The NHS recommends that adults do some form of physical activity every day, breaking up extended periods of sitting or lying down. Exercise even just once or twice a week significantly lowers the risk of heart disease and stroke. In order to age healthily and build a body that will last as long as you need it, it's recommended to combine both cardio and the strengthening of your muscles.
With the spring around the corner, the sun making more regular appearances, and the days lengthening, getting outside for some activity is becoming a lot more enjoyable. While the aim for a regular healthy person is 150 minutes of moderate activity in a week, elite runners often average more than 150 kilometres in a week! This would have been part of the training regime of the Chinese female runners who in the 1993 Athletics World Championship won six medals across the 1500m, 3000m and 10,000m, while breaking world records for all three events.
This convincing running dominance naturally led to skepticism and detailed investigations into possible doping. The athletes and coaching team openly discussed their regiment, which included the rare mushroom cordyceps. It has been used in Chinese medicine for centuries, but this was the first case of it being used as a performance-enhancing supplement that is legal. Given the surprising performance boost it appeared to have provided the athletes, a group of scientists carried out clinical trials to either corroborate or disprove the claim. The findings were presented at a conference of the American Physiological Society, and reported that of the 131 non-athletic subjects who took cordyceps extract for 12 weeks, most experienced a rise in their aerobic capacity and a reduction in the time it took them to walk a mile by an average of 29 seconds! Basically, their endurance improvements were significant, allowing them to move quicker, with less effort, and keep going for longer. Although the doping scepticism against the Chinese athletes never fully died down, the study became the first to investigate the use of mushrooms in sport, and undeniably showed a clear link.
Cordyceps
Research since then has continued into Cordyceps, with more clinical trials looking to pinpoint the effect and mechanism into exercise-boosting properties. It is one of the better researched functional mushrooms in terms of its effects on the health of physically active people. Cordyceps is sometimes described as a natural exercise mimetic, since it’s considered to improve performance by increasing blood flow, enhancing oxygen utilisation and acting as an antioxidant. Some evidence suggests that cordyceps may improve oxygen uptake, the so-called VO2 max, which is crucial for endurance athletes. However, there is evidence both for and against this particular effect with no clear weighting in either direction currently. What cordyceps definitely does do, is enhance energy production and help the body remove lactic acid faster. Cordyceps contains a unique compound called cordycepin, which has been shown to increase energy through ATP (adenosine triphosphate) production.
Short term, cordyceps can improve tolerance to high-intensity exercise, making hard sessions more bearable, allowing you to push harder and see better results. It can also have a positive effect on body mass composition, supporting muscle gain and fat mass loss. Longer supplementation, over several months, leads to a significant increase in lactate threshold. This means muscles endure more during the workout, slowing the feeling of fatigue. Improving blood flow to non-exercising skeletal muscles can help the body remove lactic acid faster.
Since the first investigation following the 1993 world champs, a number of clinical studies have been carried out in different groups of test subjects: runners, non-active people, footballers, elderly people. All of these studies show considerable improvement in the subjects following cordyceps supplementation, generally in a dose dependent manner and with more effect when taken over a longer period of time. The study on female footballers revealed a bigger impact on hypoxic training (low oxygen levels in the blood), which indicates that the benefit is linked to the aerobic pathway, possibly through upregulation of gene expression that relates to oxygen transport, glycolysis, and mitochondrial biogenesis.
In addition to the clinical trials exploring the direct effects on human exercise, scientists have also carried out a quite a few mouse model experiments, to try and establish the mechanism through which these benefits occur. One possibility is the gene expression as theorised in the footballer study, another is the presence of adenosine as a compound with beneficial effects on the cardiovascular system. Cordyceps powder in mice also enhanced neuromuscular endurance and exhibited antidepressant activity. Additionally, cordyceps helps to lower cholesterol, so in combination with (normal levels of) exercise, this special fungus should give you better heart health!
Recovery heroes
The saying “no pain, no gain” is actually not far off the mark from a biochemical perspective when it comes to exercise. Working out your muscles actually breaks them down before the body uses protein to rebuild them slightly stronger to resist more next time it goes through that process. This inflammation is a normal physiological response, a sign that your body is repairing micro-tears in the muscle fibres by increasing blood flow and immune cell activity. This is what the soreness you might experience a day or two after a work-out is. Exercise also increases oxidative stress, releasing reactive oxygen species and free radicals. While the benefits of cordyceps largely relate to improvements during the exercise, there are a couple other mushrooms that can also help you out in the recovery stage.
Reishi
Reishi, Lingzhi, or Ganoderma lucidum, can be of use when recovering from exercise, In particular, reishi has prominent anti-inflammatory effects which can help mitigate the soreness in muscles. As well as accelerating recovery, reishi is also known to reduce stress, making it easier to fall asleep and let the body repair itself. This is also backed up by scientific research; for instance one study on mice showed that reishi supplementation for 4 weeks improved both fatigue recovery and exercise performance (measured through grip strength and swimming endurance, and fatigue through the presence of biochemicals like lactate).
Chaga
Similar to reishi, the chaga mushroom also has strong anti-inflammatory properties that can help reduce exercise-induced inflammation and muscle soreness. It is also rich in antioxidants that can aid in overall health and recovery, scavenging for the free radicals caused by the oxidation during exercise. It may help with oxygen supply to cells, too, which can be useful for athletes during periods of heavy endurance training. Chaga is a great immune-booster, and the key to consistent training and progress is to stay healthy, warding off pesky colds that interrupt training. Studies in mice also showed that chaga was able to alleviate the physical fatigue experienced, extending the time the mice could swim, and increased the glycogen (main ATP source) in the liver and muscles, while decreasing lactic acid.
Mushroom magic
The 1993 world champ results sparked both outrage and curiosity, and led to one of the larger avenues in clinical trials of mushrooms, exploring their real-life benefits in people. There is good supporting evidence that they can indeed help push your training to the next level, whether you are an elite athlete, general health nut or just starting out on your activity journey. Research continues into the mechanisms of these benefits to try to understand how exactly mushrooms give you superpowers, and to better isolate the pathways responsible to improve health overall.
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