenesis, of which Little et al. found that it is profoundly elevated in the first 24h after the exercise bout (3h post: +70% nuclear PGC-1alpha/Tubulin, 24h post: +60% whole muscle PGC-1alpha/Tubulin; +150% increase in p-p38MAPK) - and all that after a single session of a all 4x30s all-out Wingate cycling tests separated by 4 min of rest).

Now, let me ask you: Do we really ask too much of our fellow (and mostly ridiculously lazy) human being, if we ask them to invest one hour of their life per week to exercise into a, no, their healthier future? I wouldn't think so!

Figure 3: Fat oxidation in kJ per minute during 60 min of cycling at 60% VO2Max before and after 7 sessions of HIIT training in eight healthy, normal-weight recreationally active women (Talanian. 2006).

Metabolic benefits of HIIT training: Now, you may well ask yourself, why you should a give a damn about those changes, well... would it convince you, if I told you that in a 2006 study Talanian et al. were able to show that after 7 sessions of serious HIIT training (10x4 min at 90% HRMax with 2 min rest between intervals) the amount of body fat the eight female study participants burned during cycling at 60% of VO2Max was increased by 36% (Talanian. 2006)? in other words, the HIIT sessions primed the bodies of the "recreatinally active women (22+/-1 yr old, 65.0kg body wt, 2.36l/min VO2peak) to burn more fat during subsequent cycling at the lower end of the "fat-burning zone"! As the data in figure 3 shows, this effect was partly, because the subjects switched more readily into "fat burning mode" - a priming effect from the HIIT sessions.

HIIT, yeah... but how to find the right dosage?

Both the Moholdt, as well as the Little study have shown that it does not take much to induce profound health benefits - but what would be the optimal dosage for YOU, who, as a diligent student of the SuppVersity, are probably (or should I say hopefully) neither an overweight diabetic nor a cardiac patient?

Figure 4: Changes in body weight, body fat (%), peak lactate levels, perceived exertion (RPE) and VO2Max (rel. to body weight) after low intensity continuous training or three different HIIT protocols in recreational cyclists (data calculated based on Seiler. 2011)

Apparently, a group of scientists from Kristinsand (again in Norway, where the descendants of the Vikings obviously are tough enough fore real exercise ;-) asked themselves the exact same question (Seiler. 2011). In the course of a 2 months study they had 29 male and 6 female recreational cyclists, whose VO2Max of 53+/-6 ml*kg/min were ~56% higher than those of the cardiac patients (after the intervention) in the Moholdt study, perform 2 HIIT sessions per week (plus 2-3 weekly low-intensity bouts) of one out of three different interval training programs: 4x4min, 4x8min, or 4x16 min at 94%, 90% or 88% of their respective maximal heart rates.

Hard, but neither torturous, nor time consuming

The results, I have plotted in figure 4, confirm that HIIT must be hard, but neither torturous nor time-consuming. Or as the scientists put it:

The 4x8 min prescription induced greater physiological adaptation than both lower and higher intensity interval programs of 64- and 16-min total duration but was perceived as less stressful than 4x4 min at ~95% HR max . These findings suggest an important interaction between accumulated work duration and work intensity that can be optimized for inducing maximal physiolo gical adaptations at manageable RPE [rates of perceived exertion] in endurance athletes performing interval training.

Image 1: Spinning at ~90% of your max heart rate
would be one way to do 4x8 intervals.

On that note, it may also be interesting that in line with the +91% increase in time to exhaustion Seiler et al. observed in the 4x8 HIIT group (vs. +12% in low intensity and +62% and +63% in 4x16 and 4x4 HIIT programs) and the increased respiratory exchange rate Moholdt et al. observed in their study (cf. Wednesday's news), A.D. Hafstadt and his colleagues from the University of Tromsoe (Hafstadt. 2011) have found in a mouse-model (where cutting out the heart and measuring its weight obviously is not so much of an issue as it would be with human subjects ;-) that despite similar increases in the heart to body weight ratio (+10%), ...

[...] only HIT altered cardiac substrate utilization, as revealed by a 36% increase in glucose oxidation and a concomitant reduction in fatty acid oxidation, [...] improved cardiac efficiency by decreasing work-independent myocardial oxygen consumption and increased cardiac maximal mitochondrial respiratory capacity.

These findings lead the scientists to conclude that "high intensity training is required for induction of changes in cardiac substrate utilization and energetics" and that these improvements may be at the heart (pun intended) of its "superior" ability to increase aerobic capacity - or as, I previously phrased it: HIT, not steady state aerobics, is real cardio training! You would not train a 20inch biceps with blue 2pound sand-filled plastic dumbbells, would you? I think, I will leave it on that, for today and wish you all have an intense weekend (whatever your interpretation of that may be ;-)

Image 2: There is no one-size-fits-it-all HIIT training.

Addendum of 10/01/2011: In the comments area, Oni posted a quite resonable question: "Doesn't HIIT usually employ shorter (1min) intervals? And how could 8 minute intervals, as in the Seiler study be feasible?" The answer to the first question is easy, as we just have to look at the words "high intensity" and "interval training", now obviously no one questions that the regimen Seiler et al. used, had a high intensity (90%) and employed intervals - and I think Oni does not disagree on that, but rather implies that this type of training is too intense and if the subjects had not been recreational cyclists, this could actually have been the case.

On the other hand, the results of the Seiler study also showed that shorter intervals at higher intensity lead (in this subject group) to greater rates of perceived exertion. Now, I dare say that 95% of the trainees who are doing the standard ~1min bouts of all-out exercise - are not going "all out" in the sense that they are scratching their real heart rate max. If they did, I am quite sure they would (in line with the results from the Seiler study) confirm that 8min @90% did not wear them out as much as 1min @100% of ALL OUT exercise at their  max. heart. This leaves the question to be answered, whether 4 intervals à 8 minutes are optimal for everyone? And this is fortunately a question that is easy to be answered... 4x8 is obviously for "advanced" athletes (who have been practicing some type of endurance activity already). From my training experience, I know that untrained (or less trained) trainees sometimes do not even reach "target heart rates ~90%" before they feel so exhausted that they give up.

Image 3: The type of equipment you are using will also have an influence on optimal interval length; doing 8-min all-out intervals on the treadmill certainly are no viable option - even not for highly trained athletes!

So what does that mean for your training, then? If you like doing the all-out (! don't forget to push yourselves!) 1-minute intervals, keep doing them. There are plenty of studies that confirm similarly beneficial effects on mitochondrial biogenesis with these protocols, e.g.

• 7x30s - Psilander. 2010
• 8-12x60s - Little. 2010
• 4x 30s - Giballa. 2009

If, on the other hand, you are an (endurance) athlete wanting to improve your performance, the available data would suggest that intervals in the +4min range would be the way to go (Seiler. 2004; Driller. 2009; Seiler. 2011), as they are more sport-specific. Overall, it is yet always about balancing duration (individual interval length + number of intervals + rest days in-between) vs. intensity (heart rate) to find your optimal HIIT protocol (Gross. 2007; Zuniga. 2011)

Block Periodization - Impressive Performance Gains in Pro-Athletes: Revolutionary Training Concept, Or Just a Good Way to Eventually Break Out of the Comfort Zone?

Block Periodization - Training revolution or simple trick? This is what we have to ask ourselves in view of these results.

With all the news and discussion about nutrition and dietary supplements, it's easy to lose sight of the significant impact even minor tweaks to your training routine may have on your results. The results of a recent study from the Lillehammer University College in Norway, for example, remind us all of the importance to periodize our training regimen. Now you could obviously randomly divide a year into cycles with different workout frequencies, intensities, volume, etc. It does yet go without saying that this is probably not the most promising approach to periodization.

What are good ways to periodize your training?

As B. R. Rønnestad, J. Hansen, S. Ellefsen point out in the introduction to their latest paper in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, there is yet a "paucity of studies" that would allow us to decide which of the myriad of possible periodization strategies works best.

You can learn more about periodization at the SuppVersity

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There is, for example, preliminary evidence that would suggest that block periodization is more effective than traditional periodization in improving performance (García-Pallarés. 2010), but this evidence is far from being conclusive and thus reason enough for the Norwegian scientists to conduct their own study to investigate

"the effects of a 1-week block of five HIT sessions, followed by a 3-week period of one HIT session per week and a naturally high volume of lowintensity training in trained cyclists." (Rønnestad. 2014)

And compare the results to those of a group of cyclists who employ a more traditional two HIT sessions per week organization while simultaneously performing a relatively high volume of low intensity training.

Mixed or exclusive periodization?

If you think in strength training terms you could probably say that we're comparing the nasty classic HST regimen with it's fixed strength-endurance, hypertrophy, strength blocks to a mixed mode regimen without a clear distinction between strength-endurance-, hypertrophy-, and strength-phases.

Different rules apply for increases in size and strength | learn more

Don't extrapolate data from trained cyclists to noobs and/or other athletes: At this point it's probably advisable to remind ourselves that we cannot extrapolate the results of this study to your own strength training regimen and/or cycling rookies who may achieve similar performance gains with either the classic mixed mode vs. blocked periodization regimen.

If your goals are strength and size, I highly suggest not to discard mixing things up, as it is done in undulating periodization regimen (learn more)

Much contrary to what we've seen in Spinetti's resistance training study from 2013 (learn more), the cyclists in the study at hand did capitalize on the strict separation of HIIT and steady state HIT and LISS training as it is depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Weekly distribution of training in the different intensity zones during the intervention period for the block periodization group (BP) and the traditional group (TRAD; upper panel). The relative distribution of the training in the different intensity zones during the intervention period in the two intervention groups (lower panel; Rønnestad. 2014)

If you take into consideration that the "zones" represent the three heart rate (HR) zones: (1) 60–82%; (2) 83–87%; and (3) 88–100% of maximal HR. A brief glimpse at Figure 1 should suffice to see that the main difference between the two groups is the high intensity focus in week one in the blocked periodization (BP) group and the subsequent reduction of intensive training to an absolute minimum in weeks 2-4.

During these HIT sessions the participants in both groups alternated between 6x5 and 5x6 min in the intensity zone 3 (➲ all cyclists were instructed to perform each HIT session with the aim to produce the highest possible mean power output across intervals). The intervals were separated by 2.5- or 3-min recovery, respectively. This makes the actual mean power output of each HIT session an indicator of performance level.

Figure 2: Perceived well-being in the legs during the intervention period (Rønnestad. 2014) .

"In order to monitor the power output during HIT sessions, seven cyclists in the BP group and six cyclists in the TRAD group were equipped with a PowerTap SL 2.4 (CycleOps, Madison, WI, USA) mounted on the rear wheel. The PowerTap device is a valid and reliable power meter (Bertucci. 2005). Furthermore, in order to quantify how the training weeks affected the perceived well-being in the legs, the cyclists reported their perceived feelings on a 9-point scale, going fromvery very good to very very heavy after each training week (Fig. 2)." (Rønnestad. 2014)

Needless to say that the initial week took it's toll on the legs of the 21 trained male cyclists with 6 ± 4 years of competitive cycling experience in the cycling shorts (data from two dropouts due to illness was excluded).

Figure 3: Maximal power, maximal oxygen uptake and average power output of the cyclists after the intervention expressed relative to baseline (Rønnestad. 2014)

Is it all about breaking out of the comfort zone? Likewise neeedless (?), but probably still worth mentioning is that they had to break out of their comfort zone during these initial 7 days of intense training, which were so different to their previous  9 ± 3 h per week of low-intensity endurance training, with no HIIT component in it. Against that background we must ask ourselves if the impressive performance gains you see in Figure 3 are a simple result of a novel training stimulus, or the consequence of this specific (i.e. blocked periodization) trainning stimulus.

So, is what we see in the study at hand the effect of the adaptation to the unconditioned stress initial HIIT week or is it a result of clever periodization?

If you asked me, it's the former - a result of one week of high intensity interval training. A result as it was observed by Lindsay et al. (1996), Westgarth-Taylor et al. (1997), Laursen et al. (2002), Swart et al. (2009) or Driller et al. (2009) in cyclists and other highly trained athletes. The take home message is thus not that mixing things up sucks, but the simple truth that you got to push beyond what your body is used to to trigger adaptation.

Reference:

• Bertucci, William, et al. "Validity and reliability of the PowerTap mobile cycling powermeter when compared with the SRM device." International journal of sports medicine 26.10 (2005): 868-873.
• García-Pallarés, Jesús, et al. "Performance changes in world-class kayakers following two different training periodization models." European journal of applied physiology 110.1 (2010): 99-107.
• Laursen, Paul B., Michelle A. Blanchard, and David G. Jenkins. "Acute high-intensity interval training improves Tvent and peak power output in highly trained males." Canadian Journal of Applied Physiology 27.4 (2002): 336-348.
• Lindsyay, Fiona H., et al. "Improved athletic performance in highly trained cyclists after interval training." Medicine and science in sports and exercise 28.11 (1996): 1427-1434. 
• Rønnestad, B. R., J. Hansen, and S. Ellefsen. "Block periodization of high‐intensity aerobic intervals provides superior training effects in trained cyclists." Scand J Med Sci Sports 24 (2014): 34–42.
• Spinetti J, et al. Comparison Between Different Periodization Models On Muscular Strength And Thickness In A Muscle Group Increasing Sequence. Rev Bras Med Esporte. 2013; 19(4)
• Swart, Jeroen, et al. "Effects of high-intensity training by heart rate or power in well-trained cyclists." The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research 23.2 (2009): 619-625..  
• Westgarth-Taylor, Christopher, et al. "Metabolic and performance adaptations to interval training in endurance-trained cyclists." European journal of applied physiology and occupational physiology 75.4 (1997): 298-304.