Episode 108 - Should Runners Take Supplements

Should Runners Over 35 Take Supplements?

Do runners actually need supplements, and do our needs change as we get older?

In this episode of the 12 Months to Marathon Podcast, I look at some of the most commonly discussed supplements for runners over 35, including the four I currently use myself: magnesium, zinc, omega-3 and turmeric.

We cover their potential benefits for recovery, muscle function, general health and training, while also looking at where the evidence is strong — and where some of the claims might be getting ahead of the science.

I also discuss vitamin D and creatine, why they may be worth considering as we get older, and why blindly copying somebody else's supplement routine probably isn't the answer.

Most importantly, supplements are exactly that: supplements.

They can't replace good nutrition, adequate protein and carbohydrate, sensible training, strength work, recovery, and sleep.

Before asking “What supplements should I take?”, there might be a better question:

“What am I actually trying to improve?”

🎧 Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the 12 months to marathon podcast with me, John Hill, the running podcast for the over 35s with Marathon Dreams. Episode 108. Should runners take supplements? Particularly runners over 35, because yeah, that's who I mainly work with. But in general, should runners take supplements? So we're going to talk about supplements today, and more specifically, do you actually need to take them? Which ones might be useful and which ones are potentially just expensive P or W, depending on where you are in the world. Which is actually a very, very it's very crass, but it's actually quite true in the sense of if you don't take decent supplements, they are just expensive bodily wastage. Let's use that. So what's going on with me at the moment? So I'm well into the throes of high rocks training, as I've talked about before, I'm doing high rocks in October, which is my main focus. Training's going well, starting to adapt to it well, starting to push myself a little bit. It's very intricate and very precise in the sense of what you've got to do to get better. So working on the areas that I need to improve on, and overall, I'm very, very happy indeed. So on this particular episode, I want to start with an important disclaimer first. Look, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a dietitian, none of this is medical advice. If you've got any sort of problems that require medical attention or any sort of deficiencies or underlying medical conditions, please see a specialist and do all that sort of thing before you do anything else. Um, and the second disclaimer is probably more important than the first, which are supplements are supplements. The clue is in the title, they're not replacements. So a good example would be if you're sleeping five hours a night, eating badly, barely consuming any protein, underfueling your long runs, and following a terrible training programme, then magnesium is not going to save you, or any supplement's not going to save you. So there's this wonderful concept or metaphor which I like, which is uh rocks, um, pebbles, and then sand. So you imagine, like, if you've got a jar and then you put your big rocks in first, that's what you need to do first before you look at any supplements. Now, those of you who listen to this podcast for a while, you'll know I've been in the fitness industry, quote, weight loss industry, that sort of field for a long time, and there's a wonderful expression which is people will do almost anything to lose weight except eat healthy and exercise, and sometimes you laugh. Sometimes um supplements fit into that category because people will take all these wacky supplements instead of just doing the basics. So if you're a runner, particularly a runner over 35, you're your training, your recovery, your sleep, your overall diet, enough calories to support your training, enough carbs to fuel it, and enough protein to recover from it, are your absolute basics. And if you're not doing those things, then you can forget any supplements whatsoever. Now, if we are doing all of those things, then we can start asking ourselves whether a supplement might fill a gap or provide an additional benefit. And that's broadly how evidence-based sports nutrition approaches supplementation as well. A supplement should eularly have a reason for being there, and this is really important because I've seen so many people over the years, myself included, from research and things like that, who've taken things because they've read about them and actually they can't give a clear pathway to why they are taking that particular thing. Now, it's particularly important as we get older that you've got a definite reason for these things, and actually they may provide you with an additional benefit. So if you're 40, 45, 50, or older and you are trying to train seriously for a marathon while managing a career, children, stress, strength training, and everything else that life throws at you, then recovery becomes incredibly important. What I'm going to talk to you about today are the supplements that I use. Okay, so these are the supplements that I personally use. I don't recommend anything I don't use particularly unless I've got strong evidence to say the benefits of it. Okay. I also don't recommend any products that I don't use myself as well, or that I've not heard are very, very good. When it comes to supplementation, what you get, you pay for. Okay. So if you're getting them from the supermarket shelf or the store shelf, the cheap ones, they're perhaps not having the desired benefit you would want. Okay. I don't get anything for this, but I for my main supplements that I'm going to talk about today, I use a company called Lily and Loaf, uh, who I've not got any sort of commercial connection with. I don't get anything, but I've used their products now for nearly 15 years, uh, and I highly recommend those. So Lily and Loaf. Um, and if you want to just chat about, you know, getting those through myself, then you can just give me a shout and we can sort that out. But yeah, Lily and Loaf are who I use, and again, I get no, there's no benefit for me for saying that, it's just a product that I use. So I'm going to start off with my favourite, which is the one that comes up the most for everybody, is magnesium. Now, magnesium is involved in hundreds of biochemical reactions in the body, it's involved in normal muscle and normal muscle and nerve function, energy production, and numerous processes that are obviously relevant to somebody who exercises a lot. And that's why magnesium gets marketed heavy to people who exercise and runners as well. So you'll hear claims about magnesium improving sleep, stopping cramps, improving recovery and transform performance. Perhaps need to be a little bit more measured than that when we look at it, because if your magnesium intake is already adequate, taking more magnesium isn't going to automatically turn you into a better runner, and that's the important distinction with all supplements, to be honest. So correcting a deficiency and taking additional amounts when you're already sufficient are two completely different things. So magnesium is naturally available from fruits, including nuts, seeds, whole grains, beans, and leafy green vegetables. It's particularly prevalent in pumpkin seeds, which I have in my porridge as an example. Okay, and that's why I put pumpkin seeds in porridge because I've heard uh there is a natural level of magnesium in pumpkin seeds. So your diet matters first, basically, is the long and short of it. So personally, I supplement magnesium, but don't look at it as some sort of performance-enhancing supplement that's suddenly going to knock minutes off my marathon. I don't look at it like that, I look at correlations. So the correlations that I generally make, do I sleep well on the whole? Yes, I do. Do I recover well? Yes, I do. So I look at those two things and say, well, actually, there's a correlation there between an increased magnesium intake. So I take this as part of my overall nutritional strategy and recovery. There's also another myth word mentioned here, cramps. So people immediately say, I've got cramps and need magnesium. So exercise associated with cramps is considerably more complicated than simply being a magnesium deficiency. It's fatigue, conditioning, pacing, and several other factors that can potentially contribute. I've never had cramps during a marathon. And the reasons I can correlate to that are number one, training properly, number two, recovering properly, number three, conditioning myself properly, and number four, how to understand the structure and pacing of an event properly. Those are the things that I look at when it comes to cramps and then magnesium and dietary things later. Okay. So don't automatically assume that every calf cramp during a marathon means you need to start swallowing magnesium. And remember that high supplement doses can also cause gastrointerrestinal problems, gastrointerestal problems, which as runners is something we don't need more of, especially when we're out there. So magnesium is the one oil we start with, and again, Lily and Loaf do a fantastic magnesium supplement. But again, when you if you're looking at any magnesium supplements, please you get what you pay for, it's worth investing. Number two is zinc. Now I use zinc, but it's not glamorous, but I use zinc because my take is every single man over the age of 30 perhaps should be looking at his zinc intake because it helps stimulate testosterone as an example, it's correlated to that. So let's look. So if you're not taking zinc, you're taking not taking zinc and suddenly running a 5k PB, but so it's not glamorous, is that sense? So it's not like all of a sudden you're gonna just it's gonna amplify your performance, for example. But zinc is essentially a mineral involving things like immune function, protein synthesis, DNA synthesis, and wound healing. That becomes interesting to run us because training itself is a stress, and if you're training four, five, six times a week and also dealing with normal life, staying healthy matters. One of the biggest performance advantages you can have is simply being able to train consistently, and there's no magic supplement that's going to do that. But if you're missing training, there's nothing that's going to compensate for that. Again, there's a massive difference between having sufficient zinc and taking more zinc. Thinking more zinc must therefore be better, which it isn't. You can get as enough zinc through food, particularly meat and seafood, as well as very dairy products and plant foods. An excessive zinc supplementation isn't harmless, but taking too much overtime can interfere with copper absorption amongst other problems. So this isn't your over 30, 35, 40. You need to take loads of zinc. It's make sure you're getting enough zinc. And if there's a legitimate reason for supplementing it, supplementation may be useful. That's a much more sensible way of looking at it. So I supplement with zinc because of my training load, and again, I I correlate that to my testosterone levels, my recovery, my muscle mass, and my immune function as well. So I see enough of a correlation from zinc supplementation alongside my diet to get results, basically. Omega-3. So number three is probably the most interesting ones for general health as well as potentially athletes. So omega-3 fatty acids. The main omega-3s you'll normally hear about in fish oil, particularly, are EPA and DHI, which have got really, really long names, which I'm not going to try and say here. You'll naturally get these from oily fish like salmon, sardines, and mackerel. Omega-3 has been researched extensively for cardiovascular health, but there's also an interest within sports science, particularly around inflammation, important for runners, muscle recovery and adaptation. So there is some research suggesting omega-3 supplementation may have applications for athletes and recovery, but again, I wouldn't sell it as a miracle recovery supplement. This is where I think an over 35 runner changes the conversation slightly. I'm not only interested in what makes me faster, I'm interested in what supports me to be a healthy human being who can hopefully continue running for a long time. That's a different way of thinking about it. Now, omega-3 is something that's popped up a lot over the years since I've been a fitness coach and weight loss coach and health coach. It's something that continually pops up. So it's something that I've supplemented well, and again, I've seen a correlation between inflammation, recovery, and things like that. So if you're 50, say cardiovascular health, maintaining muscle and recovery from training and staying healthy matter more. Okay, so omega-3 is something I personally include, but again, food first. If you're regularly eating oily fish, for example, mackerel salmon, for example, then potentially you wouldn't need to do this. If you've got a very good diet, your situation is different from someone who never eats fish, and that's why it's sometimes difficult to make sort of blanket recommendations. You can also get this from plant sources, flaxseed and cheese seeds I have every day as well. So I've always made sure to do that in the sense of um supplementing with omega-3 to make sure I get as much as I can because of stuff that I've read and things like that and how it can help. Okay. The final one is turmeric. Um, now I started I've always eaten a lot of turmeric because I read years ago that it's very good for information and it's a sort of like a power food or a power like uh spice. Now I've recently started supplementing with turmeric again with Lillian Loaf, and I've also recently started taking turmeric shots with a company called the Turmerico, who I do have an affiliation with. And if you want to get 25% off your first order, you can do the links at my bio and Instagram at 12 Months to Marathon. That's totally your choice. I use the Lillian Loaf turmeric as well. Um, because I I do that because basically it just I don't think well, there's not well, there isn't too much turmeric you can have based on the research that I've done, and I see a very big benefit from that, particularly from an inflammatory standpoint. So technically, discussing all this and talking, we're talking about what's called curcumin, which is one of the principal active compounds found in turmeric, basically. So a bit of background here. So the one interests me particularly this one interests me particularly because I train a lot, I run, I do strength training, I do hyrox training. So I've got quite a lot of physical stress that goes through my body. Okay, so curcumin has been investigated because of its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties, particularly in relation to exercise-induced muscle damage, soreness, and recovery. And there's some encouraging research here. Study and systemic systematic reviews have found potential reductions in muscle soreness and some markers of muscle damage following exercise. But this isn't like conclusive, this is all correlations. So a recent study actually found potentially favourable effects in certain areas of recovery, but again, the evidence is inconsistent and generally of low or very low certainty. So I'm not saying turmeric definitely makes runners recover faster. The science isn't necessarily strong enough to prove that, but it's more accurate to say there's some promising evidence around curcumin and exodus recovery soreness and oxidative stress, but we need to we need perhaps a bit more research on it. There's also another complication, which is curcumin isn't particularly well absorbed to the body on its own, so formulation and bio bioavailability of a supplement matter. That's why you'll see different curcumin products using different delivery methods or ingredients designed to increase absorption. So simply buying something because the bottle says turmeric doesn't necessarily mean you're getting the same thing that's been investigated in research. There's another important lesson about okay, so there's another important lesson about supplements just in general based on that, which is this. Do you actually need them? So let's look at the bigger question here. Do runners over 35 need magnesium, zinc, omega-3, and turn brick? No, that's too strong a statement. I use them and there are plausible reasons for me using them, which again I'm happy to answer if you want to message me on Instagram and we can discuss it in any more depth. There's evidence behind particular applications of some of them, but they're not compulsory, and I think suppl I think the supplement industry sometimes gets this completely backwards. People worry about the 501% and they ignore the 99%, which is the big rocks we mentioned before. Okay. People will spend like 100 quid a month on supplements but won't eat enough protein. Or they'll buy an expensive recovery powder while sleeping five hours a night or drink loads of caffeine, or they'll take an anti-inflammatory supplement under the sun, every anti-inflammatory supplement under the sun while increasing their mileage from 20 to 50 miles a week in a fortnight. You cannot supplement your way out of bad habits, okay? That's probably the biggest message I want to give you from this podcast. What else might you want to look at those supplement-wise that I've studied and come across? The first one is vitamin D, particularly for those of us living in the UK. Vitamin D is something worth understanding, particularly during autumn and winter. If you suspect a deficiency in vitamin D or iron or B12 or anything else for that matter, I'd much rather see someone get appropriately tested than blindly throw supplements as a problem. For example, if you're constantly fatigued and your running performance has suddenly deteriorated, don't assume you need a supplement. Find what's going on. The other one that keeps popping up, which I get asked about a lot, is creatine. Creatine is naturally associated with bodybuilders, but there's becoming but that is becoming increasingly outdated. Creatine monohydrate has one of the strongest evidence bases of any sports supplement, particularly for repeated high-intensity performance strength and maintaining and increasing muscle mass. For an aging athlete who's combining running your strength or annual products doing something like Hyrux, like myself, that's potentially a much interesting, much more interesting conversation, and it's something that I'm looking into as we speak. It doesn't mean every every runner should take creatine, it just means that creatine is is high on the evidence-based list of many of the other things that you might see out there. Okay? So let's wrap this up in conclusion. Um, if you're a runner over 35, don't start with the question what supplement should I take? Start with is there anything missing from my nutrition health and recovery that supplementation could help with? That's a better question. Okay, for me personally, like I said, I currently use magnesium, zinc, omega-3, and turmeric, but that's part of a bigger picture. None of these replace eating properly, none of these replace carbohydrates around demanding running sessions, none replaces sufficient protein, non-replace strength training, non-replace recovery, and absolute none of them replace sleep. Think of supplements as the final piece of the jigsaw rather than the foundations of it. Get your training right, get your nutrition right, get your sleep and recovery right, and then look at the evidence that a particular supplement can help you. And if so, do your research and then look at correlations once you take it. Don't take anything because another runner on Instagram takes it, including myself, understand the reasons why you are taking it, and that's probably the most useful supplement advice I can ever give you. So, thank you for listening as always. I do appreciate it. Do your research, test things out, and make sure that you're listening to credible people. I have recommended the supplements that I personally use. Like I said, they're through a company called Lillian Loaf. I do take turmeric through the turmeric co. There's a link in my bio, and you can get 25% off your first order. I do have an affiliation with those, that's entirely up to yourself whether you do that. But whatever you do, just do your research first before you take anything, or in truth, listen to anybody. And if you've got more complex issues, please go and see a professional. So thank you very much for listening as always. I do appreciate that. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcast from Apple or Spotify, that makes a massive difference to me. If you want to drop me a comment as well or a five-star review on Spotify, that really helps. Please share this podcast with anyone that you feel may be of interest to. If you don't follow me on Instagram, hop over there at 12 months marathon and drop me a follow. I would really appreciate it. And if you go to the link in my bio, like I said, there's a couple of things you can do over there. You can join my free running community for the over 35s where we can engage, take you away from the noise of social media and share experiences. And again, if you do want to investigate, particularly the turmeric company, I do rate these products. I have used them for a good few months now. It's worthwhile looking, but the links there at my bio. So thank you very much for listening as always. Do appreciate it, and I'll speak to you all again very soon indeed.