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Toptimum Performance, Lindenhoeve 31, Vosselaar (2026)

07/09/2026

Broccoli sprouts lowered blood lactate at a fixed workload in two Swedish trials. The effect is real and small, the protocol built on it was never tested.

Flockhart et al. (Redox Biology 2023) administered 150 g of blended sprouts a day to nine participants through a week of twice-daily HIIT (double-blind crossover). Lactate at submaximal load fell from 3.06 to 2.66 mM on sprouts and rose from 2.69 to 3.17 on placebo (interaction P = 0.003). Work rate at a fixed lactate improved 15-20 W. Time to exhaustion gained 46 s versus 5 s. Time below 4 mmol/L glucose fell from 5h21 to 2h16 per day (P = 0.002). VO2max, mitochondrial respiration and citrate synthase did not change; the authors state that the mechanism is unknown.

Vinge et al. (Physiological Reports 2026) then administered a single 37.5 g or 75 g dose to 15 participants: lactate 0.4 mM lower at the hardest work rate.

Where the summary departs from the papers:
- “44 g, strict U-shaped dose-response.” A parabola fitted through three doses, R² = 0.24, nadir at 44 g. No 44 g dose was administered, and the SD (±0.6 mM) exceeds the effect (−0.4).
- “44 g equivalent of ITC extract 2-3 hours pre-session” and a “7-14 day chronic protocol”: neither exists in either paper.
- A continuous glucose trace with two labelled curves. The paper reports daily totals, not a curve.
- Omitted: two authors of both trials hold a patent on isothiocyanates for training and co-founded a company selling performance products.

📚Sources:
• Flockhart M, et al. (2023). Redox Biol 66:102873.
• Vinge F, et al. (2026). Physiol Rep 14:e71081. Both open access.

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06/09/2026

THEY PUT 122 STATEMENTS TO 23 EXPERTS. FIFTY FAILED.

The first international consensus on warming up is out. Twenty-three experts from twelve countries, three rounds of Delphi voting, an 80% agreement bar. Seventy-two statements cleared it. That is 60%, and the other 40% is the part nobody quotes.

WHAT THEY AGREED ON
A warm-up is a structured, purposeful preparatory intervention that combines active and passive strategies. Not just jogging: the heated garment and the tracksuit are in the definition.

• The structure is three layers.
General work to raise temperature and open oxygen kinetics.
• Specific work at the movements and speeds of the event.
• Then conditioning activities: voluntary contractions of enough volume and intensity to induce postactivation performance enhancement.

That last term matters. Potentiation is a reflex measured with an electrical twitch. Enhancement is what a hard effort you choose to make does to the run that follows.
Fatigue clears faster than the boost fades, and the gap between them is your window.

ON INJURY
Regular preventative exercise does reduce long-term risk. The panel adds a clause that gets cut in the retelling: it does that in any part of the session, not because it sits in a warm-up. For acute protection, there is no support.

WHAT IT IS NOT
A running protocol. This is a consensus across all sports, with no distances, no paces and no minutes to the gun, because warm-ups were recognised as context-dependent. Any deck handing you exact numbers is filling in a blank the experts left open.

📚 Source: Boullosa et al. (2026). International expert consensus on warm-up protocols for athletes: a Delphi study. Int J Sports Physiol Perform 21(9), 982-995.

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05/09/2026

Creatine for endurance runners.
A 2026 ISSN review is being turned into a “blueprint” for marathoners and ultra runners. Here is what the review itself says.

Kerksick et al. (J Int Soc Sports Nutr, 2026) is a narrative review across sports and populations. On endurance, its verdict is plain: the evidence is “inconclusive and comparatively unexplored”, and creatine is “not a classical endurance enhancer for steady-state performance”.

Two systematic reviews found no benefit on time to exhaustion. Absolute VO2max dipped slightly (ES −0.2), relative VO2max did not change.

Where it helps: repeated 15-second sprints after 30 minutes (+18% power), final sprints in a 120-km time trial, the last 50 m of a 400-m swim. The cost: about 0.86 kg, mostly water.

What the summary that was sent got wrong:
- A seven-day muscle-damage recovery curve. Santos 2004 took two samples, before and 24 h after a 30-km race. The 61% and 34% attenuations are real; the curve and the “accelerated strength restoration” are not. And Santos is not cited by the review the summary credits.
- “+0.87 L total body water.” That is creatine plus glycerol. Creatine alone: 0.63 L. The cooling chain is a hypothesis the review raises for firefighters.
- “Preserves fast-twitch fibres during endurance stimulation.” An animal model.
- Undisclosed: AlzChem, a creatine manufacturer, paid to publish the review; the first author is an AlzChem scientific affiliate.

Safety holds up: across 685 trials, no difference in side effects once participants are counted.

📚Source: Kerksick C, et al. (2026). J Int Soc Sports Nutr 23(1). doi:10.1080/15502783.2026.2646627 (open access).

toptimumperformance🔸🔺

04/09/2026

THE THIRD PILLAR OF ENDURANCE WAS NEVER ACTUALLY TESTED

The classical model says performance comes from three things: VO2max, movement economy, and the fraction of that ceiling you can hold.
Joyner proposed it in 1991, Joyner and Coyle reviewed it in 2008, and two of the three have been confirmed over and over.
A 2026 review went looking for the evidence behind the third.

THE BIG DATASET
In 888 runners and cyclists, VO2max explained 65 to 77% of the variance in threshold speed or power and economy 24 to 26%.
Fractional utilisation explained 4% or less at lactate threshold and 1% or less at the turn point. Those relationships were statistically significant. They were just tiny.

THE LANDMARK DOES NOT DISCRIMINATE
In 97 marathon runners split across five finishing bands, the percentage of VO2max at both lactate thresholds did not differ between a 2:30 runner and a 4:30 runner.
It separates them only when you make them all run the same speed, where it is really VO2max wearing a disguise.

AND NOBODY CAN TELL YOU HOW TO TRAIN IT
Of the studies testing whether it predicts performance, only a handful found a substantial relationship, and evidence that it shifts systematically in trained athletes is limited. The review declines to give a practical recommendation.

TWO THINGS TO KEEP STRAIGHT
That review is a narrative one, not systematic. And the masters case reports quoted against all this are one athlete each.

📚Sources:
• Sondermann et al. (2026), Int J Sports Physiol Perform, doi:10.1123/ijspp.2026-0039
• Mougin et al. (2026), Sports Med 56(8), 2047-2065
• Gordon et al. (2017), Open Access J Sports Med 8, 231-241.

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03/09/2026

Je traint hard, regelmatig, hebt een ambitieus sportief doel uitgekozen, of je werkt vooral aan je fitheid en gezondheid…
Maar train je hierbij op de júiste intensiteit? Ben je wel efficiënt, doelgericht en/of verantwoord bezig?

Eén lactaatveldtest en je krijgt antwoorden op bovenstaande vragen plus veel meer…

→ Je eigen zones, correct gemeten en bepaald in plaats van geschat. Van rustige duurlopen tot kwaliteit en interval, het is geen giswerk meer.

→ Je weet waar je in de laatste weken nog winst kan maken, richting je najaarsmarathon, halve marathon of de Hel van Kasterlee.

→ Je krijgt een goede inschatting aan welk wedstrijdtempo je best start en dat je kan vasthouden tot aan de finish, in plaats van te gokken en hopen dat het wel goed komt.

Boek jouw lactaatveldtest → link in bio · www.toptimumperformance.be

Toptimum Performance — reeds meer dan 8 jaar dé running expert uit de regio.

03/09/2026

YOUR MUSCLES SWITCH ON IN AN ORDER YOU DO NOT CONTROL

Pull on a cat’s soleus and record from the ventral root, and five motor units answer in a fixed queue: smallest first, largest last, never out of turn.
Henneman worked this out in 1957 and nailed it down in 1965. It is still the reason easy running has to feel easy.

THE PRINCIPLE
Excitability runs opposite to cell size. A small motoneuron needs almost nothing to fire. A large one needs a flood of input. So recruitment order is not a decision you make, it falls out of the wiring.

THE ECONOMICS
Frequency of use runs opposite to metabolic cost. The units doing the work all day are the cheapest to run. The expensive ones sit behind a high threshold, which is exactly why they stay out of your easy runs, and why going out too hard switches on machinery you then have to keep paying for.

ONE OVERREACH WORTH FLAGGING
This research gets used to argue that running economy is hardwired into the spinal cord. A fixed recruitment order does not make the cost of running fixed. In a twelve-month randomised trial, economy improved in every group, including the controls.

THE SMALL PRINT
All of it is sixty-year-old work on anaesthetised cats, driven by a stretch reflex rather than by a nervous system deciding how fast to run. Later work found recruitment order can shift with movement speed and contraction type. It is a strong tendency, not a law.

📚Sources:
• Henneman (1957), Science 126, 1345-1347 • Henneman, Somjen & Carpenter (1965), Journal of Neurophysiology 28, 560-580
• Henneman & Olson (1965), same volume, 581-598

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02/09/2026

THE FASTEST MILE EVER RUN WAS ALSO ONE OF THE MOST EVENLY RUN

On 18 July 2026 in London, Josh Kerr ran 3:42.66 and took the mile world record off Hicham El Guerrouj, whose 3:43.13 had stood since 1999.

He had named the target four months earlier: Project 222, meaning 222 seconds.

THE SPLITS
55.3, 55.8, 55.4, 54.9. Nine tenths of a second across four laps, and the quickest one last. Broken into 200s: 27.5, 27.8, 27.9, 27.9, 27.7, 27.7, 27.5, 27.4.
The slowest segment came at 600 m, the fastest at the line. Nothing in that profile looks like a kick. It looks like a pace chosen carefully and then very slightly raised.

WHY THAT MATTERS
It is exactly what the power-duration maths recommends: your best time comes from the highest pace you can hold to the finish, and going out too long too hard is always punished.
A world record that looks like a metronome is a useful thing for anyone who still opens a time trial two seconds quick.

THE REST OF THE TELEMETRY
123 bpm on the start line, 188 by 400 m, then the 180s for the rest of it. He was at his ceiling a quarter of the way in. Average 178. Cadence 194 spm rising to 200, maximum stride 2.2 m, ground contact around 200 ms.

WHAT TO TAKE, AND WHAT NOT TO
Take the shape: even splits, effort committed early, last rep fastest. Kerr’s laps sat inside 1.6% of each other, and that is a number you can measure in your own session tonight. Do not take the cadence or the stride. Those belong to one man at 7.2 metres per second.

WHERE THIS COMES FROM
Amazfit published it, and Kerr wears their watch, armband and ring. Optical heart rate and motion-estimated stride, not laboratory instruments.
One race, one athlete, no control. Real data, honestly reported, and still worth knowing who measured it.

Data: Amazfit, 18 July 2026
Performance: World Athletics

ToptimumPerformance🔸🔺

02/09/2026

A CENTURY OF SPEED AND DURATION

In 1925 A.V. Hill had no metabolic cart and no muscle biopsy. He had a table of world records. From it he derived the bioenergetic limits of human performance, decades before ATP was discovered.

WHAT HE GOT RIGHT
The curve has the same shape in running, swimming and rowing: steep, then flattening toward an asymptote after about twelve minutes.
Below a critical speed, supply and demand balance ‘indefinitely’. Above it you spend a finite reserve. That is the critical speed model, decades early.

He also worked out that carbohydrate feeding becomes mandatory past two hours. Coyle et al. proved it 61 years later, and showed that ingested carbohydrate replaces glycogen rather than sparing it.

WHAT HE GOT WRONG
He put the asymptote at VO2max speed. It sits well below that, because of the slow component of oxygen uptake.
Prescribe threshold work at or too close too VO2max pace and you are structurally too high.

THE FINE PRINT
Normalised to each athlete’s own maximum, the power-duration relationship does not differ between men and women (Ansdell et al., 2020). What differs is the absolute ceiling. But that study ran on the bike with 18 participants, and the same authors did find s*x differences in the mechanisms of fatigability.

Performance is not one limit but a sequence. Which system fails at your athlete’s race duration decides what you train.

📚Sources:
Burnley, Vanhatalo, Poole & Jones (2025), J Physiol 603(6), 1361-1374
Ansdell et al. (2020), J Physiol 598(24), 5717-5737
Coyle et al. (1986), J Appl Physiol 61(1), 165-172

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01/09/2026

One system decides intensity by feel, terrain and whoever is leading the group. The other decides it by a lactate meter. Both keep producing world-class distance runners.

What this is: a 2026 narrative review proposing a conceptual framework. Not a head-to-head trial, and the authors hedge carefully, variability “may favor” adaptability, density “may promote” metabolic efficiency. A map of two routes, not a verdict.

ROUTE ONE — VARIABILITY
East African training is group-based, fartlek-heavy, internally regulated, often at moderate altitude on unpaved hilly ground. Terrain and pack dynamics dictate the loading rather than an algorithm.
Athletes cross the threshold repeatedly without anyone naming it, training lactate clearance under genuinely variable effort.
Proposed payoff: adaptability, recruitment diversity, tolerance to pace changes.

ROUTE TWO — DENSITY
The Norwegian model does the opposite. Lactate is held in a narrow submaximal band, speed adjusted to keep it there, work above threshold used sparingly to protect the nervous system.
Double threshold days multiply total quality volume well beyond what one exhausting session allows.
The proposed payoff: metabolic efficiency, lactate regulation, steady-state durability.

WHERE THEY AGREE — THE PART THAT MATTERS
Massive low-intensity volume in both. Both shun frequent failure-driven VO2max exhaustion. Both build the engine through frequent, manageable stimuli rather than heroic sessions. They disagree on how quality work is organised; the foundation is identical.

SO WHICH ONE
Depends on the limitation in front of you. Big engine but falls apart when the pace changes and cannot sprint at the end, implement variability: fartlek, hilly unpaved terrain, recruitment diversity.
Fades late in races, or breaks down whenever you programme intervals, implement density: strictly lactate-controlled submaximal work.

Not right or wrong.
The right tool for that athlete’s physiology.

📚Source: Grivas et al. (2026). Frontiers in Physiology, 17, 1878492.

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01/09/2026

Nine men raised the head end of their beds by six degrees. Five weeks later they carried 104 mL more red blood cells and 36 g more haemoglobin than when they slept flat.

No altitude exposure. No drug. No heat training.

The physiology: lying flat erases the head-to-foot hydrostatic gradient and shifts an estimated 500 to 1000 mL of fluid toward the chest. Central venous pressure rises, RAAS and vasopressin are suppressed, and the kidney offloads the pressure through nocturnal diuresis. Eight hours flat is eight hours of volume defence switched off.

The extreme version is the BRACE study: 24 men, 60 days head-down, plasma volume and haemoglobin mass falling in every group. Daily interval cycling inside a short-arm centrifuge did not protect them, the working muscle pump cancelled the fluid shift the centrifuge was meant to create.

The reverse is the interesting part. Montero’s group tilted ten men head-up for three hours and circulating EPO rose 13%, at sea level, breathing normal air.

Mazza and colleagues then tested five weeks of six-degree head-up sleeping, randomised crossover, in the participants’ own homes:

• Red cell volume: +104 mL (p = 0.009)
• Haemoglobin mass: +36 g (p = 0.009)
• Total blood volume: +4.1%
• Plasma volume, morning EPO, blood pressure and sleep quality: unchanged

Read that list honestly. The gain is real and roughly what five weeks at altitude buys. The mechanism is not established — the authors write that whether it comes from reduced central venous pressure “remains unclear and warrants further investigation.” Nine men, five weeks, one lab.

One caveat worth stating: patients prone to thrombosis were flagged by the authors as people who should not attempt this.

📚Sources:
• Mazza, Gejl, Larsen & Lundby (2026). Did You Know: Erythropoiesis Is Regulated by Changes in Posture. Acta Physiologica, 242(6), e70248.
• Montero et al. (2016). Reduction in central venous pressure enhances erythropoietin synthesis. Acta Physiologica, 218(2), 89-97.
• Bryans et al. (2026). BRACE. Journal of Applied Physiology, 140(3), 621-629.

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