Holmer calls a link "the closest thing to a legal PED"

Brady Holmer posted a single line to X and attached a link. The line reads, "This is the closest thing to a legal PED we have."

Brady Holmer

@Brady_H

X

This is the closest thing to a legal PED we have.

That is the whole post. The text never names the substance, the study or the protocol. There is no number, no dose, no effect size, and no mention of who tested it or in whom. Everything that would make the claim checkable sits behind the attached link rather than in anything Holmer actually wrote.

Why we are not filling in the blank

It would be easy to guess. Holmer writes about performance research most days, and plenty of candidates are floating around the sport, from caffeine to bicarb (sodium bicarbonate, taken to buffer acid in the muscles) to heat work. Guessing is still guessing. As of now nobody has stated in public what the post is pointing at, so naming it here would be us inventing the story rather than reporting it.

"Closest thing to a legal PED" is also a phrase that gets thrown at a lot of things. It is the kind of line that travels well and gets screenshotted without the link, which is exactly how a reader ends up believing a specific supplement has been endorsed when the endorsement was never specific at all.

What it actually means

Right now this is a teaser, not a finding. A claim that strong needs a named intervention and a measured effect, and the post has neither, so there is nothing a runner can act on yet.

Holmer's recent posts give some sense of the territory he works in. He has said a cold plunge before a workout doubled fat burning and that training low on carbs doubled fat oxidation while costing 7 percent power, both claims that came with an actual number attached. This one does not.

If the thing behind the link turns out to be real and specific, it is worth a story. Until someone says what it is, the only fact is that a well read running scientist thinks something deserves that label.