In the world of sports and fitness, carbohydrates are often alienated for inducing weight gain and being deemed as ‘inessential’ – absolutely ridiculous. One of the most important aspects of fuelling your body for training is the inclusion of carbohydrates, and we’re going to break down exactly why you should / how to consume carbohydrates in a way that doesn’t mess up your training.

Carbohydrates are the primary energy source from your diet for fuelling moderate to high-intensity exercise, they support the immune system and improve the absorption and utilisation of other supplements such as protein within the body, so suck on that you woke ‘we don’t need carbohydrates’ melons – that’s a fact, not an opinion… know the difference.

So whether you engage in activities like running, cycling, or smashing weights, your muscles rely on the consumption of carbohydrates to provide muscle glycogen (a fuel source) to perform at their best. Glycogen, the stored form of carbohydrates, is especially important during exercise to sustain energy levels and prevent the early onset of fatigue. Glycogen is important for many other aspects, for example, the body’s ability to adapt to exercise i.e. repairing and growing muscle depends on glycogen stores, low glycogen can prevent the mTOR pathway (fancy & confusing) from producing hypertrophic responses to your resistance training. This is because the insulin produced from carbohydrates essentially promotes this fancy mTOR pathway (key for muscle growth & protein synthesis) and provides the storage of key nutrients required for muscle repair and growth.

However, we wouldn’t be scientists if we didn’t consider both sides of the argument, so although the above is true, evidence is mixed, with studies showing adequate protein intake can also improve your body’s ability to repair and grow muscle, theoretically eliminating the need for insulin to promote anabolism (muscle building & repair).

Yet, in the context of performance, glycogen depletion can limit your ability to train hard and train well, particularly during higher-intensity bouts because during moderate to high-intensity exercise, as mentioned, glycogen/glucose will act as the main source of energy. It’s essential that therefore, athletes have adequate glycogen stores before and during workouts.

Right then, all of this is great, but how much exactly should I be having?

Well, it depends.

Hear us out, a universal recommendation of optimal carbohydrate intake wouldn’t be appropriate because people have different goals, volumes, and intensities for their training across microcycles. So the simple answer is: the amount of carbohydrates you need, depends on your intensity of training.

It’s been recommended that athletes should consume around 1 to 4 grams of carbohydrates per kilogram of body weight, 1 to 4 hours before exercise. If you haven’t or can’t eat anything 1 to 4 hours before training then don’t worry, studies have shown that if your volume is less than 8 sets with a duration of 45 minutes or less, then glycogen stores won’t or shouldn’t negatively impact performance, especially with the supplementation of caffeine. However, greater volume or longer sessions will most likely have a reduction in performance.

It’s also important to note that carbohydrate substrates are digested at different rates (oh great… the ‘is a calorie a calorie’ debate, don’t worry we’re not addressing that here, we’ll deal with that silly debate at a later date.). You can digest approximately 60 grams of carbohydrates per house for glucose, sucrose, maltose, and maltodextrin. Fructose and galactose are slower absorbing, so if you supply these two substrates too close to the onset of or during exercise in large amounts it can negatively impact performance and lead to an upset stomach (awww).

An effective strategy instead would be consuming two types of carbohydrates together then, i.e. glucose and fructose at a ratio of 2:1 would be advised, this can increase your approximate absorption rate to 90 grams per hour and prevent your upset tummy (voilà) because they’re absorbed differently.

So that’s before, but what about during and after exercise?

Well, a single resistance training session can reduce muscle glycogen by 24 to 40%, meaning supplementation can counteract this and allow for sustained intensity, however, some studies failed to show the benefits of intra-workout carbohydrate supplementation, so unless you’re doing very prolonged or extremely high intensity/volume sessions (think marathon, ironman), you probably don’t need to.

After exercise though, it’s important to replenish muscle glycogen stores, our muscles are more sensitive to insulin after exercise meaning it’s easier to replenish them up to 2 hours post-exercise. This might be more important if you’re exercising twice in one day with little recovery time between (I’m looking at you hybrid ‘athletes’). In the later phases of recovery (4–24 hours), having an optimal amount of carbohydrates (1.2 g/kg/h, approximately) is more important than the timing of consumption

So to conclude…

Moderate or high-intensity, carbohydrates are your main energy source, and an empty glycogen tank is bound to reduce your performance. If you want to increase performance, then consume enough carbohydrates of a low glycemic index (raises blood glucose levels slower) and have 1 to 4 grams per kilo of body weight, 1 to 4 hours before and a maximum of 90 grams per hour (2:1, glucose:fructose relation) and increase daily intake of carbohydrates to 10 grams per kilogram 24 to 36 hours before a big competition or event, when possible. Finally have a high glycemic index carbohydrate option 2 to four hours after your training session.

We can’t forget the opposite argument to this though, I promise this is the last bit (finally, hooray).

Sometimes training with low glycogen during endurance exercise can be useful to maximise adaptations such as mitochondria production and fatty acid oxidation, however, maintaining this strategy for more than 3 weeks can be detrimental to the immune system, sleep quality, and protein balance, so periodising your nutrition in relation to the intensity of your sessions (higher intensity = higher carbohydrates, lower intensity = lower carbohydrates) can be effective for boosting performance. Well, that was a mouthful, but we hope your next mouthful of carbohydrates is now effectively supplementing your training and you’re no longer winging it.

See you in the next brain dump of information.

Love, Azelus.

Blog source:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6566225