For some of you who use some of the supplements by Hammer Nutrition such as like Race Day Boost or Anti Fatique Caps
do you find them effective or waste of money
can one just get same elements from regulr food?

Well you don't get the element of convenience you get from mixing up Heed in a waterbottle.

I only use Heed, for racing and training rides. Well, I guess I do take Gu gels on the 3-4+ hr rides as backup just in case I founder (one bottle Heed, one water), but I don't use 'em that often, though they do help me kick out those hard, back half, efforts.

How many people have won a gold medal as a result of using one of those overpriced supplements ??

Never tried the AF caps. Some of the stuff in them you can get from food, maybe, but some not. Whether any of it does any good or not is unknown to me, nor have I read research saying that it does. I've used RDB and it works as advertised. No, not available in food.

It's true . . . that you don't know. Neither do I. Hammer regularly reports the successes of their sponsored athletes who do use these products. Whether their wins are due to their use of the product is another matter. Certainly, some of their products are in the class of products which see a great deal of use by elite athletes.

I mostly just drink milk on long rides. It has the minerals, protein, fat, and easily (for me) digested sugars (lactose and galactose).

I am not comfortable with the aspartic acid in the anti fatigue caps.

I have used Hammer Perpetuem and it is ok but pretty pricey compared to just buying maltodextrin in bulk. I'd rather spend the money expensive tires.

Hi there what products you recommend be just as same as perpeteum but cheaper? or more less maltodextrin in bulk?

Perpetuem is mostly maltodextrin, soy protein, and some fat. My system prefers whey protein to soy. I don't miss the fat: on very long rides, I get some fat from browsing in grocery and mini marts. There's also a number of other things in Perpetuem. Some you can get from diet or a multi. Others are in such small quantity I doubt they do much. The main thing is does it work for you? Does it work enough better than anything else to be worth the extra cost?

For performance enhancing supplements that work, I recommend:
n-acetyl cysteine, 2 X 600mg/day
acetyl L-carnitine, 2 X 500mg/day
alpha lipoic acid, 2 X 250mg/day

Not free, though. Combined with hard training, takes a couple of months to see any effect.

thanks so much, ya perpetpeum i have used, but its like this goop in my water bottle though, like gross

You're talking about outmoded characteristics like taste and mouthfeel. The only thing to care about is if you've ever barfed it up.

I like Perpeteum because it is palatable to me on an all day ride and not much else is and the needed calories are there.

It appears the active ingredient in Race Day Boost is a salt of phosphoric acid or sodium phosphate. It is commonly available in most foods. In fact, a can of regular coca cola is loaded with it (and also sugar and caffeine) so probably cheaper and more effective to drink a coke - as many cyclists do.

AF is a mish mash of stuff but the active appears to be various aspartic acid salts (aspartate). Aspartate is an amino acid and present in any food that contains protein. It is also a non-essential amino acid meaning that your body makes it itself if it needs to.

Regarding supplements, and the mostly heavily biased anecdotal reports of efficacy in the science literature, it is highly unlikely that supplements actually do anything physically for your performance, unless you are deficient or make yourself deficient. But, as others have stated, if they work for you or believe they work for you, you should use them. Afterall, sports performance has a huge mental component.

Curious where you found the quantity of sodium phosphate in Coke? You probably don't realize that a daily dose of RDB is 4g. Yes, it works, not available from food in clinical quantities.

You are being disingenuous about the AF caps. The aspartate is the relatively inert carrier for the minerals in AF, though the minerals are of questionable importance if one is using a wide spectrum electrolyte supplement anyway. The active ingredient in AF is Ornithine alpha-ketoglutarate or OKG. Ornithine alpha-ketoglutarate in nutritional support. - PubMed - NCBI and many other studies and reviews. Not available in food in clinical quantities. Haven't tried it, but sounds like it should help for long distance training or competition.

I find sports drinks better than strait water for long rides. Sure a Coke is good as well an I might have one with lunch on a long ride.

The question is which sports drink is best? The typical gatorade that you purchase today has reduced sugar so the common dork can drink it and think it is sporty.

HEED, without question IMO. Why? Your teeth. HEED contains a lot of xylitol, which prevents tooth decay. It took me about a year to figure out that the Cytomax I was drinking was rotting my teeth. Most sports drinks, shot blocks, gels, that stuff is bad for your teeth.

What about Heed [h=1]Perpetuem?[/h]

Perpetuem is good stuff. It doesn't really fall into the category of "sports drinks," being more of a complete food for rides of 3 hours and longer. Most folks don't do enough of that for the tooth thing to be a problem. I wouldn't recommend it for general use. For extreme long distance, like RAAM, most people use a mix of liquid and solid, more ordinary foods.

My rides are between 60 & 130 miles.

For short rides I use water or common Gatorade.

Well then either Perpetuem or Sustained Energy. Read about them here:
The Hammer Nutrition Fuels - What They Are & How to Use Them | Hammer Nutrition

I used to use a mix of SE and a little Hammer Gel for flavor. That worked well. I've tried Perpetuem, also works well. If you ride a lot, and it sounds like you do, it starts to run into money. So now I do long rides on a mix of maltodextrin and flavored whey protein, mixed ~7:1 by weight. Whey works better with my guts than does the soy in Hammer products. I buy the malto in 50# bags from a homebrew supply house and Optimum Nutrition Gold whey in 10# bags. That gets the cost down to reasonable. I use about 14 oz. powder/100 miles.

I like First Endurance EFS. It has a good mix of simple and complex carbs, electrolytes, and amino acids. Doesn't taste overly sweet either.

I followed this advice a few months ago and have had a lot of success. I don't eat "real food" during a ride because I feel bloated and bogged down. 1 bottle of water and a 2nd with the mix above makes a huge difference.

If I plan on riding three hours or longer I use perpetuem ninety minutes or longer I like heed. I also add a scoop of First Endurance PreRace to the drink. I generally use diluted hammer gel mixed 2:1 in a flask and take it at 45 minute intervals and wash it down with water.

Carbon - your diligence, dedication, and contributions continue to dazzle me. But that doesn't stop me from digging deeper.

How can you get a sense that something works if the effect takes months for the effect to appear?

Why do you like these supplements? I.e., what do they do for you?
Where do you get them? I bet you've already researched quality and price.

Thanks, as always. And keep up your excellent contributions. You are a valuable asset, especially in this forum.

My wife and I were planning a 13-day backpacking trip in the Sierra and much of it would be above 10,000'. My wife always had trouble above about 7,000'. I started looking around and found this website:
Mountain Might, Altitude Training, High Altitude Training

But I'm cheap, so I bought the individual ingredients from other sources. Mostly I use bodybuilding.com. I prefer NOW and Optimum Nutrition products if available. What I can't get there, I get from Amazon. IIRC the mountain website doesn't mention the alpha lipoic acid. It's an anti-oxidant. I don't recall where I got the idea for that, but probably from something to do with my age related macular degeneration, which I've managed to hold at bay with various supplements.

Anyway, we took these caps, as well as B-12 as recommended and 15mg iron 3 X week, for I think a couple months before our trip. We overnighted on Mt. Rainier at 10,000' to check it out. My wife was strong and slept and ate well. The Sierra trip went well. So I figure it worked. We've been tandeming since '07 but were really slow. My wife is wonderful, but has the worst aerobic engine I've ever heard of. Since our Sierra trip, our performance has taken off. We're still slow climbing, but noticeably faster. Some of the people we were riding with won't ride with us anymore and we're riding with people we had no hope of staying with before. So it seems something's working, and not just training. We've been training for years and are not getting any younger.

Latest possible discovery is PQQ and shilajit. We think there's an effect, but probably not worth the money for us. We'll take them for a couple months and see if anything happens. This will be our peak year: we're age-limited. We're doing a number of hard climbing rides this year, some of them for the first and probably only time. We'll also do a difficult backpacking trip that we last did maybe 15 years ago.

NAC is the main ingredient is the Altitude product....?

NAC helps increase both EPO and Glutathione. NAC is pretty cheap bought in bulk. No question in my mind tht NAC helps recovery due to enjanced glutathione production but not sure about other benefits.

As a flatlander, I am considering a 400K in Colorado in 2-3 weeks. The mountain high products say results can be obtained in 8 days. I might buy some.