Sports Cycology - Sponsored by Mars® Refuel
Published: Runner’s World Magazine, May 2007.
Not only could the odd chunk of choc be good for you, but surprising new research suggests that chocolate milk, the stuff many of us used to slurp at school, could help you recover faster after exercise.
A headline-making study from the University of Indiana in the US last year suggested chocolate milk helped athletes recover more efficiently and could therefore boost subsequent endurance after exercise better than fluid and carbohydrate replacement drinks. We decided to repeat the study to test the results.
The small, independent trial by a team at the Northumbria University was co-funded by Runner's World and Mars, the company behind the Mars® chocolate brand. The UK study followed the protocol of the American research very closely. The compared chocolate milk to fluid replacement drink Gatorade and also Endurox R4, a carbohydrate replacement drink. In the British study a particular type of chocolate milk, Mars® Refuel, was tested against Gatorade and Endurox R4. The results backed up the conclusions of the original study.
"Our study indicates that consuming Mars® Refuel during a short recovery period significantly improves subsequent endurance capacity compared to two other sports-specific recovery drinks," says Dr Emma Stevenson, Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Nutrition at Northumbria University.
On three separate days, nine male cyclists did an energy-depleting exercise session, followed by four hours of recovery. (Cycling was chosen because it was felt it would be easier to make effort levels consistent for all of the subjects.) Then the subjects cycled to exhaustion at 70 per cent of their VO2max. The men drank equivalent volumes of Mars® Refuel, Gatorade or Endurox R4 immediately after the first exercise bout and two hours into the recovery period.
The results showed:
Eight out of the nine subjects cycled for longer in the second session after drinking Mars® Refuel than after drinking the other two drinks. One subject performed the least well on Mars@ Refuel.The subjects cycled for an average of 32 minutes 21 seconds in their second exercise session after drinking Mars® Refuel during recovery, compared to 22 minutes 36 seconds after Gatorade and 21 minutes 27 seconds after consuming Endurox R4.
What is the key to chocolate milk's powers of recovery?
"The mixture of carbohydrate and protein in the chocolate milk could possibly have facilitated muscle glycogen resynthesis during the fourth recovery period and therefore enabled [the] subjects to exercise for longer," says Dr Stevenson. Whether chocolate milk will catch on as a recovery drink remains to be seen, but if you're a runner who used to enjoy chocolate milk back in the playground, it could be worth a try.
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