How Your Gut Can Boost Endurance

One muscle that many athletes overlook is the gut and by neglecting it, you could be holding back your performance. The good news? This article will give you everything you need to know to strengthen your gut and boost your endurance.

Your gut health plays a crucial role in nearly every aspect of your wellbeing, and growing research shows just how much it can impact both performance and recovery. Athletes all have a unique gut microbiome that adapts to how you train and what you eat.

Your gut microbiome is home to trillions of microorganisms that affect your gut health but is also linked to overall health and even performance. We have both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bacteria in the gut, and the abundance of both of these is how it will affect our overall health. Both exercise and diet can affect the composition in the gut and promote a more diverse microbiota. By improving the diversity and the ‘good’ bacteria in your gut you are indirectly improving your exercise performance.

A balanced microbiome supports not only digestion but also overall health and even performance. Your gut contains both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bacteria, and the balance between them determines your overall health. Exercise and diet both shape this balance, promoting a more diverse microbiota. By increasing the diversity and abundance of beneficial bacteria, you can indirectly enhance endurance, recovery, and energy levels.

Simple Ways To Improve Your Gut Health:

• Eat a wide range of plant foods
• Eat plenty of fibre
• Include fermented foods containing probiotics
• Avoid heavily processed foods
• Focus on prebiotics
• Include polyphenol-rich foods (like berries, green tea, and dark chocolate)

But How Does This Translate To Better Performance?

A diverse microbiota offers several performance boosting benefits:

• Stronger Immunity: Reducing the risk of illness and gut problems that could interfere with your training.
• Lower Oxidative Stress and Inflammation: Less muscle damage and faster recovery.
• Improved Metabolism and Energy Expenditure: Short chain fatty acids produced by gut microorganisms help regulate energy metabolism, appetite hormones and body composition.

What Are The Other Ways Our Gut Can Help Performance?

Did you know that 30–50% of endurance athletes experience gastrointestinal symptoms that can become debilitating and negatively affect performance? These issues can stem from physiological, psychological, mechanical, or nutritional factors, but the good news is that they can often be reduced by training your gut.

And no, this doesn’t mean adding more training sessions to your week. Gut training can easily be built into your existing routine and adapted to your lifestyle. In fact, just two weeks of gut training can help reduce symptoms and enhance running performance.

Try these strategies to strengthen your gut and support endurance performance (Jeukendrup, 2017):

• Drinking regularly during training to ‘train the stomach’ and encourage faster stomach emptying.
• Training immediately after a meal to get used to exercising with food in the stomach.
• Training with a relatively high carbohydrate intake.
• Stimulate the race with a race nutrition plan, Practice consuming the same foods and drinks you plan to use in the race.
• Increase the overall carbohydrate content of your diet.

The gut plays a larger part in endurance performance than many athletes realise, but by implementing gut training and improving gut health, you can unlock noticeable performance gains.