Hey I'm Dr. Jason Barker with the Natural Athlete's Clinic.
Are you still carb loading before a big race?
Well if you are, I'm going to hopefully convince you that you don't need to do that anymore
because it's kind of fallen out of favor and there are more efficient ways of getting energy
on-board now.
So, I got the idea for this video because my kids are in high school sports right now
and I've noticed before every swim meet they've had this winter, the parents have organized
a big pasta dinner the night before so they can be all loaded up on carbs so they have
energy the next day.
Well before I tell you about that, I'm going to give you a little history about carb loading.
So it was kind of discovered in the 1960's by a couple scandinavian researchers who were
interested in looking at glycogen stores in rested versus exercised muscles.
Now glycogen is your body's primary stored form of fuel.
It's derived from carbohydrates, it's packed in our muscles and it's packed in our liver
and we've got about 24 hours worth of glycogen stores sitting around in our body so that
we have that immediate source of fuel before we dip into other energy sources like our
fat.
So, back to the researchers what they did was some one-legged exercises to exhaustion
and did some muscle biopsies.
They found of course in the exercised muscle that it was depleted of glycogen.
Then what they did was a three day heavy carbohydrate diet, repeated those biopsies and they found
that low and behold in that exercised muscle that the glycogen stores were about one and
a half times that in that rested muscle.
So this gave the idea that depleting glycogen, loading up on carbs and then you would be
super compensated with glycogen.
So they did some more studies, athletes started using this and carb-loading was born.
At the risk of dating myself back when I was in high school running track and cross country
competitively - this is when they started giving us the pasta dinners the night before.
And you still see this going on today whether it's a 5k, a 10k, anything like that, you
almost always get a ticket to go to the pasta feed dinner the night before.
So the problem with this is there is two of them - even if you are going at race pace,
a competitive pace, you've got enough glycogen on board to fuel you for about 75 to 90 minutes
before that glycogen depletion becomes a limiting energy factor in your body.
So in other words, you've got enough energy on board right now.
If you've eaten regularly over the last week or so to go out and run as hard as you can,
you don't need to replace with a sports drink or a bar or a gel or anything else like that.
So you've got enough energy to do that.
The other issue is that when you carb load like that, for every gram of glycogen that
your body creates, you are going to store about 2.7 grams of water.
So this means that if you went to the pasta dinner last night and loaded up on a bunch
of carbs, you are going to weigh about another 2 to 3 percent more because your body has
held onto that extra water.
So waking up, feeling kind of bloated and logy and trying to run a 5k or 10k is going
to be detrimental to your time and your performance so my suggestion is skip the carbo load.
Just eat a regular diet.
Now one thing you need to pay attention to though is what we are focusing on these days
is making the right carbohydrates available for the right situation.
So if you've got a race in the morning, you may need to wake up four hours before and
eat some food to replace the glycogen that you just burned as a matter of course of metabolism
over the course the last twelve hours that you have been fasting.
OK because you can loose about 50% of that glycogen overnight just sleeping.
So if you wake up, you are already at a little bit of a deficit.
So you eat a few hours before so you've got time to assimilate it.
Then you're topped off before you go and run that race and of course if you are going to
be running or racing or riding or doing whatever for more than an hour to hour and fifteen,
you know 90 minutes, you need to have those carbs readily available.
And that's having a bar or a gel or something like that.
So this is going to help you be more efficient in your energy availability.
You are not going to be watered down with excess water on board and you're going to
have a cleaner and sharper performance if you do that.
Now what this video is not about is about fat adaptation and skipping carbs entirely.
That's a whole nother subject.
So this is primarily based on carb loading only.
So hopefully you can use some of these ideas.
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Share it with your carb loading buddies especially the ones who like to go to the dinners before
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