Sports psychologist and elite ultrarunner, Lucie Hanes, shares insights into the mental skills required to train your gut to consume more carbohydrates during exercise...
Ultrarunning is undergoing a transformation with more and more athletes embracing high-carb fueling. From Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc to Leadville 100, previously “unbeatable” records have fallen in quick succession as athletes rack up higher rates of carbohydrate consumption than ever before.
Unfortunately, unless you’ve been blessed with the bombproof gastrointestinal system of a sewer rat, following athletes like Leadville 100 winner David Roche and hitting 100 grams of carb per hour won’t end well. Don’t forget to stash a roll of toilet paper in your pocket should you decide to try.
The gut needs time to get used to a higher intake before it can put that energy to good use. Gradually exposing your body to more and more fuel reduces the risk and intensity of GI distress. It also gives the gut a chance to work through any growing pains well before the big dance.
The biggest barrier to a successful gut training protocol isn’t always physical. The mind often puts up a convincing argument against consuming more fuel...
How to train your brain (to train your gut)
Fuelin Chief Nutrition Officer, Scott Tindal, told Andy that training your gut can be as much a psychological challenge, as it is a physical one...
I've taken a look at three psychological techniques that you can employ to help train your brain so thaht you can train your gut to consume more carb...
1. Use self-talk
There’s hard science behind the connection between the brain and gastrointestinal system. One study on the gut-brain axis described how the inner workings of your gut have a direct, palpable effect on your mental state and vice versa.
This physiological connection can pose a real problem for endurance athletes. Your gut is like a particularly outspoken guest at your carb-king party. It has the ear of the most influential person in the room — your brain — and isn’t afraid to lodge a complaint about anything it doesn’t like. In short: if your gut’s not having fun, it’ll make damn sure that no one else is.
A little GI distress can be a normal part of the gut training process. But your brain doesn’t know that, because the signals it’s getting from your stressed out intestines muffles the logic behind what you’re doing. All of a sudden, your motivation to continue following the gut training protocol has dwindled, and you can’t put a finger on why.
The same is true in reverse. When it’s the brain’s turn to feel frazzled, it will confide in the gut, which will throw a fit and refuse to properly digest the fuel that comes its way. The same foods and feeding cadences that feel fine one day might send you straight to the bushes another day.
There are times when it pays off to trust those feelings. The gut-brain axis exists for a reason; it makes evolutionary sense that our brains would want to know when something isn’t right with the digestive system so that we don’t continue to eat things that make us sick. In the other direction, it makes sense that the gut would want to stall digestion in response to mental stress, so that the body can funnel its resources into more pressing concerns.
The issue is, we’re not actually eating potentially poisonous berries and fleeing from predators like our primal ancestors. We’re running, but not for our lives, and these distress signals aren’t always helpful in this context. Endurance athletes need to be able to override the signals that travel along the gut-brain axis in order to give our guts the best chance of adapting to higher carb intake.
To do this, you have to be more outspoken than your gut. Act like a lawyer preparing for trial and compose your arguments carefully. Have your logical reasoning ready to fire off in rapid response to your gut’s complaints. Boil them down into short, quippy phrases that roll off the tongue without hesitation so there’s less opportunity for your gut to butt in.
2. Fuel for performance (not for image)
In the same vein, the brain loves to interpret other feelings as facts too. Body image is a prime example here. Endurance athletes who struggle with body dysmorphia, or an obsession with perceived flaws in physical appearance, might go into gut training with the best of intentions, only to find themselves stumped by ingrained beliefs about body size being more important for performance than having enough gas in the tank.
You can be the spitting image of an Olympian and still move at a snail’s pace if you don’t eat like one. Many of us find that out the hard way after under-fueling the work we’re doing because of this systemic hyperfocus on looking the part. One study puts it plainly right in the title: The prevalence of eating disorders in elite athletes is higher than in the general population.
It makes sense that the idea of taking in a ton of carbs and calories puts athletes off because we’re taught to believe that lighter, leaner, and less is the key to success according to the image we define it by.
But the data doesn’t lie. Just like using logic against your gut, use it to move your mental goalpost too. Replace images with the hard quantitative and qualitative data that proves carbs are king. Pair every slurp with a mental note of the astronomical numbers behind Western States podium finishes and Leadville course records. Performance doesn’t have a look — but it does have one hell of a fueling plan.
3. Set it and forget it
Running makes you dumb. Okay, maybe not in the grand scheme of things, but definitely in the moment. Between coordinating all the micro-movements that comprise your stride, sacrificing significant blood flow to your muscles, and fighting a mental battle against crippling fatigue, the brain doesn’t have much bandwidth left to spare.
Running is taxing. That’s the whole point of high-carb fueling; you can’t outrun your energy stores, and you can only go as far or as fast as your gas tank allows. But because running is so taxing, your body compromises on other bodily functions like appetite and cognitive control. In short: you’ll probably forget to eat.
It’s hard enough to physically train your gut. Tack on these side-effects of your body’s misguided effort to preserve energy, and it becomes even harder. You can’t rely on either your hunger cues or your attention span.
If you want to hit your carb count, you'll need to plan ahead. Use your brain power while you still have it. Plot out your exact feeding schedule and set timers that you can’t ignore — plus backups for when you inevitably hit 'snooze'. You’re no more reliable than a sleep-deprived teenager out there.
But technology isn’t invincible either. Don’t let a dead watch be the reason you fall short. Build in analogue buttresses too, like asking your training partners to hold you accountable or writing your fueling windows on your hand. If all else fails, run in tiny loops so you pass the same tree every 20 minutes and make that your visual cue. It’s worth a little boredom to help get your gut in the groove.
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I don’t believe in the concept of “no pain, no gain.” Even when the going gets tough, chasing down your goals should come from a foundation of joy. Having fun is the surest way to run fast.
But gut training might be the one exception. It’s just as much a mental battle as a physical one, and it’s neither exciting nor easy in either context. What makes it a battle worth fighting is the opportunity to do more of what you love — only harder, better, faster, stronger. Daft Punk must have had a well-trained gut.
