Fuelin Sessions

Dr. Alan McCubbin joins Scott Tindal on Fuelin Sessions to discuss whether athletes really need to go gluten-free. With so many athletes avoiding gluten in hopes of improving performance and reducing gut issues, is there actually any science to support it? And could cutting out gluten unnecessarily do more harm than good? Listen to find out.

STUDIES / ARTICLES MENTIONED

Exploring the Popularity, Experiences, and Beliefs Surrounding Gluten-Free Diets in Nonceliac Athletes

Low Carbohydrate Availability in Energy Balance Alters Bone Turnover and Muscle Proteomic Response With Limited Endocrine Disruption

Body fat, skin tone, and the accuracy of smartwatch caloric expenditure estimates

Lactate Gels

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Can a workout make up for a bad night’s sleep? Scott Tindal sits down with Dr. Michael Ormsbee, who directs Florida State University’s Institute of Sports Sciences and Medicine (yes, the pre-sleep protein guy, and Scott has already asked him back for that one). Michael's lab pushed people’s bedtimes back until they lost 30% of their sleep, three nights running. In the sedentary group, cardiovascular function started to slip. The active group held. It doesn’t save everything. College women who lifted and binge drank kept their strength, but their glucose control still drifted. They also get into why journal reviewers won’t let Michael publish sleep stage data from wearables, and why his cross-country runners’ sleep a full week out still showed up on race day.

STUDIES MENTIONED

Body Composition Changes in Postmenopausal Women After Twelve Weeks of Either Resistance or Aerobic Training (conference abstract, study ongoing)

Resistance Training and Binge Drinking: Impacts on Glucose Regulation in Young Adult Females

Impact of Exercise on Sleep in Postmenopausal Women With Obesity: A Pilot Study

Sleep Duration Correlates With Performance in Ultra-Endurance Triathlon

Pre-Sleep Milk-Derived Proteins Do Not Impair Sleep or Recovery in Elite Female Athletes

Effects of Pre-Sleep Macronutrient Ingestion on Nocturnal and Morning Glycemic Responses in Elite Female Athletes: A Pilot Study

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What does an Olympic champion eat when he’s racing for fun? Scott Tindal sits down with Jan Frodeno, Olympic gold medalist and three-time Ironman World Champion, to dig into how 100,000 lifetime kilometers and a bottle every 5K at 80 grams of carbs an hour added up to a 2:23 Berlin Marathon; why UTMB OCC a month earlier was the opposite story, with Jan running dry three times and drinking from a river; and how Scott is fueling the 80K Bondi to Manly Ultra he’s running for his son Jack.

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Why do some athletes cramp no matter how much salt they take? In this episode of Fuelin Sessions, Scott Tindal is joined by Dr Alan McCubbin, sports dietitian and Monash University researcher, to work through the three main theories of exercise-associated muscle cramps. They dig into why the dehydration and electrolyte story has struggled to hold up in the research and how Kevin Miller's multifactorial model treats each athlete's cramps as their own recipe. Alan's take: there's no single cause, so control as many of the controllables as you can.

Martinez-Navarro I, Vicente-Mampel J, Lopez-Grueso R, Collado-Boira E, Recacha-Ponce P, Gomez-Sere T, Hernando C. Muscle Cramping in Ultra-Trail: Dehydration and Electrolyte Depletion versus Muscle Damage. J Strength Cond Res. 2026. DOI: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000005440

Martinez-Navarro et al. Muscle Cramping in the Marathon: Dehydration and Electrolyte Depletion vs. Muscle Damage. J Strength Cond Res. 2020. DOI: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000003713

Miller KC et al. An Evidence-Based Review of the Pathophysiology, Treatment, and Prevention of Exercise-Associated Muscle Cramps. J Athl Train. 2022. DOI: 10.4085/1062-6050-0696.20

Maughan RJ & Shirreffs SM. Muscle Cramping During Exercise: Causes, Solutions, and Questions Remaining. Sports Med. 2019. 49(Suppl 2):115-124. DOI: 10.1007/s40279-019-01162-1

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What do you do when you tear all three hamstrings off the bone and the first people you ask tell you it's probably just a strain? Scott Tindal sits down with Jen Harrison, a Chicago triathlon coach and lifelong swimmer who fell on a trail in Tucson, got sent home from the ER on crutches, and waited four days for the diagnosis. They cover the two to three week surgery window she nearly missed, why she shifted toward protein before the operation, how she ate through six weeks of bedrest, isometrics starting three days post-op, and the motto she taped to her desk: fuel for the season you're in.

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In this episode, Scott Tindal sits down with Megan Foley, sports dietitian and professional triathlete, straight off her Nice 70.3 World Championship start. They go through the numbers day by day, why her fat dropped to 30g and her protein to 80g, the case for drinking your carbs instead of eating them, and the decision to front load 200g on the climb because the descent gave her nowhere to fuel.

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Can a supplement get you sweating earlier and racing cooler? Scott Tindal sits down with Alistair Brownlee, the only male triathlete to win back-to-back Olympic gold, who now runs True Fuels and has just launched a taurine supplement called CoreCTRL. They discuss what the taurine and heat studies actually measured, whether a bigger sweat rate leaves you short on fluid, and how much of that effect a properly heat-acclimated athlete has already banked. Alistair also walks through the Kona blow-up that pushed him to strip race nutrition back.

The effect of 8-day oral taurine supplementation on thermoregulation during low-intensity exercise at fixed heat production in hot conditions of incremental humidity

CoreCTRL

Alistair Brownlee Instagram
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Does blending fruit destroy the fiber? Scott Tindal is joined by Fuelin dietitian Megan Foley to take apart two claims doing the rounds online, starting with the viral warning against blending bananas with blueberries, which came from a trial of eight men that never once put the two in the same glass. From there they get into the 2022 study where blended fruit produced a lower glucose response than whole fruit, what the unmeasured insulin response is probably doing underneath that, and the one real drawback of smoothies nobody posts about. Their answer on the fiber: it survives the blender.

Impact of polyphenol oxidase on the bioavailability of flavan-3-ols in fruit smoothies: a controlled, single blinded, cross-over study

Recent Research on the Health Benefits of Blueberries and Their Anthocyanins

Postprandial Glycemic Response to Whole Fruit versus Blended Fruit in Healthy, Young Adults

Perspective on the health value of carbohydrate-rich foods: glycemic index and load; fiber and whole grains

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90 grams of carbs an hour was never a physiological limit; it was a practical target. In this episode of Fuelin Sessions, Scott Tindal is joined by sports dietitian Alan McCubbin to unpack the narrative review questioning ultra-high carbohydrate intake in endurance athletes. They discuss where that number actually came from, why glucose oxidation tops out around 60–70g while fructose has no clear ceiling, what unpublished testing on the UTMB winners suggested about their real oxidation ceiling, why gut training improves tolerance but maybe not absorption, and why a rider under 150 watts needs 30–50g an hour, not 90.

Effects of 120 g/h of Carbohydrates Intake during a Mountain Marathon on Exercise-Induced Muscle Damage in Elite Runners

Carbohydrate improves exercise capacity but does not affect subcellular lipid droplet morphology, AMPK and p53 signalling in human skeletal muscle

C-glucose-fructose labeling reveals comparable exogenous CHO oxidation during exercise when consuming 120 g/h in fluid, gel, jelly chew, or coingestion

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In this episode of Fuelin Sessions, Scott Tindal is joined by Dr Lindsey Hunt, senior sports scientist at Precision Fuel & Hydration, to work out what happens when one caffeine dose becomes six. They dig into why the 3 to 6mg per kilo window says nothing useful about a 16-hour race; why the biggest mistake Lindsey sees is athletes saving the last gel for the final hour, when caffeine needs 30 minutes to absorb and roughly five hours to halve; and how Precision models repeat doses against half-life and total body water. The fix isn't more caffeine: it's earlier caffeine.

Dr. Lindsey Hunt Instagram

Precision Fuel & Hydration

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In this episode of Fuelin Sessions, Scott is joined by physiologist and Kona age-group world champion Dr Dan Plews. They discuss what 12 weeks of HYROX training should actually look like, why HYROX is tilted further towards endurance than the "hybrid" label suggests, and how Dan structures a training week: 80 percent aerobic, three hard days, sessions of an hour to 90 minutes.

Papers and articles mentioned:

Which Training Weeks Actually Matter?

Physiological demands of running at 2-hour marathon race pace

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40798-024-00802-9

Seven (.65) seconds away: the possibility and physiology of a women’s sub-4 min mile

ENDUROX Podcast

ENDUROX Website

ENDUROX email

ENDUROX Instagram

Endure IQ Website

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In this episode of Fuelin Sessions, Scott is joined by triple board-certified cardiologist Dr Troy Badger. They discuss the dual 70.3 world champion in his late 50s whose coronary calcium score came back at 321, the "fit bias" that gets athletes waved out of the clinic with false reassurance, how endurance training itself can accelerate coronary plaque, the panel Troy actually orders, and why a pre-diabetic HbA1c in an endurance athlete is usually a false reading.

www.cardiostrongmd.com

CardioStrong MD IG

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Is there an upper limit for caffeine in ultra-endurance? Scott Tindal saw that Josh Amberger rode 356 miles at Unbound XL on roughly 1,600mg of caffeine, about four times the FDA's daily ceiling, and assumed it was a typo. It wasn't. In this episode of Fuelin Sessions, Scott is joined by Fuelin dietitian Megan Foley, and they dig into it. They discuss why there's no guideline to check that number against, what matters more than a fixed mg/kg dose, and why the only real ceiling is the one you find in training.

Josh Amberger and Precision Fuel & Hydration Graphic

Infographic

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In this episode of Fuelin Sessions, Scott Tindal is joined by Chad Brothers, a Fuelin athlete, real estate professional, father of two, and a middle-of-the-pack triathlete with a story most athletes never tell. They discuss the addiction that emptied his corner, how he went from 275lb and unable to run to his mailbox to a 12:06:41 at Challenge Roth, why the second Ironman nearly broke his motivation, the fuelling that took him past 150g of carbs an hour, and the moment he decided to race for someone other than himself.

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In this episode of Fuelin Sessions, Scott Tindal is joined by Dr. Alan McCubbin, accredited sports dietitian and Monash University researcher, to pressure-test carb loading against the new "Beyond Belief" review paper. They dig into why a 50-year-old practice rests on just two flawed double-blind trials; why old physiology studies were never designed to answer today's performance questions; and why blinding carbs is so hard. The takeaway isn't a debunk: lack of evidence isn't evidence of no effect. Carb loading stays. It's low-cost, low-risk, and worth it.

Study

Beyond Belief? Absence of Double-Blinding and Limited Ecological Validity in Carbohydrate Loading Research

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In this episode of Fuelin Sessions, Scott is joined by applied sport scientist Jonah Rosner (ex-NFL, Nike Running Performance Lab NYC). They discuss why mechanical tension — not heavy weight — drives muscle growth, how blood flow restriction builds similar muscle at 20–30% of your max, who benefits most from injured athletes to hospital patients, and the practical protocol: limb occlusion pressure, the 30-15-15-15 scheme, and BFR's role in recovery and pain relief.

Newsletter

Instagram

Free Foot and Calf Strength Plan

BFR papers

Loenneke et al. 2025, Twenty-five years of blood flow restriction training: What we know, what we do not know, and where to next?

Kataoka et al. 2025, Submaximal low-load resistance exercise with blood flow restriction produces similar results to low-load exercise to failure for muscle size and strength, but not endurance.

Peden et al. 2026, Sprint-interval training with post-exercise blood flow restriction increases mitochondrial content and respiration.

Lavigne et al. 2025, Physiological mechanisms underlying enhanced performance after blood flow-restricted exercise training in elite endurance athletes.

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In this episode of Fuelin Sessions, Scott is joined by professional runner and Puma athlete Lucy Reid. They discuss her recovery from a medial meniscus root repair and eight weeks non-weight-bearing, why the biggest nutrition mistake injured athletes make is easing off exactly when fueling matters most, why recovery often means eating more rather than less, a supplement protocol driven by blood testing and retesting instead of guesswork, the rehab tech behind her comeback (blood flow restriction, muscle stim, and the AlterG treadmill), the DEXA scan showing under 3% muscle asymmetry, and her return to racing at the British 10K Championships after 16 months out.

Lucy Instagram

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In this episode of Fuelin Sessions, Scott is joined by Fuelin dietitian and triathlete Megan Foley. They discuss a new study of female athletes at the 2024 Nice Ironman World Championships that found most fell short of their carb-loading targets, why the gap on race day is rarely about knowledge and almost always about execution, how "eating clean" and too much fiber can sabotage a race, the finding that athletes who fueled more finished faster, the mindset shift from training to eat to eating to train, and the lack of female representation in sports-nutrition research.

Study

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In this episode of Fuelin Sessions, Scott is joined by running coach and writer Mario Fraioli. They discuss his recovery from disordered eating and the "lighter is faster" myth that still lingers in endurance sport, the influence a coach's words can have on an athlete for decades, the super-shoe and fueling revolution behind today's tumbling marathon times, why no endurance champion trains low-carb, and a candid take on doping and the case for more transparent testing.

Content note: this episode discusses disordered eating. In the US, the National Alliance for Eating Disorders runs a free, clinician-staffed helpline (allianceforeatingdisorders.com).

The Morning Shakeout⁠

⁠Mariofraioli.com ⁠

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In this episode of Fuelin Sessions, Scott is joined by Chief Fueling Officer Daniela Ryf. They discuss her transition from professional athlete to lifestyle, her hesitancy to jump on the latest supplement trends, the importance of consistency, and a newfound realization of how enjoyment and social connection can make a big difference in fitness.

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