ANOTHER AdvoCare Benefit – Education & Help
We could go on and on about how much we enjoy and benefit from the AdvoCare products, as well as how much we like the company and the business.
One thing I wanted share is my experience with asking AdvoCare questions about the products and getting very thorough and intelligent answers from the Science and Research department.
At a local AdvoCare business meeting a couple years ago, Dr. Hartman, Director of Research & Education, was in attendance and I had the opportunity to corner him and ask a number of pretty detailed questions about ingredient choices and some other topics. I take a lot of pride in the amount of know how I have on nutrition and supplementation. I dig the science behind it all. But, I was blown away by the amount of knowledge Dr. Hartman has. We talked pretty deep and while I could keep up, he took me to school.
Recently, Pam and I have changed our diet back to a Ketogenic approach (first post about that here, with more to come in the future). With that Ketogenic diet, we are keeping our daily carbohydrates really low, no more than 30g per day. Therefore, we are very selective at this point what supplements we take as we don’t want sneaky carbs creeping in all over the place. Down the road after our bodies are very, very ‘fat-adapted,’ we’ll allow more carbs in the day and probably be able to re include some of our favorite pre-workout items like Muscle Fuel (5g carbs per serving) and/or Arginine Extreme (6g carbs per serving). While these products aren’t high carb at all, we’re excluding even those for now.
For now, though, our main pre-workout is Muscle Strength which works well with our current goals. We’ve also used O2 Gold in the past and I got to thinking that O2 Gold might be very beneficial on the Ketogenic diet since it is designed to help with oxygen utilization during exercise, as well as handling stress.
Instead of guessing, I emailed Dr. Hartman directly and, not surprising, he emailed me back some very insightful and useful info!
Here’s my email:
“I would like your take on something. If one were on a ketogenic / fat adapted diet, would O2 Gold be of any benefit?”
Here’s his 2 responses:
“Given your diet O2 Gold should be a huge benefit as it relates to training and performance. The main ingredient, Rhodiola, has several benefits related to fatigue and stress adaptation but there is also some older animal data which suggests improved fatty acid utilization during exercise. Beetroot and the whey peptides also have benefits as it relates to blood flow and oxygen delivery which also ultimately results in fatty acids (triglycerides) being used for energy.”
“There are several issues with this study but of note is the large, but non-significant, improvement in fat utilization during exercise (Figure 5). The researchers do not state the subjects pre-training diet but one could assume it was carb heavy, which to me suggests with a keto diet there could be even greater benefit using fat as energy during training.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4590898/
As an update, here are some thoughts on our metabolic transition and the use and effect of O2 Gold. We are currently in week 5 of keto. First few weeks were typical of the keto diet transition. Weeks 3 and most of 4 we had notable, significant drops in our ability to maintain work capacity in training and we were getting dizzy often. But we’ve been taking O2 Gold (and Muscle Strength) preworkout for about 2 weeks now and here in week 5…out of nowhere our performances and ability to ‘continue’ in the workouts sky rocketed. Whats more, from an interval sense, our ability to recover within a short period of time (30-60 seconds) and then go again has dramatically improved.
Now, is this due to our bodies finally making a serious switch to fatty acid metabolism, or was the O2 Gold part of the equation? Not sure. I almost wish we had waiting until the 3rd month or so before we added in the O2 Gold (simply for scientific reasons). At the same time, the addition of O2 Gold might have even made the metabolic switch that much faster/easier.
