ASPDA 2026 Recap, Part 1: 6 Sessions That Are Changing How I Coach Endurance Athletes

May 15, 2026

ASPDA 2026 Recap, Part 1: 6 Sessions That Are Changing How I Coach Endurance Athletes

Live recap from the Annual Sports Performance & Dietetics Association conference, New Orleans, May 2026 — Part 1 of a multi-part series

I’m spending five days in New Orleans at the ASPDA 18th Annual Conference, surrounded by the researchers and practitioners doing some of the most interesting work in sports nutrition right now. By the time the conference wraps, I’ll have attended 14–16 sessions. This is the first batch of takeaways — Part 1 of a series I’ll be rolling out as I work through the rest.

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Below: six talks from the first half of the conference, six takeaways, and what each one actually means for the athletes I work with.

1. Athlete immunity isn’t broken from training — it’s broken from your stress bucket

Speaker: Professor Neil Walsh, one of the world’s leading researchers on exercise immunology.

For a long time, the prevailing narrative has been: hard training suppresses immunity, so heavy-load athletes are inherently more susceptible to getting sick. Walsh’s body of work over the last decade pushes back on that. Athletes don’t have weaker immune systems. What they have is heavier stress buckets — psychological load, poor sleep, sudden training spikes, travel, under-fueling — that stack on top of training stress and predict who catches colds, flu, and respiratory infections.

The specifics that stopped me:

  • Respiratory infections are the second-leading reason athletes miss training, after joint and ligament injuries.
  • If you show up to a marathon or ultra with infection symptoms in the 24 hours before, you’re twice as likely to DNF.
  • The “low energy availability tanks your immunity” headline needs nuance: the data points to protein intake as the critical lever, not total calories alone. Athletes hitting their protein were significantly more resilient even when overall fueling was suboptimal.
  • The supplement hierarchy with the strongest evidence: zinc lozenges at first cold symptom (~75 mg, shortens duration by about a third), probiotics especially for traveling athletes, vitamin D through the darker months, and vitamin C selectively for high training loads — with the caveat that high-dose vitamin C may blunt training adaptations.

What this means for you: Stop trying to “boost” your immunity with a single hero food or supplement. Manage your stress bucket. Sleep is non-negotiable. Protein is the immune lever inside fueling. And if you travel often or train at high loads, the four supplements above are the ones with real research behind them.

2. Most of what you’ve been told about training and fueling during pregnancy is outdated

Speaker: Professor Margie Davenport, one of the world’s leading researchers on exercise in pregnancy and postpartum.

This session reframed an entire body of conservative advice that has dominated this space for decades. The headline: continuing to train through pregnancy is safer and more beneficial than stopping, and the old caps on duration and intensity are not supported by current data.

What the research now shows for pregnant athletes who continue training:

  • About a 40% reduction in major pregnancy complications (gestational diabetes, preeclampsia).
  • About a 67% reduction in odds of developing depression.
  • Heavy resistance training at 80%+ of one-rep max during pregnancy was associated with a 51% reduction in complications versus stopping.
  • The 60-minute duration cap and the 90%-max intensity ceiling that have been repeated for years? Not supported by data.

On fueling, you’re not eating for two. The actual added energy cost is modest — roughly 350 extra calories per day in trimester 2 and 500 per day in trimester 3 — and that’s before you account for training. Most pregnant athletes I work with are dramatically under-fueling because the messaging they’ve received is built around sedentary pregnancy.

The piece that floored me: the first study on REDs (Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport) in pregnancy showed a history of low energy availability was associated with 3.5x higher odds of premature labor and 2.5x higher odds of preterm delivery. A pre-training snack 15–30 minutes out is essential because the baby has first claim on glucose, mom’s liver glucose stores are reduced, and hypoglycemia hits faster.

Postpartum, the 2025 Canadian guidelines have moved away from the fixed “6-week return” recommendation toward individualized, gradual return — with measurable mental health and pelvic floor benefits. And the injury insight that floored me: postpartum injury risk has nothing to do with breastfeeding or speed of return. It’s tied to how much training was cut during pregnancy. Maintaining modified training protects you postpartum.

What this means for you: If you’re an athlete navigating pregnancy or return-to-sport — or coaching one — the conservative advice that’s defined this space is overdue for an update. Fueling, hydration, and continued movement are the foundation.

3. Creatine isn’t a muscle supplement anymore — it’s a stress reserve for your brain

Speaker: Professor Darren Candow, the most-published creatine researcher in the world (30+ years, hundreds of peer-reviewed studies).

Most of us think of creatine as a strength and power supplement. Candow’s session reframed it entirely. Your brain uses about 20% of your daily energy at rest. Under metabolic stress — sleep deprivation, jet lag, mental fatigue, hard travel, chronic stress, head impact — that demand spikes. Creatine is the brain’s preferred high-energy currency.

The most counterintuitive finding: diet does not change brain creatine levels. Vegans, vegetarians, and meat-eaters all measure the same. (Muscle creatine, by contrast, IS diet-dependent.) The brain manufactures its own — until it can’t keep up with demand. The blood-brain barrier also blocks most supplemental creatine from getting in under normal conditions. But under stress, that barrier becomes more permeable, which is exactly when supplementation matters most.

The dosing reframe:

  • Muscle: 3–5 g/day
  • Bone: ~8 g/day
  • Brain: 20+ g/day in short-term studies

Candow himself takes 10 g/day — enough to cover muscle, bone, and brain reserves without going extreme. He also flagged that very high doses (20–30+ g) can deplete methyl groups, which may affect mood and neurotransmitter synthesis in some people; if you go higher, take it earlier in the day.

One study that genuinely stopped me: a single high dose (about 0.35 g/kg, or ~30 g for a 175-lb athlete) given after 21 hours awake restored cognition and memory. Not a green light to skip sleep — a tool for when life happens.

For athletes in contact and crash-prone sports (yes, this includes mountain biking, gravel racing, and any sport with hard ground impact), athletes with repeated head trauma showed reduced brain creatine. Pre-loading creatine before impact reduced brain damage in animal models by 21–50%. The human research is still early but compelling.

What this means for you: If you’re well-rested, fully recovered, and not under significant life stress, you won’t notice much from creatine beyond muscle benefits. But endurance athletes are almost never in that state. We travel, we lose sleep, we carry chronic training load, and many of us crash. Daily, long-term, low-dose monohydrate is the play. Stick with creatine monohydrate — the trendier forms don’t have the data behind them.

4. Continuous glucose monitors are useful — but mostly as a short-term learning tool

Speaker: Professor Michael Riddell, one of the world’s leading researchers on CGM use in athletes (and a person who has lived with Type 1 diabetes for decades).

Riddell gave the most balanced, evidence-based take on CGMs I’ve heard. The hype has gotten ahead of the science, and the science is more nuanced than either the “everyone should wear one” or the “they’re useless for healthy people” camps suggest.

The legitimate athletic use cases:

  • Identifying reactive hypoglycemia before races — when pre-race fueling backfires and crashes you 30–60 minutes in.
  • Catching under-fueling in recovery (high glucose post-race often signals stress + glycogen depletion, not over-eating).
  • Personalizing carb timing pre-, during, and post-training.
  • Spotting glucose dysregulation when there’s family history.

The reactive hypoglycemia data is the part that’s most actionable. Fueling 20 minutes before a race: ~7% of healthy athletes go hypo. Fueling 60 minutes before: ~14%. Fueling within 5 minutes: drops back to ~6%. This is highly individual — some athletes never get it, others get it every time — and without a sensor, you’re guessing.

And the fasted-training finding deserves more attention: after an overnight fast plus low-intensity exercise, ~50% of non-diabetic athletes drop into biochemical hypoglycemia. You won’t necessarily feel it, but your sprint capacity, endurance, and cognition all measurably decline. Worth thinking about if “train low” is part of your protocol.

The honest limitations: sensors are less accurate at the extremes (very high or very low). They can drive obsessive food monitoring in some people. Glucose is one signal — heart rate, sleep, RPE, and overall fueling all matter alongside it. And a CGM does NOT reliably predict your HbA1c if you don’t have diabetes.

What this means for you: A CGM is best used as a short-term learning tool (2–4 weeks) paired with a sports nutritionist who can help you interpret patterns. Not a forever device. Not a daily anxiety machine. A diagnostic lens. If you’ve struggled with pre-race nerves crashing your blood sugar, persistent under-fueling, or feeling “off” without knowing why — it could be one of the most useful experiments you run this season.

5. There’s a free, $0 heat acclimation protocol that improves 5K performance by 5%

Speaker: Professor Neil Walsh (returning for a second session).

Walsh laid out the problem first. Exercise in the heat reduces time to exhaustion by up to 45%. A survey of 300+ elite athletes preparing for World Athletics Championships showed only 15% acclimatized in the natural environment, and just ~2% used a heat chamber. One in twelve had a medically diagnosed exertional heat illness. Most athletes know heat matters. Almost none prepare for it — because chambers are expensive and pre-race travel disrupts the taper.

So his lab spent the last decade asking: what if hot water immersion after normal training could substitute for heat-chamber acclimation?

The answer, across multiple controlled studies, is yes.

The protocol:

  1. Train normally in cool conditions (40 minutes of moderate intensity is the studied dose).
  2. Immediately afterward, immerse to the neck in a 40°C / 104°F bath.
  3. Start with ~15 minutes on day 1.
  4. Add 5 minutes each day.
  5. Build to 40 minutes by day 6.
  6. Repeat for 6 consecutive days.

The measured benefits: lower resting core temperature (~0.3°C drop), lower end-exercise core temp during heat stress (fully matching pre-heat baseline), earlier sweat onset, lower perceived exertion, and a 5% improvement in 5K time trial performance in 33°C heat — well outside day-to-day variation. Benefits hold for at least 2 weeks after the protocol ends, which means you can complete this 1–2 weeks before your race, during taper, without compromising training quality.

Safety guardrails (important):

  • Exactly 40°C / 104°F. Not hotter.
  • The water should feel hot but NOT “as hot as you can stand.”
  • Sit on the edge for 2 minutes before standing up — sudden upright posture after a hot bath can drop blood pressure.
  • Skip this if you’re sick, dehydrated, or pregnant without clinician approval.
  • This stacks with proper hydration and sodium protocols, not in place of them.

What this means for you: If you have a hot race on the calendar — summer gravel (Unbound, SBT GRVL, BWR), hot marathons, late-summer Ironmans, ultras in warm climates — this is one of the most practical, evidence-backed interventions you can layer into your prep. It doesn’t require travel, equipment, or money beyond a bathtub.

6. The “human energy ceiling” is real — and elite endurance athletes blow right through it

Speaker: Professor Louise Burke, arguably the most influential sports nutrition researcher of the last 30 years and the architect of the AIS sports nutrition program.

This was the session I’d been waiting all week for. Burke walked us through the methods we use to measure energy expenditure — doubly-labeled water, metabolic chambers, DEXA scans — and the assumptions and errors baked into all of them. Then she dropped the data.

Evolutionary biologists have proposed a “ceiling” on sustained human energy expenditure: about 2.5x your basal metabolic rate. The theory is that beyond that, the body can’t refuel itself fast enough over the long term, so you’ll inevitably break down.

Then sports scientists measured actual endurance athletes:

  • Tour de France cyclists routinely sustaining 7,000–9,000+ calories/day for three weeks.
  • Pat Farmer, who ran around Australia (76 km/day for 6 months), averaging ~6,000 cal/day.
  • Burke’s own data from a recent 3-week altitude camp with 46 elite rowers from the US and Canadian national teams (the “Suda Project,” fresh and unpublished): females averaging 4,500 calories/day, males averaging 6,000 calories/day, total energy expenditure averaging 2.5x BMR and in many cases substantially higher.

And this was at altitude, in a slightly reduced training load relative to sea level.

The methodological highlight: to capture accurate intake data, Burke’s team converted the dining hall buffet into a “sushi train” — every food item pre-weighed and itemized before service, eaten in a roped-off area, with leftovers measured. The most accurate intake data ever collected on elite endurance athletes of this caliber.

What makes those numbers sustainable, per Burke:

  1. Periodization. Lower-volume days are catch-up days, not deficit days. Rest days are where energy balance happens.
  2. Sport culture. Cyclists have chefs in support trucks, food on the bike, and a normalized expectation of 100+ g carbs per hour during long efforts. Other endurance sports lag behind on this.
  3. Logistics. Food is available 24/7, prepped, portioned, ready.

One more critical finding: self-tracked food diaries underreport intake by about 20% on average. Worse, the act of tracking changes what athletes eat — they simplify meals to make logging easier, which means the “data” isn’t even representative of their normal pattern. AI food logging is promising but still struggles with accurate portion estimation.

What this means for you: If you’ve been told you eat “too much” for an endurance athlete, you’ve likely been told wrong by someone who hasn’t seen what elite endurance athletes actually consume. The ceiling isn’t your physiology. The ceiling is whether you have the systems, support, and education to actually fuel the work you’re doing.

The throughline

If you zoom out across all six sessions, the same themes keep surfacing:

  • Under-fueling is the silent variable. Walsh ties it to immunity. Davenport ties it to preterm delivery and postpartum injury. Riddell ties it to reactive hypoglycemia and fasted training crashes. Burke ties it to the gap between what athletes actually need and what they’re tracking.
  • Stress is cumulative. Training stress isn’t isolated — it stacks with psychological load, sleep debt, travel, and life. The athletes who manage all of those win the long game.
  • The old conservative advice is overdue for a refresh. Whether it’s pregnancy training caps, “calories in/out” oversimplification, the 6-week postpartum rule, or the 60-minute exercise duration ceiling — the data has moved past where the recommendations have stayed.
  • Practitioners matter. Burke’s closing point: research is one half of this field. The other half is the practitioners who know their athletes, see the patterns, and translate the data into real-life decisions.

That’s the work I do every day with my clients. If you want help building a fueling, recovery, and training-support plan that’s actually based on the current science — not the 1990s textbook — let’s talk.

Part 2 is coming

That’s six sessions in the books — and I’ve got another 8–10 still to go before the conference wraps. Part 2 will land here as soon as I’ve worked through the next batch. Topics I’m especially excited about include hydration and electrolyte protocols, gut training research updates, female athlete physiology, and the latest on training the gut to absorb higher carb intakes.

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Work with me

Nutritional Revolution is a sports nutrition practice for serious endurance athletes — gravel cyclists, ultrarunners, marathoners, and triathletes. We work with both amateurs and professionals, including 2024 gravel national champion Brennan Wertz, Sarah Sturm, Dani Moreno, Vida Lopez de San Ramon, and Clay Hutchinson.

To get started:

Thanks for reading. See you out there. 🤍

Kyla Channell
International Olympic Committee, Sports Nutrition
MS, Nutrition & Human Performance (Honors)
BS, Clinical Dietetics UC Davis

ASPDA 2026 Recap, Part 1: 6 Sessions That Are Changing How I Coach Endurance Athletes

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