Evidenced Based Supplements for Endurance Athletes to Beat the Heat

TLDR:

• Heat and humidity can really hinder performance, as well as pose a risk for heat-related illness. PTs help athletes with fatigue, cramping, heat exhaustion, and more -- could dietary supplements help?

• New research shows promise with Taurine, menthol, and mouth rinsing. Learn the details in our video blog post and sign up today!

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- Nutrition interventions for chronic diseases (e.g., obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases)

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- Case studies demonstrating successful integration of nutrition into physical therapy care plans

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Transcript:

Hey y'all, Dr. Wells here from San Agustin Beach. I'm out in my garden here. It's a hot day.

I'm trying to stay in the shade. And this article today we're going to do for our literature review is focused on supplements for improving endurance athletes and heat. So particularly in Florida, we deal with a lot of hot sticky weather.

Like right now, it's 85 degrees with heat index well into the 90s. Particularly across the southeast, we see a lot of issues with heat-related illnesses, particularly with endurance athletes and sports like soccer and rugby and football. So this study that we're looking at today is by Lee et al.

in the study journal Nutrients, June of 2025. It's a network meta-analysis. So they're looking at 25 randomized control trials in athletes.

And they're looking at if they supplement with certain things before or even during competition, is there an effect on heat-related illnesses per se, but the perception of heat and also is there an effect on their performance? We know with heat, it decreases overall exercise endurance in athletes. Part of that is due to dehydration. Some of it's also due to central fatigue, right? So central nervous system type symptoms, possibly electrolyte imbalances, and also just energy depletion as well.

Our body needs more energy to sort of dissipate the heat, right? So what did they look at? Well, they found that menthol, either in a drink, an oral rinse or a gel helped to reduce some of those, or sorry, improve exercise endurance. But really the effect was largest with the drink and the oral rinse. So literally just taking menthol, dosed at 0.01 percent or up to 0.7 percent, drinking it or just rinsing it in the mouth and spitting it out had a significant improvement in endurance.

And we've seen some studies around oral rinses and some of their benefits with endurance athletes putting, you know, even sugar-based products in the mouth and not even consuming those products and how they can cause boost in performance for endurance athletes. Well, same thing here. We saw a large effect size increase in exercise endurance.

With the gel, however, what they saw, interestingly, was an improvement in thermal comfort. So the athletes said they weren't quite as hot. And that kind of makes sense, right? Because menthol has that cooling effect.

So maybe the gel, as they consume the gel, it sort of cooled their body down. The other supplement that stood out was taurine. We've seen taurine before.

Anyone that's drank Red Bull, you've had taurine. It's an amino acid and dosed at between 1 to 6 grams about 30 to 120 minutes before exercise. They also saw a large effect size on improving exercise endurance.

So overall quality of studies, they said were moderate to high. So that's good for us as physical therapists and exercise specialists to look at.