Endurance supplements that worked for older women flopped in older men

Ageing changes physical and physiological capacity, and while regular training can blunt much of that decline, older people are also at greater risk of falling short on nutrition. That combination has created a market of supplements pitched at older exercisers, most of it built on evidence gathered in young athletes. Whether those products actually help endurance performance in older bodies, and whether they help men and women equally, is a separate question that has rarely been asked directly. This review set out to gather what evidence exists on nutritional strategies paired with endurance exercise in older populations.

The authors conducted a systematic review following the PRISMA statement, searching three databases: PubMed, Web of Science and SPORTDiscus. They looked for studies combining nutritional strategies or supplementation with endurance exercise in older people. Eight studies met the inclusion criteria and were synthesised narratively rather than pooled, since the interventions and outcomes varied. The supplements covered included caffeine, beta-alanine with protein, beta hydroxy methyl butyrate, sodium bicarbonate, ubiquinone, and amino acids including lysine and arginine.

Caffeine, and beta-alanine taken with protein, were found beneficial in both sexes. In older women, a balanced diet, increased protein, HMB supplementation and sodium bicarbonate supplementation all looked favourable, and bicarbonate, HMB, lysine and arginine showed positive effects on exercise performance. In older men, by contrast, no benefit was seen from sodium bicarbonate or from ubiquinone. The authors conclude that supplements should be prescribed according to individual characteristics and the person's physical activity, rather than assumed to work across the board.

Most supplement research is done in young, trained people, so a review focused on older exercisers fills a genuine gap, and the apparent split between men's and women's responses to sodium bicarbonate is the most striking pattern here. But eight studies is a very thin base, the interventions were heterogeneous, and no pooled estimate was possible, so none of these findings carries the weight of a large meta-analysis. Whether the sex differences reflect real physiology or simply which trials happened to be run remains open. Larger trials in older men and women, tested under the same protocols, are the obvious next step.

If you are an older endurance exerciser, the most defensible signals here are for caffeine and for protein combined with beta-alanine, which showed benefits in both sexes. The finding that sodium bicarbonate helped women but not men is a useful reminder that supplement evidence from one group does not automatically transfer to another, including from young athletes to older ones. Ubiquinone showing no benefit in older men is worth knowing before spending money on it for performance. With only eight studies behind all of this, treat every one of these signals as provisional.