Breaking Beta | Can Beta-Alanine Supplementation Help You Send Your Sport Climbing Project?

In this episode, the final episode of Season 2, Kris and Paul discuss beta-alanine, a nutritional supplement, and its impact on climbing performance as investigated in:

Beta-Alanine Supplementation and Sport Climbing Performance

Authored by Krzysztof Sas-Nowosielski, Judyta Wyciślik, and Piotr Kaczka; published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in May, 2021.

They’ll explain what beta-alanine actually is and does chemically, and how this might translate into improved climbing performance. They’ll consider the pros and cons of the experiment’s design and thus the validity of its results in an attempt to determine whether or not climbers should consider using beta-alanine.

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Got a question? Comments? Want to suggest a paper to be discussed? Get in touch and let us know!

Breaking Beta is brought to you by Power Company Climbing and Crux Conditioning, and is a proud member of the Plug Tone Audio Collective. Find full episode transcripts, citations, and more at our website.

For a limited time, Breaking Beta listeners can take 15% off their purchase using the code BETA15 at checkout! Or simply click the image above to shop and have the discount automatically applied!

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Kris Hampton  00:00

Season Two of Breaking Beta is brought to you by Gnarly Nutrition. After the episode use the code BETA15 for 15% off of your next order at gognarly.com or click the link in your show notes to have the code automatically applied. Gnarly Nutrition: Push your possible with science-backed, delicious sports nutrition.

Breaking Bad Audio Clip  00:25

So listen up. This is how it goes. I front each of you an ounce and you sell it for $2,500. I keep the two, you keep the five. No cutting it. You sell it as is. Alright?

 $2500 an ounce? That's kind of like, hopeful, bro. 

Yeah, Jesse. Street is maybe seventeen, eighteen. 

Okay. Hey, this is the best shizz ever, alright. Everybody and their mother is gonna want a taste and second, who else is selling right now, huh?

It's dry out there, that's for sure.

Church. 

So you point it how you want, okay? Quarter, half, teener, whatever. But I make what I make. Two large, no exceptions. Short me, you're out. Cut it, you're out. Period. This is a big opportunity I am giving you. Understand? Badger, what is this? 

Ummm....a big opportunity. 

Exactly. Alright. This is the ground floor, gentlemen. How far you go is up to you.

Kris Hampton  01:32

How far you go is up to you, Paul. You and maybe beta-alanine?

Paul Corsaro  01:37

 We shall see. Right. 

Kris Hampton  01:38

All right. We are here today to talk about a paper called "Beta-alanine Supplementation and Sport Climbing Performance." Authors are Krzysztof Sas-Nowosielski, Judyta Wyciślik and Piotr Kaczka.

Paul Corsaro  01:58

Nicely done.

Kris Hampton  01:59

I looked those up or tried to learn how to say them haha. From the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2021. And the purpose is to "investigate the effects of beta-alanine on climbing specific performance." Man, I like it when a paper has a simple title and a simple purpose and it's simply done.

Paul Corsaro  02:23

Yeah, we were just talking about this in the preshow. It's like we did a lot of convoluted papers this season. This one was quite refreshing.

Kris Hampton  02:33

Yeah, it felt like I told you, when I first looked at it, I was like, "Ah, this is a cute little paper."

Paul Corsaro  02:38

Haha. That doesn't mean not impactful, though, either though, too

Kris Hampton  02:43

Exactly. They say in this paper that they aren't necessarily concerned with the mechanisms by which beta-alanine might be helping, just with "Does it help?" and I appreciate that. 

Paul Corsaro  02:57

I love it. 

Kris Hampton  02:57

Yeah. For the uninitiated, before we get this thing started, let's explain beta-alanine for just a second. Essentially, research has shown that supplementing with beta alanine improves exercise performance, specifically in efforts that are dependent on anaerobic glycolysis. And that's the the transformation of glucose into lactate when the oxygen supply is limited. So basically, power endurance is sort of how we think of that.

Paul Corsaro  03:29

And a short note on some of like, you know, the physiology behind all that. So when we break it break glucose down into lactate and hydrogen ions, you know, we can use lactate. Lactate isn't necessarily the bad guy. A lot of the issues that come from fatigue and working hard without oxygen to the muscles come from those hydrogen ions, which creates a more acidic environment in the muscle. And that affects contractility, a lot of other things we use those muscles for to get the performance outcome we look for. So it's hypothesized that beta alanine can buffer some of the acidity in the muscle when we're working hard and let us continue to keep working hard. And like you mentioned the beginning the episode, and maybe get to the chains.

Kris Hampton  04:10

Yeah, and you know, most of the research has been done on sports that are lower body dominant. So I think this is really interesting to look specifically at a sport where the forearms are our limiters in this case, and see if beta alanine is actually going to help us.

Paul Corsaro  04:30

Yeah, it's literally looking at climbing performance, not some analog of performance or we have to make, you know, a logical leap to see how it applies to climbing. It's looking at how did someone climb.

Kris Hampton  04:41

So yeah, they didn't try to try to create a sport route on a hand grip. 

Paul Corsaro  04:47

Haha. Yep. 

Kris Hampton  04:48

Partially modified handgrip squeezer. Hahah good. All right, let's jump into this thing.

Breaking Bad Audio Clip  04:55

You clearly don't know who you're talking to, so let me clue you in.

Paul Corsaro  04:59

 I'm Paul Corsaro

Kris Hampton  05:01

I'm Kris Hampton

Breaking Bad Audio Clip  05:02

Lucky two guys but just two guys okay

Paul Corsaro  05:06

And you're listening to Breaking Beta,

Kris Hampton  05:09

Where we explore and explain the science of climbing

Breaking Bad Audio Clip  05:12

With our skills, you'll earn more than you ever would on your own. We've got work to do. Are you ready? 

Paul Corsaro  05:21

I am ready, are you?

Kris Hampton  05:24

Man? I guess so. It's the it's the last official episode of the season, though. So how are you feeling about what we covered this season?

Paul Corsaro  05:34

I'm psyched on it. It was a good mix of things. We broke away from, you know, what we you would expect to look at when looking at climbing research, so that that was cool. We looked at papers that tried to look at a lot. We looked at papers that didn't really tell us a whole lot. We look at papers where we got some information out of it. You know, that's, that's what this is about. We're sifting through the weeds and getting ourselves intensely lost in the weeds so other people don't have to.

Breaking Bad Audio Clip  05:59

Look it up. It's science. 

Paul Corsaro  06:01

And I think we did a good job of that this season.

Kris Hampton  06:03

Exactly. I feel like we've done a good job over the last two seasons of kind of laying out what climbing research looks like currently, addressing some of the findings that we see being repeated often. So those are things we can be, you know, we can count on a little more, and looking at some of the big limitations. So honestly, I'm excited to start figuring out where we go from here and you know, I think next season might look a little bit different because we've laid this groundwork.

Paul Corsaro  06:33

Yeah, always good to evolve right? I'm psyched to keep rolling.

Kris Hampton  06:37

 Yeah, all right, let's, let's jump into the methods.

Breaking Bad Audio Clip  06:39

In a scenario like this, I don't suppose it is bad form to just flip a coin. 

Paul Corsaro  06:47

Alright, so for this study, there were 16 elite climbers. 14 male, 2 female. Again, there's an imbalance. We've talked about it. We'll continue to talk about it. Hope it changes in the future. Out of those 16, one did have to drop out for a knee injury. And then something I couldn't quite grasp.

Kris Hampton  07:04

Hahaha. I had to do the same thing here, yeah

Paul Corsaro  07:08

"Given that the study repeated measures two way analysis of variance within between interaction, a small overall effect size and alpha error in the desired power of .8, the total sample size resulted in 12 participants." I don't really know what that means. We might have called Dale in for a special one, just on that paragraph.

Kris Hampton  07:27

I think that's who can explain it, because it's definitely just the data. You know, when they when they're giving the results, they're saying, you know, "Seven in this group, eight in this group" or whatever. So it's definitely just the way the data decided to look at it.

Paul Corsaro  07:42

Yeah, so I thought that was interesting. I hadn't seen that in a paper before. I'm sure it's happened. But that gave me gave me pause. But um, so yeah, so they ended up with 12 participants that they looked at. So all participants had experience in bouldering and lead competitions, and they had some medalists on the national level. So there's some high level climbers in there. All all also had experience in "extreme rock climbing", which I can only see assume means they consumed copious amounts of Mountain Dew. 

Kris Hampton  08:11

Hahaha

Paul Corsaro  08:11

But nut actually, no. So what they meant by that is there are some climbers who've climbed 5.14. So we've got a good mix of people and some pretty high level climbers in this group. Four of the climbers had tried beta-alanine in the past, but no one had ingested it for a few months before the initiation so we're coming at coming into it with a pretty level playing ground. One thing they did, they didn't follow a unified training program as they were going through this, which you know, maybe added an element of variability but also I think it apply it could also show the universe, the universal nature of maybe what the study showed, because you know, this is gonna apply to a world where people are doing different things outside of the supplementation.

Kris Hampton  08:51

Yeah, I think not controlling for the diet and the regular training program actually works in their favor.

Paul Corsaro  09:00

One thing they talked about the training program..... again, just I wonder if it's just the difference in language here..... but the main elements of these training programs there were campus board exercises, especially "laddering monos" and then in parentheses "double dynos". I was like "Oh my god."

Kris Hampton  09:17

Hahaha

Paul Corsaro  09:17

 Touches, dead hangs and weighted pull ups on fingerboards and doing hard boulder problems. But it looked like "monos" in this paper was pretty much just a double on a campus board, so two arms from one rung to another

Kris Hampton  09:29

Haha yeah, I thought it was really funny though what we call doubles they call monos. 

Paul Corsaro  09:34

Yep. Haha. Right.  I was like, "Oh, man. These guys are crushers. Mono dynos on the campusboard? Like they found 14 Wolfgang Güllich."

Kris Hampton  09:42

Yeah, exactly.

Paul Corsaro  09:45

So what they did as they did this study, so they broke the group into two different groups. One group consumed beta alanine throughout the course of this course of this study, one group did not. The group that did not also got a placebo pill that looked the same. They didn't know what they were getting. The researchers didn't know who was getting what. And they even did something cool where they gave guidelines on how to consume this pill to kind of spread out the effects because apparently one of the side effects of beta alanine is your skin can tingle. So obviously, if you don't know what pill you got but your skin's tingling Like crazy, you probably know what you got. 

Kris Hampton  10:21

Right. Have you have you used beta alanine before? 

Paul Corsaro  10:24

I haven't taken a supplement for it. I remember reading a book, I think it was Alex Hutchinson's "Endure", a while ago where he talked about it and like, I tried to find some of the animal sources that had a lot more in it. But at the same time, I've never used the supplement

Kris Hampton  10:39

I have, and it's, it's very distinct. It gets...it's a little unsettling if you're not prepared for it. I personally, like my supplements and things to feel like medicine so that I know that it's working. 

Kris Hampton  10:57

Yeah, that was a good idea. I know I've had a climbing partner bail on me once in the past where the morning of that person took a pre workout that had that in it. 

Paul Corsaro  10:57

Yeah

Kris Hampton  10:57

So I like the tingling, but your face does....it's like this pinprick sensation. You get really tingly from taking it. So going into this, I was like, "How are they going to have a placebo group? You if you take it and there's no tingling, you know, you didn't get beta alanine." So they were giving four grams a day, and they split it into four doses per day to reduce that tingling, reduce or remove the tingling entirely. So I thought that was super smart.

Kris Hampton  11:09

Yeah. 

Paul Corsaro  11:10

And he didn't know. He was like, "Hey, I gotta bail. Like, I'm going to the doctor. I'm feeling really weird."

Kris Hampton  11:42

Hahaha. So funny.

Paul Corsaro  11:45

So yeah, after so that was the intervention, the use of the supplement, and they did some testing. So a couple of the tests they did, they did this before and after the supplementation regimen. It consisted of a high intensity, upper body intermittent performance, or power endurance tests, which were just pretty much foot on, campus reaches. You have a foot on and your on a campus board. They did intervals of 20 seconds on 20 seconds off for six intervals. And then they did one more 20 second interval with a 10 second rest, and then another 10 second interval at the finish. If I read that, right, I had to kind of times too.

Kris Hampton  12:19

Yeah they were just trying to get it to fit four minutes perfectly, I think is is what they decided because I think that has something to do with the comp time. 

Paul Corsaro  12:29

Yes, that's right.

Kris Hampton  12:30

 So so that was the deal there. But this I thought this was cool, because it's essentially one of our tests, in our testing battery, is this almost identical movement on the campus board.

Paul Corsaro  12:43

So always cool to see it back up with what you're doing, right. So what they did, they looked at both before and after the supplementation, how many reaches they could get in that timeframe. So you know, you're going on this. You're trying to just bang out as many reach as you can. You're trying to move fast. You're moving powerful. And you know, these are high level competition climbers, so they did a ton. The other test was a hard bouldering traverse. So it was 11 moves on a 45 degree wall, around V7/V8ish. They would just go back and forth to failure. And they tracked a couple different metrics here. They tracked the number of moves an individual did, and then also the time to failure. And then the third test they looked at was an easy traverse. So another traverse going back and forth to failure. They track the same things: number of moves, time to failure. The traverse for this one was on a 30 degree wall, so a little bit less steep and the difficulty was around 6b+, that's puts us at V5ish, V6 or somewhere around there. 

Kris Hampton  13:41

V4. V5, somewhere around there

Paul Corsaro  13:43

V4 V5. Yep. So they looked at easy efforts, harder efforts, a good mix of things. And then they just, they rested five minutes in between the in between these attempts in these tests. And then they checked back in after 28 days and looked to see if there are any changes. 

Kris Hampton  14:02

Yeah, I like the setup. It seemed, seemed really simple. And you know, if you're just looking to see, "Are they going to perform better after this?" because we expect that everybody's going to perform a little better, right? They're in a training phase for their competition season. Everybody's going to see some progress. But is the beta alanine group going to see more progress? I think that's the question.

Paul Corsaro  14:28

And they didn't just stop at like a sports specific measure. They looked at actual rock climbing, but they also looked at the sport specific measure too. So yeah, yeah. 

Kris Hampton  14:36

Pretty cool. 

Paul Corsaro  14:37

Simple, polished. Good.

Kris Hampton  14:39

Alright, let's take a break. We'll come back and tell you all about what they saw.

Breaking Bad Audio Clip  14:43

Please. I really need a break here. Okay.

Kris Hampton  14:49

Let's be honest for a second. I'm not getting any younger, or less stubborn. And as I approach my 50s, with no plans to shelve my desire to continue climbing harder, I have to put a premium on products that are trustworthy, high value and easy to implement. With careful use of Gnarly Creatine, Collagen and Protein, I can get in more quality workouts with more power and that means more and harder climbs. Win, win, win

Breaking Bad Audio Clip  15:18

Look it up, it's science, 

Kris Hampton  15:20

Use code BETA15, that's b e, t a one five for 15% off of your next order at gognarly.com or click the link in the show notes to have the code automatically applied. Gnarly Nutrition: Push your possible with science-backed, delicious sports nutrition. Yeah.

Breaking Bad Audio Clip  15:43

Let's all get back to work for Christ's sake. Okay.

Kris Hampton  15:46

All right, we have returned and we're looking at whether or not beta alanine is going to help these high level climbers. Going into it, were you concerned at all? I'm curious about the high level of the climbers not having a lot of room to improve?

Paul Corsaro  16:07

I thought about that. Um, I think the fact that they were looking at two different groups, I think they would have been able to tell still if one group significantly improved over the other, because we weren't just looking at magnitude of improvement, there was a comparison. So maybe that would help tease some things out. But, you know, we definitely could be in the realm of diminishing returns a little bit.

Kris Hampton  16:30

 Yeah, that I was definitely concerned about that. And that made the results for me even more surprising. So after doing four weeks of the supplementation, either with beta alanine or with a placebo, they came back. They repeated all those same tests and here's what they find. In the campusing test, campusing with feet on I should say, the climbers in the beta alanine group added on average 21 reaches when compared to the placebo group, who added on average eight reaches,

Paul Corsaro  17:08

You don't even gotta run statistics on that one. 

Kris Hampton  17:10

No

Paul Corsaro  17:10

That's a pretty obvious difference.

Kris Hampton  17:12

For me, that seems like a pretty big deal. The hard traverse, the V7 ish traverse, there were no real differences. Everybody improved a little bit, but nothing statistically significant. And then on the easy traverse, which was around V4 ish, it allowed them to stay on the wall longer. The beta alanine group improved significantly. A 51% improvement in number of moves and a 59% improvement in time to failure versus 19% and 27.5% in the placebo group. So everybody improved, but the beta alanine group almost doubled the improvement of the placebo group.

Paul Corsaro  17:56

Man, after like looking at a season of like marginal improvements and having to like kind of squint your brain to like put things into place, like this it almost just hits you in the face, doesn't it?

Kris Hampton  18:07

I know! Don't you wish we could have a whole season of 10 episodes of studies this simple and easy and effective? 

Paul Corsaro  18:11

I think our podcast would be a little shorter haha

Kris Hampton  18:16

Haha it'd be way shorter. So it looks like four weeks of beta alanine supplementation may improve efforts of climbing that's around one minute or longer. And it also appears to help short bouts of upper body power endurance and in this case, it was big, foot on campus reaches. I think I could take that into other places and expect to see somewhat similar results, personally.

Paul Corsaro  18:44

And also too, if you think about it, supporting more power endurance, if you just look at it from a training perspective too, it means you're probably going to get a better output from hard training and get more out of it

Kris Hampton  18:55

Sure.

Paul Corsaro  18:55

 So not only are you performing better, you're able to put in more quality work and that that's got to compound a little bit, right?

Kris Hampton  19:01

Totally, totally. There are some things to keep in mind here that aren't super obvious at first. The beta alanine group, while while they were randomly chosen, they actually had considerably lower scores in their pre tests in everything except for the time to failure. This indicates to me that they had more room to see improvement. So I don't know if we can chalk it up entirely to the beta alanine and they mentioned several other limitations in this paper. One,it was a traverse and they theorized that climbing up may do something different. They they question the hold choices on their traverse. One was all edges, one was all pinches. They question the not controlling the diet and training. But I, for me, I think this is number one a great starting point for knowing more about how beta alanine can help or not for climbers, and whether or not you may want to use it.

Paul Corsaro  20:08

Yeah, I think, you know, if someone comes to me and asks, you know, what my thoughts are on beta alanine, you know, I had read a little bit about it, in kind of in lay person books, like I mentioned earlier, just articles on the internet. You know, I had thought it was a pretty good idea and you know, it was worth trying. But after reading this, I think this is like the, this is one of the pieces of evidence where I'm like, "Hey, you know, but from what I've seen, it's pretty well, pretty well supported." Might be worth giving it a shot, provided, you know, if you make sure you don't have any medical issues, or talk to someone if you're not sure about if a supplement is right for you, you know, disclaimer, disclaimer, talk to some with doctor in front of their name if you're going to put something into your body, most likely,

Kris Hampton  20:49

Totally. But yeah, yeah, for me, it's convincing. Like, I mean, I've got some goals that kind of fit right into this sort of timeline. They're saying maybe it doesn't help for climbs that are under one minute. You know, maybe it just doesn't have time to do its thing, essentially. And I've got quite a few goals, both bouldering and short, powerful sport climbs that fit right into this. They they last a little longer than a minute. They very much look like foot on powerful campusing.

Paul Corsaro  21:25

This is Landertown right not for sure haha

Kris Hampton  21:27

So, so I'm gonna try it, you know. Gnarly Nutrition has beta alanine in their pre workout. It's five grams per dose. So they were taking four in this. It's available with and without caffeine. So for me, that's where I'm going to start is try some of the pre workout, work that into my routine and see how it goes with these goals for me.

Paul Corsaro  21:53

Yeah, you know, maybe if you're in a long season, maybe near the end of the season and you need to make a hard push on something, you're close. You know, you're you're close, you're on a road trip, you're there for a couple months and  it's the last month and you're trying to sport route that's kind of in those in that realm. 

Kris Hampton  22:09

Yeah

Paul Corsaro  22:09

Why not give it a shot if you don't have any health contraindications?

Kris Hampton  22:13

Yeah, I think it's, I think it's super interesting. So man, I, I sort of like ending the season on a short, little easy,

Paul Corsaro  22:23

It's maybe the shortest one we've ever done, I think. Hahaha

Kris Hampton  22:28

Haha. Maybe what we need to do is do more of these. We can get 20 episodes in if we 

Paul Corsaro  22:34

Oh for sure

Kris Hampton  22:35

If we have more of this kind of study. Just as a note, I know I said this in the commercial, but you know, if you guys are interested in trying beta alanine via the Gnarly Nutrition Pre Workout, be sure to use the code BETA15. That's beta one five, at gognarly.com. You can also click the link right there in your show notes. It'll automatically apply the code on the website. So go check some of that out. I think that's it. I think it's done.

Paul Corsaro  23:05

Yeah.

Kris Hampton  23:06

All right. You all can find Paul and I all over the interwebs by following the links right there in your show notes. You can find Paul at his gym Crux Conditioning in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And when you're hearing this, it might be starting to think about cooling down in Chattanooga, so if you're in that area, and you want to get trained up for a good winter of bouldering in Chattanooga, definitely hit him up over at Crux. If you have questions, comments or papers you'd like for us to take a look at, hit us up at community.powercompanyclimbing.com. Don't forget to subscribe to the show. Leave us a review. And please tell all of your friends who want a deeper look into what science is actually saying about rock climbing, that you have the perfect podcast for them. And we won't see you next week. We're done. It's over.

Paul Corsaro  23:59

For now. 

Kris Hampton  24:00

However, we're going to try....I'm going to put this out there. I may...what do the kids say on the internet? "Felt cute might delete later"

Kris Hampton  24:09

Haha. I might delete this later, but right now I'm going to say we're going to try and get a few special guests. Some of the researchers we whose papers we looked at this season on for interviews coming up in the coming weeks. And we will also be back with more Better Call Pauls in a couple of months, building up for Season Three. So hit us up with those questions if you have them. 

Paul Corsaro  24:09

Haha I don't know anymore.

Paul Corsaro  24:09

Awesome.Thanks a lot, y'all. I really appreciate you guys listening to all this. It's been a lot of fun and can't wait to keep on moving.

Breaking Bad Audio Clip  24:44

Yeah, science.

Breaking Bad Audio Clip  24:46

 It's done. 

Breaking Bad Audio Clip  24:48

You keep saying that and it's bullshit every time. Always. 

Breaking Bad Audio Clip  24:52

You know what? I'm done. 

Breaking Bad Audio Clip  24:55

Okay, you and I we're done.

Kris Hampton  24:59

Breaking Beta is brought to you by Power Company Climbing and Crux Conditioning and as a proud member of the Plug Tone Audio Collective. For transcripts, citations and more, visit powercompanyclimbing.com/breakingbeta

Breaking Bad Audio Clip  25:12

Let's not get lost in the who, what and whens. The point is we did our due diligence

Kris Hampton  25:18

Our music, including our theme song Tumbleweed is from legendary South Dakota band Riff Lord 

Breaking Bad Audio Clip  25:25

This is it. This is how it ends.