Choline is a vitamin-like substance found in a variety of foods including eggs, fish, liver, cauliflower, soybeans, spinach, lettuce and nuts. Your body needs it for a variety of purposes including forming cell membranes and manufacturing the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. When it comes to physical activity, low choline stores can affect certain types of athletic performance.
Acetylcholine and Exercise
Neurotransmitters like acetylcholine, which your body makes from choline, carry information from the brain throughout the body. By fostering communication between nerve cells, your body performs all its various tasks required to survive like breathing and digestion. Acetylcholine plays an important role in sparking muscle movement. When this chemical messenger attaches to receptor points on the membranes of the muscle, it prompts the muscles to contract and provides them with the energy for sustained functioning.
Exercise and Choline Stores
In most cases, your body has enough choline to get through a typical bout of exercise such as jogging a few miles. Depleted stores typically only become a problem when exercising for longer periods of time. Physiology expert Owen Anderson, Ph.D, says choline stores typically drop to performance-effecting levels when running marathons or when exercising intensely for two hours or more, as in the case of training for a sport. Unless you are engaging in these types of activities, supplementing with extra choline will probably not offer any performance benefit.
Choline Drops
Choline stores appear to drop significantly during these more intense, prolonged bouts of exercise and which might account, at least in part, for that feeling of extreme fatigue near the end of a bout of exercise, or what people refer to as "hitting the wall." A study of marathon runners that appeared in the "International Journal of Sports Medicine" found that choline stores dropped 40 percent at the end of the race. Anderson notes studies of Boston Marathon runners that found choline stores dropped by half.
Supplementation
If you want to maximize the benefits from choline, you will probably require supplementation. Fitness expert and member of the United Kingdom's governing body on track and field athletics, Brian Mac, recommends taking about 2.5 g an hour before your marathon or prolonged exercise session. He says blood levels can begin to fall again two hours into activity and you might consider taking a second dose to compensate. Anderson says research looking at the effects of choline supplementation on various types of intense exercise have shown it enhanced performance though some studies did not find this benefit. He notes however, that the studies showing no significant effect had elements that might have contributed to inaccurate results such as using too small a dosage. Generally, choline supplementation appears to be safe so it will not hurt to try it, though it can produce unpleasant side effects like diarrhea and foul-smelling gas.
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