Does Taking Sodium Bicarbonate Before a Hard Session Actually Buffer the Burn?

Most runners hear "baking soda" and think of a chemistry-class volcano, not a performance aid. But sodium bicarbonate is one of the few ergogenic aids with a mechanism that actually makes sense for the kind of running that hurts: the 1500m to 10K range, and the hard interval reps inside a marathon build. When you push into high-intensity work, hydrogen ions accumulate and your blood pH drops. Bicarbonate is an extracellular buffer. Load more of it, the thinking goes, and you blunt the acidosis that shuts your legs down in the last minute of a rep.

The evidence holds up better than most supplement hype. A large meta-analysis by Grgic and colleagues found that bicarbonate produced small but real improvements in exercise performance, with the clearest effects in efforts lasting roughly one to ten minutes (see [1]). The classic dose studied is around 0.3 grams per kilogram of body weight, taken 60 to 180 minutes before the effort, and a review by Carr and colleagues in Sports Medicine mapped out how that timing and dose interact with the notorious GI side effects (see [2]). That's the catch every coach hears about: the cramping, the bloating, the sprint to the bathroom that ends your workout before it starts. Newer delivery formats, like enteric-coated capsules studied by Hilton and colleagues, appear to soften the gut distress by moving absorption past the stomach (see [3]).