"Carb Rinsing": Gluck and spit - why do athletes do that?

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Drinking is easy. From an early age man learns that liquid in the mouth is intended for swallowing. Especially if it comes from bottles. Football professionals seem to have supplanted this knowledge - much like Weintester.

If there is a short break during the 90 minutes, many players spray their drinking bottles as if they were elephants in the pink shower. If liquid ends up in the mouth, it will not be swallowed greedily, but after a short gurgle, it will spit on the lawn.

That footballers like to spit is nothing new at first. Even without drinking land again and again on the lawn, psychologists see it mainly a territorial behavior. But as far as the mouth rinse is concerned, spitting could certainly have medical justification - and even help the athletes to a small performance kick.

How should this work?

The method is called "Carb rinsing" or "Mouth rinsing" (German: Mouthwash), a real German name does not exist yet. The condition is that not pure water, but a sugared broth in the bottle. For which footballers this is the case is one of the secrets of team tactics.

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In order to use the "carb rinsing" correctly, the carbohydrate content should be around six percent. This mixture must take the athletes in the mouth, leave there between five and ten seconds and then spit out again.

"There are studies that have shown that the method with intensive loads of about one hour is sufficient to increase the performance," said Stephanie Mosler of the University of Education Schwäbisch Gmünd. Accordingly, the performance increases equally, no matter whether athletes drink the liquid or spit it out again.

The concept goes back to sports scientists. How do you get such an idea?

Muscles need carbohydrates to gain energy. If the fuel goes out, the power decreases. For this reason, it has long been clear that endurance athletes should fill their reserves during competitions - such as with bananas, gels or even sweetened drinks. However, this rule only applies to sports units that last at least two hours.

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Those who do sports for a short time actually have enough supplies in their muscles. In addition, the carbohydrates need time to get from the food into the muscle. In a short training session, this often takes longer than the sport. Nevertheless, scientists observed that cyclists had a positive effect on carbohydrate drinks, even though they only trained for about an hour. At a distance of 40 kilometers they came after drinking about one minute to the finish faster, they were about two percent faster.

The question now was, how can that be explained, but where the carbohydrate supply should play no role? To test this, the researchers launched another study: again they let cyclists compete for over 40 kilometers, but this time the athletes spit out the drinks again. In fact, they used carbohydrates faster - the effect was similar to drinking the liquid. The result has since been confirmed in further studies, but not all tests proved the effect.

How do the researchers explain the effect?

This has not been discovered down to the last detail. "As possible mechanisms researchers see an activation of previously unknown carbohydrate receptors in the mouth, which in turn activate higher brain areas, among other things in the reward and movement center," writes Mosler, researching nutrition in competitive sports. "Mouth rinse has more of a psychological effect."

For longer athletic challenges, the method reaches its limits: in the muscle, the spitted carbohydrates finally never arrive. If an athlete has to accelerate for more than two hours, he needs carbohydrate supplements - otherwise he loses power.

So, if a game is about extra time, as is typical for the World Cup, footballers should definitely consume carbohydrates and give their bodies the chance to replenish the energy reserves in their muscles. That they do this is often observed on the court as players press the contents of a gel pack into their mouths. This way, the reserves can be filled up - without water belly. Sometimes, as it should be, they even swallow their drink.

So spitting out is basically a good idea for footballers?

"In football with 90 minutes," Mouth Rinse "is a method that you can try out - especially if the players do not want to burden the gastrointestinal tract too much," writes Mosler. "I still recommend taking an isotonic drink or an apple spritzer (if it is tolerated) during the half-time break for the supply of fluids and energy."

Isotonic drinks, which include juice spritzers (ratio of water to juice 1: 2), are suitable for all endurance benefits. Their concentration of dissolved particles is similar to that in the blood. It is important to make sure that the water is rich in sodium in extreme endurance performance. So it counteracts a deficiency, as the body sweats out a lot of sodium.