Food for (vegetarian) climbers part 3: creatine

I promised to be a bit faster with this third post on food for veggies and to keep it shorter than the previous one. So here it is, within a few days and all about creatine. Luckily, the story on creatine is much shorter. I have to admit though that I cheated a bit: most of it was written already before publishing the previous post. Anyway, here we go.

About creatine

So for starters, what's creatine? It is an amino acid that our own body produces constantly. As all vertebrates produce creatine, we consume it when eating meat, raising creatine levels significantly above levels that our own body can produce. Consequently, vegetarians - like me - usually have lower creatine levels than meat eaters. Without dwelling into scientific details, let me explain why creatine can be important for athletes. Remember the three different systems that produce ATP - the fuel in our muscle cells - that I discussed in part 1? The 'phosphagen system', providing ATP at high rates for a short duration, needs creatine phosphate. It's the fastest energy supplying mechanism and the first our muscles will resort to. A higher level of creatine phosphate means a bigger capacity of the phosphagen system. And the body needs creatine to form creatine phosphate (open door, isn't it?). Additionally, creatine is believed to speed up the recovery process after training. In summary, effects of increased creatine levels are:

• An increased capacity of the fast energy supplying phosphagen system during high intensity exercises and therefore an increased ability to perform them. That means a few more push ups or bench presses per set if you're into that. By increasing the training volume you can handle (imaging doing the same number of exercises, but with a few more moves/repetitions in every single set), creatine will help you build up muscles. For climbers it could also mean an increase in power endurance. The more creatine phosphate we have stored in our muscles, the more very hard (crux our boulder) moves can be done relying on the phosphagen system before the glycogen lactid acid system has to take over and the pump clock starts to tick. In other words: higher creatine levels will increase strength, power and to some extent (indirectly) power endurance.
• Creatine is osmotically active and will draw more water into your muscles. This will make you heavier. It also aids in the regeneration and recovery of muscles. Faster recovery means that shorter rest periods between training session suffice and more training is possible (this relies on more effects than just water being drawn into the muscles).

Opinions collide on whether this is good for climbers or not. I'd say for climbers two effects of creatine supplementation are interesting: an increase in strength, power and anaerobic endurance and faster recovery, allowing more training. The third effect is less favorable: an increase in weight, partly due to water retention and partly due to the additional muscle mass your body might start building up if you milk the extra few reps that the extra creatine allows you to perform. As ultimately the strength-to-weight ratio is what matters in climbing, it becomes a trade off: will the additional weight drag you down or will the increased power and power endurance launch you to the next level? This balance will be different for everybody. The only way to find out if it works for you, is giving it a try. Finally I should mention that there are non-responders to creatine supplementation. Some people notice strong effects, some don't. Again, you'll have to try and see how it works for you. Nevertheless it is reasonable to assume that in a low-creatine diet (like a veggie diet) stronger effects from additional supplementation can be expected than in a high-creatine diet.

Legendary Wolfgang Güllich and Kurt Albert have pushed the bounderies of sports climbing like few others and make most climbers look like twigs. The strength to weight ratio of Güllich was good enough to climb the world's first 9a nevertheless... Simply looking at this picture makes me feel much less worried about my weight again.

As a vegetarian, I was inclined to expect a response to creatine supplementation. I spent days reading about possible side effects and health risks associated with it. It turned out that after being popularized in the early 90's (after reportedly paving the way to some Olympic gold medals), creatine became the most studied food supplement for athletes and stood all tests and scrutiny. Some early reports of kidney damage and other health effects were later discredited and in 2004 the EFSA (European Food Safety Authority) published a report stating that a long-term oral intake of 3g creatine per day is risk-free. Curious about the results of the trade off between strength and weight and puzzled by the low training volume I could handle, I decided to give it a go. I ordered a can of high quality, pure creatine and started taking the prescribed daily 4g supplement.

Initial results of my increased creatine intake

In the first week of supplementation, I didn't notice any difference in my training. But towards the end of the second week, the first results were undeniable. I could clearly hold up better in my antagonist & fitness workouts and I could do significantly more hard bouldering within a short training session. Additionally, my (perceived) strength increased. That's all rather vague, unquantified and subjective, but here are some numbers to chew on: in the second week I was able to increase the additional load I could carry in a typical deadhang session on my fingerboard by 7 kg. That may not sound like a lot, but those familiar with deadhang training will know that (provided you're not new to hangboarding) gains here usually are very small, come tediously slowly and require inhuman patience and persistence. Clearly my strength to weight ratio had increased (as predicted by several studies, I measured a weight gain of about 1 kg in the first two weeks).

Weeks later I measured some more weight gains: adding up to about 3 kg in total. I think it's mostly gains in bigger core muscle groups that I regularly address in my training. Although my perceived strength and power increased, I also got the rather subjective and unquantifiable feeling that my power endurance suffered a bit, probably due to the additional weight. As it pushed me past the psychological barrier of 80 kg, I started trying harder to achieve a small caloric deficit and over nearly two months I lost about 2 kg again. I am almost back at my old weight now, but obviously I would have been lighter had I done the same without creatine supplementation. Focussing on power endurance training for a few weeks restored my power endurance to a level I haven't had the entire season, so overall I feel like the additional creatine gave me the sharp edge I missed before and hasn't given me significant disadvantages in the end. But again: most of this is hard to quantify and quite subjective.

In conclusion

Among many other nutrients, proteins and creatine affect climbing performance and our ability to endure and recover from hard training sessions. A vegetarian diet is prone to be low in both without some extra attention. Although it's relatively easy to consume plenty of proteins while refraining from meat for most, vegetarians have to rely only on the creatine their own bodies produce. I turned out to be a responder to creatine supplementation (but there are plenty of accounts of non-responders as well). I feel stronger and fitter during training, but haven't really had the chance to test these perceived gains on real rock. I'll let you know when I do. Based mostly on the deadhang statistics, it seems my strength to weight ratio has increased, tipping the balance to the beneficial effects of creatine. It might be different for you though. There's only one way to find out. That is, if you care to bother.

I would recommend a vegetarian diet to everyone. For me it has made weight control much easier and made me feel healthier. Cooking and eating became more interesting and it has affected my eating attitude positively. But with or without meat, making varied meals from clean, unprocessed ingredients is what's most important. For me starting to eat veggie simply triggered a change of mindset regarding food. I'll stick with it for sure, because it makes me feel good and healthy. But during periods of hard strength and power training I will supplement (just a bit of) extra proteins, as it seems to help my body recover. And for now I'll keep supplementing some creatine as well for the reasons described above. After a while I do intend to stop it briefly though and see what difference that makes. Despite all guidelines, studies and good advice about eating, the way an individual body responds to eating habits remains unpredictable, making dieting above all a matter experimenting. Only through trial and error you can find out what works for you and what doesn't. If you suspect that an eating habit is holding you back somehow, simply change it for a few weeks and evaluate the results. You might end up pleasantly surprised, just like me. 

Food for (vegetarian) climbers part 2: proteins

In my previous post on this topic - that I wrote so long ago you've probably already forgotten about it - I described my suspicion that my diet lacked some proteins and creatine to support my body going through the trainings I do. Without wanting to break with my principled decision to strongly reduce meat consumption, I decided to supplement some (whey) proteins and (synthesized) creatine for a little while and see for the results. To disentangle between the effects of both of them, I started supplementing protein a month before starting with creatine. In the following I'll focus on the importance of proteins and why different body types will have different needs. In the third (and final) post of this series I'll discuss creatine and the gains I got from supplementing it.

Protein 101

Most of us know that proteins (or 'amino acids') are the stuff that builds muscles. They are however the building blocks of much more - hairs, nails, bones, skin, most of our bodies actually. Not to mention the role they play in membranes and all kinds chemical processes in our bodies. There are 20 different amino acids that we need. Out of them 9 are 'essential', the other 11 can be synthesized in the body. Protein sources that contain adequate amounts of the 9 essential amino acids are commonly referred to as 'complete' proteins.

During a workout, muscles get damaged. The damage needs to be repaired afterwards and this is where proteins come in: they literally are the building blocks we need to repair our muscles. With the right intensity and number of repetitions of the exercise, muscles will even grow in this process (called 'hypertrophy'). It's the aim of strength athletes, whereas endurance athletes will generally stay quite far away from this exercise regimen. Too light exercise (anything aerobic) will change the vascular structure in muscles to enhance blood flow, but it won't promote excessive muscular protein synthesis. Too heavy exercise (something you can do for 1-3 repetitions) will mostly encourage neurological adaptations for better muscles recruitment. But somewhere in between, at an intensity you can sustain for about 6-8 repetitions, is the hotspot for muscle growth. Logically, training in this regimen will induce the highest protein need during the recovery process. Anyone engaging in athletic activity will increase his or her protein need, but strength athletes significantly more than endurance athletes.

Now let's step back for a second and remember my first post on this topic in which I 'claimed' that rock climbing is not an endurance activity. Apart from the implications on the metabolic needs on which I focussed in the first post, this also means that training for climbing includes a strong strength component. It's no coincidence that according to most advice any training program should include a lot of bouldering, whether you are a boulderer or not. Unless you are doing a threshold bouldering session or maximum effort campus exercises (both aim for neurological adaptations), you will either be in the hypertrophy range (if the exercises are hard enough) or at least beating up your muscles big time. So supplying your body the time and nutrients (proteins!) to recover from this assault is recommendable: alternatively you're just breaking down muscles. A little side note here is that the muscles that are driven to failure here are probably in the forearms. They are not the biggest muscle groups in our bodies and don't require as much protein as for example the back muscles. If you include a few sets of pull ups, push ups or other supplemental exercises in your workout however, you are pushing big muscles groups to get bigger.

Proteins: not only in meat...

So hard training climbers will have a relatively high protein need. Agree? Let me start debunking this: it's a myth that vegetarian food is per definition low in proteins. Of course if you're a lazy eater it's easy to omit the necessary proteins (and iron, and vitamins B for that matter). But hey, also non-veggie lazy eaters will consume a lot of crap and fail to include important nutrients. Some lucky individuals have a natural tendency to eat healthy and well balanced. But most of us - like me - have to think about we put in our mouths, resist a craving every once in a while and opt something that better fits the athletic demands we put on our bodies instead. Veggie or not. Although meat, chicken and fish are the common protein bombs that many athletes resort to, there are plenty of possibilities that fit in a vegetarian or even vegan diet as well. Dairy products are good sources of complete proteins and  combinations of nuts, legumes and grains can make for a complete set of proteins as well.

There are plenty of natural sources of protein and there is no direct need to supplement them. But finding clean, healthy sources of complete protein and include them in your diet without overdoing on carbohydrates particularly will require some commitment and won't be cheap. Protein supplements can be an easy quick fix for an otherwise good diet that lacks just that extra bit of proteins for periods of heavy exercise. Whey protein (a residue from the process of making cheese from milk) is an excellent source of complete proteins. Vegans could consider soy protein instead. That said, protein powders are (highly) processed and may be harder for the body to use than proteins obtained from clean whole foods. There are quite a few low quality powders out there, some with toxic levels of heavy metals. If the powder has been processed at high temperatures, the protein molecules will be denaturalized and much harder to digest. Pay attention to this when buying a supplement. Then again, most meat or fish you can get in a supermarket is highly processed as well and probably has many more health deteriorating effects than a high quality protein powder. Trying to use as many clean, unprocessed, natural sources of whole proteins as possible in your diet should be your aim. Use powders to supplement, not to replace.

Chris Sharmas and Adam Ondras

As I briefly mention in the introduction to this post, different body types have different protein needs. Let me take a black and white approach here and divide the climbing community in two groups: the wiry, light Adam Ondras and the muscular, heavy Chris Sharmas. Of course there's a lot in between, but for the sake of the argument let's simplify things a bit. In the end, both the Adam Ondras and the Chris Sharmas strive for a high strength to weight ratio and enough (power) endurance to get them to the top of their route. The Adam Ondras may rely a bit more on endurance and their ability to hold on to super small intermediary holds and the Chris Sharmas may rely a bit more on power and their ability to throw themselves from big hold to big hold, but in the end a similar set of skills should get them up the same routes. They'll have totally different bodies doing this though and consequently they will have different nutritional needs as well. The Chris Sharmas need to carry more weight up with bigger muscles and will need more energy (even in a rest state a more muscular body consumes more energy!). They'll have bigger muscles to regenerate after training and will need more nutrients to facilitate this.

Spot the differences...

You can't choose whether you'll be in the Sharma group or in the Ondra camp: genetics did that for you (it has a lot to do with the balance between slow twitch and fast twitch muscle fibers, which is mostly genetically determined and different for all of us). Most strong climbers happen to be in the Ondra group: it seems to be a favorable body composition for climbing. But I am in the Sharma group: when I train I build up muscle mass and become heavy and strong. So if you are a climber, statistically the odds are that you have a lower protein need than I do.

But how much protein do we need? Is there a guideline? Obviously, we need enough to recover from our training. Getting too muscular and heavy is not desirable though, but that's something you should target primarily in the way you train and not in the way you eat. In my view your eating behavior should always support your training behavior. In other sports strength athletes often live by the rule of consuming 1.4 to 1.8 grams of protein per kg of body weight. Some claim that much less is more than enough and that many athletes overdo their protein intake. It is even said that too much protein can be hard on the kidneys and liver, but there's no scientific evidence to back this up. Although science has repeatedly shown positive effects on performance and muscle regeneration when athletes supplement additional proteins, it fails to give anything more than a rough guideline about how much exactly is needed. To discover what works for you, you simply have to try and learn through trial and error.

I'll give you another reason not to overdo it though: there's energy in proteins as well. Our bodies extract about 4 kCal from every gram of protein, which is about the same as from a gram of carbohydrates. Consuming a 20 gram portion of proteins yields as much energy as eating 20 grams of sugar! I'd strongly advice against counting calories for anyone, but just bear in mind that eating more protein than you need will eventually build body fat, not muscle. Don't overdo it. On the bright side: protein also dulls hunger (quite contrary to many carbs, such as sugar) and may end up making you lighter simply by killing your appetite and saving you the occasional sugar craving.

To be continued...
In the end, even in exactly the same training regimen every individual body will have different nutritional needs. How much protein exactly you need is something for you to find out by trial and error. I've decided to experiment a bit and increased my protein consumption by about 25 grams per day. It immediately affected how my body responded to training: I recovered faster and quickly (within a month) saw a more defined musculature on my body without gaining weight (which I like to interpret as a gain in muscle mass and a reduction of body fat). I'll play a bit more with the amount and timing of supplementation, but I feel like sticking to it at least during strength and power oriented training phases. In the next (and final) post of this series I'll write about creatine supplementation. It might take a while again, but stay tuned!

Food for vegetarian climbers part 1: is climbing an endurance sport?

I've been eating almost exclusively vegetarian food for quite a while. About a year before I started my effort to become good at climbing (in 2010), I became a vegetarian. To be very precise (and unnecessarily complicated), I am what is called an 'ovo-lacto vegetarian'. In normal language that means I refrain from eating meat and fish, but I do consume eggs and dairy products. I've been reasonably conscious about ingesting enough iron, proteins and vitamins B (B12 in particular). Failing to do so is a common pitfall for veggies, especially for those who refuse to eat eggs and/or dairy as well. Through the years, I've drawn comfort from a wealth of online articles reassuring me that a sports diet without meat is very well possible and according to many even a lot healthier than a diet that includes meat. I can recommend a visit to the 'No Meat Athlete' blog to anyone who considers cutting down on meat. My steady progress through the grades seemed to confirm I was eating well enough to fuel my climbing efforts.

Nevertheless I've started doubting the completeness of my diet after subjecting myself to a more strength and power oriented training schedule at the beginning of this year, without seeing significant performance gains  (either in or outside the trainings) or body composition changes for months. Instead I often started feeling tired, fatigued, sometimes even unmotivated and I experienced more bad days than good days when I had the chance to hit the crag. Within my limited understanding of sports science, there were two plausible explanations for my 'problem': either I was overtraining or I wasn't eating well enough to enable good recovery from my trainings. Most of the symptoms seemed to fit the former. I refused to accept it: the step up in training was small and my training load wasn't unreasonably high for a climber who has done several years of fairly consequent training. And I couldn't imagine that both explanations were unrelated: in both cases the real problem is that the body fails to recover well enough from a training before the next one starts. With better food, faster recovery is possible and overtraining is harder to achieve. So once again I started reading, hoping to reassure myself that my diet was just fine.

Climbing is not an endurance sport
This time I noticed a subtlety that I missed previously: all articles explaining how carefully picking your ingredients (enough spinach, broccoli, nuts, legumes etc.) can result in a complete sports diet that has many health benefits over a diet including meat, are aimed at endurance athletes. And although sports climbers talk a lot about 'endurance' and target this in their trainings, I'd like to make a case here that climbing (and not just bouldering) isn't an endurance sport at all. Let me explain. The term 'endurance sport' usually refers to aerobic activities, such as long distance running, cycling etc. Hard sports climbing and bouldering are almost exclusively anaerobic activities. Aerobic and anaerobic activities rely on completely different energy supplies. The 'fuel' in our muscle cells is called ATP: adenosine triphosphate. Whenever a cell needs energy, it starts breaking down ATP. A phosphate complex splits off, releasing a lot of energy from the bond and leaving adenosine diphosphate (APD) behind. After about three seconds of very hard work, the cell runs out of ATP. When that happens, the cell needs to restore ADP to ATP to continue delivering work. There are three systems that are able to do this, but at very different rates and durations:

1. Aerobic respiration (slow). In the presence of oxygen (supplied via the blood flow), glucose (stored in the form of glycogen - chains of glucose molecules - in muscles) is broken down completely into carbon dioxide and water and the energy released is used to form ATP. The mechanism is slow, but as long as the blood flow can supply enough oxygen, it can accommodate moderate activity continuously for hours.
2. Glycogen lactic acid system (fast). When a higher demand is placed on ATP levels and there's insufficient oxygen, glucose gets only partly broken down. It provides enough energy to synthesize ATP, but lactid acid is created, causing the acidity in the muscles to skyrocket quickly. The lactid acid causes temporal muscular fatigue and is the cause of the all familiar 'pump' that hits us in what we like to call 'endurance' climbs. Once relying on the glycogen lactic acid system for energy, we have about two minutes of exercise left.
3. Phosphagen system (very fast). For very fast ATP replenishment, muscle cells contain the compound creatine phosphate. When the bond between the phosphate group and creatine breaks, a lot of energy is released and binds the phosphate group with ADP to form ATP. This mechanism supplies ATP extremely fast and can facilitate very high intensity activities. The catch is that it can only do so for a short time: after about ten seconds the creatine phosphate storage is depleted.

The first system involves oxygen and is called aerobic, the other two don't involve oxygen and are therefore called anaerobic (the term 'anaerobic system' is also often used to describe just the glycogen lactic acid system). Although easy parts of sports climbing routes may require only the aerobic respiration to deliver energy, sports routes typically consists of hard, sustained sections that mainly rely on the (anaerobic) glycogen lactid acid system. Crux sections and bouldering will even be in the phosphagen system regime. So let's be very careful in calling climbing an endurance sport and applying knowledge, customs, diets etc from other endurance activities to climbing. On a cellular level, they are very different. That means they have different nutritional requirements as well.

Additionally, when doing very tough, powerful exercises (like hard bouldering or redpointing) the muscles get damaged. Many small ruptures occur (called 'microtrauma') and in the subsequent recovery process the muscles regenerate. When the exercises were hard enough, the muscles will grow in this process: 'hypertrophy'. This can only happen when all the necessary nutrients are present. Obviously, activity that results in hypertrophy has a different nutritional requirement than typical aerobic endurance activities.

So what's the message?
This is where I'd like to end the first of three posts on food for climbing from the viewpoint of a vegetarian. My aim was to outline how hard sports climbing and bouldering are different from what we usually call endurance sports. They rely on different biochemical systems supplying the required energy and put a heavy demand on muscle regeneration. For all athletic activities, independent of their nature, great supplies of glycogen and an abundance of red blood cells are desirable. In red blood cells, oxygen is bound to the iron atoms in hemaglobin molecules and transported to the muscles. Obviously, failing to consume enough iron (a common pitfall for vegetarians who are sloppy about their diet) will limit the capacity to transport oxygen and decrease your athletic performance dramatically. But in hard climbing - as in all other anaerobic activities - there are some additional food dependancies, particularly on proteins to regenerate muscle tissue and on creatine to supply the phosphagen system with a proper storage of creatine phosphate. Both are abundant in meat and can be tricky to consume in large quantities in a vegetarian diet.

While reading about all this food stuff I started linking the lack of training results and my symptoms of unexpected overtraining to a lack of protein and creatine (I've safeguarded my iron consumption with a glass of Roosvicee Ferro daily ever since I cut down on the meat). Parts 2 and 3 of this series of food posts will deal with these two nutrients specifically. This summer I started supplementing them a bit and in the upcoming posts I will describe the first results I've got from them and why it will probably be completely different for you, even if you are a vegetarian too. Stay tuned!