For a change of pace, I thought I’d cover two recent neuroscience findings in today’s post. It’s not all academic, either, since both of these studies might help improve your everyday life. Just sit back, suspend your disbelief and fire up the expectation and reward centers of your brain. You might be able to unleash your inner endurance athlete – or epicure, if so inclined – all through the power of the mind.
I’ll start with a surprising finding that I’ve tried to explain to other long-distance runners, who often take a small snack to eat in the middle of a run. I’ve seen the gamut, from orange slices to salty sports drinks and space-age energy gels. The rationale is that these foods quickly replenish the glucose available as blood sugar, the fuel for muscle contraction.
But if you are running for less than an hour, it is biologically impossible for these snacks to improve your performance. For one thing, the amount of carbohydrate that can be effectively absorbed from the stomach to muscle cells in an hour is too small to make any real difference1. And besides, our muscles can hold vast stores of energy in the form glycogen, more than we can possibly use in that span of time, anyway. Spend an hour on a stationary bike, cycling all-out, and you still won’t fully deplete the glycogen in your muscle tissue – so long as you were charged up to begin with2. And yet the snacks work, even in controlled laboratory tests of exercise performance3. No wonder athletes everywhere continue to use them.
Incredibly, this energy boost has nothing to do with caloric consumption, and everything to do with the act of eating.