On the first podcast of the fall season behavioral scientist Dr. Susan Swithers from Purdue University will be joining me to discuss new concerns raised about artificial sweetners. Forget the cancer warnings, scientists are questioning the impact that artificial sweetners (NNS) on both our body’s response to sugar, but also our brains ability to determine what to do as food comes in. NNS appear to increase our risk for cardiovascular and metabolic diseseases, like diabetes, and do little to aid in weight loss. What is worse, thin people, like athletes, may actually be at greater risk than overweight individuals. If you’re interested in health as well as fitness, you’ll want to stick around for our discussion. 

Also on the podcast, Dr. Swithers and I discuss how perception of sweetness can be applied to exercise and whether you really do need to drink that sports drink to benefit from it.

We also want to remind everyone to head over to iTunes and write a review! 

ARTIFICIAL SWEETNERS PRODUCE THE COUNTERINTUITIVE EFFECT OF INDICING METABOLIC DERANGEMENTS. Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism.

Don't miss our next podcast and article series where I update the latest on periodization!

Approximate show time: 1:04

In the final installment of our three past series covers five tests you can and should do yourself to optimize your performance. Rather than focus on testing for marginal gains, like functional threshold, ESP recommends addressing the bottlenecks. Some of the most important assessments include:

• Movement Screening

• Assessing strength specific for good movement and balanced muscle development

  Estimating maximum 30 sec and VO2 max (run) pace or (bike) power

  Sweat rate

From this list, you can easily see that the last three can be easily ascertained during actual training sessions.