click here decrease in total body mass Changes in body mass reached statistical significance (P < 0.05) for both male and female 24-hour

ultra-MTBers. Compared to women, men’s average decrease in body mass was 1.1 percent points (pp) lower. In ultra-endurance settings where athletes race for hours, days, or weeks without a break during the night, a decrease of body mass is a common finding, in which both fat mass and skeletal muscle mass seemed to decrease [2, 6, 22, 24, SB202190 26]. Changes in fat mass in male and female ultra-MTBers were heterogeneous and did not reach statistical significance (P > 0.05). Nevertheless, men’s change in fat mass was 6.7 pp lower and was related to a decrease in body mass. A better explanation of the higher changes of body mass and fat mass in men could be the reason that their pre-race values of body mass were higher than in women, men were faster than women and also the substrate utilisation during submaximal exercise in endurance-trained athletes differs between the sexes [23, 58], where the contribution of intramyocellular lipids to energy supply during endurance performance could be higher in men compared to women. A decrease in fat mass is expected in an ultra-endurance

performance of approximately two days [26]. Studies on ultra-triathletes [59] and ultra-cyclists [36] reported a decrease in fat mass. The 24-hour ultra-MTBers in the present study had to continuously Selleckchem Go6983 perform for nearly 24 hours, which might explain their great losses in both body mass and fat mass. We assume that adipose subcutaneous tissue was the main energy

source for a long-lasting performance such as a 24-hour MTB race and the ability to use body fat as fuel is important of in a such a type of ultra-endurance performance [23, 26]. In the present study, skeletal muscle mass showed no statistically significant changes in both male and female ultra-bikers. Skeletal muscle mass decreased in ultra-endurance races without breaks [22, 24]. An excessive increase in endurance activities might lead to a reduction in skeletal muscle mass [12, 31]. However, a loss in skeletal muscle mass might be dependent upon race intensity and was not reported for all endurance sports [12]. The decrease in skeletal muscle mass has been demonstrated rather in case reports [15, 22, 24] than in field studies [27, 44, 60], and a decrease in body mass was mainly due to a decrease in fat mass [22, 24, 26] than in skeletal muscle mass, such as in the present study. Furthermore, in a study of an ultra-cycling race over 230 km with 5,500 m of altitude no evidence of exercise-induced skeletal muscle damage was reported [37]. In another study of a 600-km cycling race, again no decrease in skeletal muscle mass was found [36]. Cycling involves predominantly concentric muscle activity which will not lead to skeletal muscle damage, which may explain the lack of skeletal muscle mass loss in cyclists [39, 61].