When I was asked to start writing this column in 2015, I had just started as an assistant professor at The College of Idaho after moving from the Bay Area. I had just injured myself and was struggling to regain the pea...
Articles by Matt Laye
The goal of this column when I started five years ago was to take existing research in the world of ultrarunning and endurance sports and make it translatable. It’s a lot of fun and I always learn something new. Howev...
When I teach my students about carbohydrate use for energy production during exercise, the discussion always starts with where, how much and what form carbohydrate is stored in the body. Carbohydrate is stored in three l...
My goal for this column is always to discuss the latest relevant science on endurance sport, providing both practical takeaways and a peek inside the science of endurance. However, this time I’m going to pivot a little....
Back when I started running, I learned that miles were king. They were essentially the end-all be-all for tracking training even when we were guessing sans GPS watches. Measuring vertical gain? Forget about it....
As the days get longer, spending more hours in the sun is part of training. And when it comes to vitamin D levels, that’s a good thing. Known for its important role in bone health, vitamin D also plays an importan...
Foam rolling takes me back to the track. At UC Davis post-practice sessions, I was typically rolling around wincing in pain because of a chronically tight IT band, and it was causing knee pain. I started foam rolling...
One of the problems with science is that studies are not always easy to reproduce. This is especially true in the field of exercise science where funding is limited, techniques may vary from lab to lab and the subject...
What if decision fatigue leads to physical fatigue? The concept that mental fatigue is related to physical fatigue is an active area of research. There are a few theories which are being tested. The first is the centr...
One of the favorite debates of exercise physiologists is fatigue and the limits of performance. Is fatigue just in the brain? Or is it in the muscle? Are we limited by the cardiovascular system? Or by the ability to use...
Carbohydrate has four calories per gram which equates to 240 - 360 calories per hour. Current nutritional guidelines for carbohydrate intake during ultra activity is 60-90 grams per hour (g/hr), which lasts 2.5 hours or...
Big days on the trails can require a lot of gear, nutrition, hydration and extra layers. While necessary, all that weight does not always feel great when you are 10, 20, 80 miles into a long race or run. In addition to t...
The stress and anxiety associated with the COVID-19 pandemic reaches every part of our lives, including our exercise habits. Initially, I was going to write about how being a fit runner is beneficial for the immune syste...
Sports nutrition during the Tour de France in the early days consisted of rabbit, hot chocolate and lots of strong red wine. Today, we have a greater understanding of what nutrition is necessary for optimal performance a...
The basis of any effective training protocol is stress and rest. Runners must engage in activity which is more strenuous than usual which causes fatigue. When the stress of training is coupled with adequate rest, a posit...
How can you get a 4% improvement in your running? Some say you just need to buy a new pair of shoes, but the science tells us plyometrics may be the answer.One of the things I like most about running is its efficiency. T...
Cold weather running shares at least one similar challenge which occurs in warm or neutral conditions. For instance, in a 161k ultramarathon taking place in extreme cold, nearly half of the 16 athletes that were followed ended up with hyponatremia.
As ultrarunners, most of the time we are worried about hot weather rather than extremely cold weather – and for good reason. Thermoregulation of body temperature in warmer weather is problematic. While running, about 75-...
In 2009, Elizabeth Blackbourn, a scientist at UCSF, was awarded a Nobel Prize for her work discovering telomeres and their importance in aging. Telomeres are repeated sequences of DNA that protect the end of chromosomes...
Physiologically, there are a lot of differences between men and women. For instance, there are differences in body composition and the ways they fatigue, and there are many potential explanations for performance differen...
Ice baths are a good thing, right? Don’t antioxidant vitamin supplements improve your health? If you have been reading this column over the last several years, you know science is more nuanced than that. For instance, ic...
In memoriam of Dr. Pernille Højman Immediately after completing my PhD, I had the privilege of working as a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Inflammation and Metabolism in Copenhagen, Denmark. I worked in a lab of...
It doesn’t take a psychologist to know that runners are a bit different in the head (which is a good thing since I’m a physiologist). Ultrarunners on the other hand, well, most people think they more than just a bit diff...
My research experience is diverse. I’ve worked with rodent models of inactivity, human skeletal muscle in cell culture and dietary restriction effects on aging in flies. When starting at The College of Idaho, I was unsur...
During exercise, we typically think of carbohydrates and fats as our main sources of fuel, while protein is associated with recovery. Today, many sports nutrition bars, gels and drinks contain branched-chain amino acids (a special subset of amino acids) or protein. If we aren’t using protein to help muscles continue to make energy and contract, then what is protein doing in those supplements? Is there a role for protein during exercise? Let’s take a look.
During exercise, we typically think of carbohydrates and fats as our main sources of fuel, while protein is associated with recovery. Today, many sports nutrition bars, gels and drinks contain branched-chain amino acids...
The concept of exercise specificity is extremely important for sports performance. Specificity is the idea that you get the most benefit for a sport by doing that particular sport. If you want to be a better trail runner...
What is heart rate variability (HRV) and does science support it as a practical measure of training adaptation?1 HRV is controlled by the autonomic branch of our nervous system (responsible for breathing, digestion, etc....
There are certainly many ultrarunning women out there with a far better perspective on how to manage pregnancy while continuing to ultrarun. So at the risk of “Man-splaining,” the goal of this article is to summarize the...
There are a lot of supplements and even more money in the sports nutrition world. Frankly, most supplements have limited scientific evidence, especially herbal types. However, caffeine is a notable exception. Caffeine’s...
Most of us can’t escape the ultra-shuffle as we reach the later stages of races. As we fatigue our biomechanics change in many ways, including changes in stride length and frequency. In this article I will shy away from...
Most of us can’t escape the ultra-shuffle as we reach the later stages of races. As we fatigue our biomechanics change in many ways, including changes in stride length and frequency. In this article I will shy away from the nitty gritty details of biomechanics and focus on the relationship between stride length and frequency and how they impact running economy.
It’s summer and the competition and temperature on the trails is heating up. Summer ultras have the added benefit(?) of being long enough that athletes often need to run during the peak heat of the day. Most of us know,...
The stress of any given training is due to the intensity and duration of the types of running that occurs. The idea of periodization of training is that during some periods you may train at a low intensity for a long duration and during other periods at a high intensity for a short duration – or any combination in between.
Why do some people get injured and others don’t? It seems like this simple enough question would be solved by sports scientists, especially when it comes to new runners. However, injury prevention for novice runners is a topic that is much discussed but not well understood.
Recently, the importance of sleep has had a bit of renaissance. Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington wrote a book called The Sleep Revolution, corporate offices have invested in nap spaces and new technology offers numerous ways to track your sleep patterns. Sleep is in, so does the science support the recent hype?
By understanding the physiology behind thermoregulation, we can be better prepared for our summer events. Here’s what you need to know about what causes body heat to increase, heat loss mechanisms, why athletes perform worse in the heat and factors to improve performance in the heat.
This is the first in a series of articles on what happens to your body during an ultra, focusing on the sparse but growing scientific literature that exists. However, physiology is extremely individual dependent, so please interpret this column with caution, as we are all different.