- Morning Trainiacs.
Over the last, maybe six weeks I've got a lot of questions
about whether I'm still doing low carb
and the answer is yes, but also no.
So the evidence to show
that being able to burn a higher amount of fat
when you are doing endurance events
that are anything longer than about four hours
I.e Half Ironman, cycling events, Ironman races,
it's indisputable that being able to burn
a higher amount of body fat
to get a greater amount of calories like it's beneficial,
there is no way around it.
It's just math.
It's as proven as coffee being delicious.
But what I found over the last couple of years
is that there are ways to get a lot of the benefits
of restricting carbs without a lot of the drawbacks
of restricting carbs.
The first one is that fibers
and resistant starches are carbs.
And when you go into situation
where you are restricting carbohydrates
it's just gonna be really tough
to get a high amount of fiber,
which keeps your gut microbiome in check.
It keeps all of the good bacteria
balanced out with the bad bacteria,
or if you have an infection like I had
where you've got a lot of bad bacteria,
that bad bacteria might take over
when the good bacteria isn't being fed.
So how do you actually get some fiber in
while not blunting your ability to burn fat
and then running out of calories and bunking a race.
The name of the game is to keep your blood sugar low.
And if you keep your blood sugar low,
you are able to burn a higher amount of fat
and UCAN train in a way that burns more fat as fuel.
So things like chia seed, things like overnight oats,
resistant starches, insoluble fibers.
So what I've got here is a chia seed pudding here.
We'll put up a bit of a little recipe over there.
What's in this is three tablespoons of chia seed,
a tablespoon of your favorite nut butter,
a scoop of protein powder, a scoop of athletic greens,
water and some thick coconut milk.
And I have that just about every morning
and it doesn't shoot up my blood glucose tremendously.
And it gives me a lot of good fiber.
A lot of the benefits of carb restrictions
without some of the risks.
So something that I have always done,
regardless of my approach to timing carbs,
restricting carbs, whatever it might be is,
before intense rides, which is what I've got right now,
I've got a intense interval bike ride
that we're doing right now.
I've always had carbs.
You need carbs to hit peak peak levels.
And the carbs historically that I've taken
were UCAN bars.
UCAN is a new sponsor of mine.
This isn't a sponsored video.
I've been recommending UCAN in our books
and as a pre-workout and as a pre-race and an in-race
option for a couple of years.
And it's just now that we're actually doing stuff together.
So they sent a sweet care package.
What I like about UCAN is that
they've got what's called SuperStarch.
SuperStarch is a very fancy carbohydrate
and it digests really, really slowly
and keeps your blood sugar down.
And it was actually developed for diabetic children
who literally couldn't make it through the night
without dying if they didn't eat.
So what happens with UCAN
is you get a source of carbohydrates
but you're not jacking your blood sugar up.
So we get easy delicious carbs
that you also get that nice easy access to energy
without blunting your fat burning.
Historically for all easy workouts
there would be strict carb restriction,
no carbs before definitely lots of calories before,
but no carbs.
And the reason for that is to keep the blood sugar low
so that you can burn more fat.
You can train your body
to increase the amount of fat that you burn
every single minute.
It's also an additional stressor on the body
which allows you to get a little bit more
out of the workout.
But that additional stress
as I'm moving more towards training for health
as opposed to training strictly for performance
is something that I wanna be a little bit cautious of.
I don't wanna give myself too much stress.
Now with UCAN, I've actually done tests
where I had a continuous blood glucose monitor on
and I tested low carb bars like keto bars versus UCAN,
and the blood sugar response was actually
basically the same.
I've also with UCAN get access
to those easy to access carbs.
So if I can get the same blood sugar control
while still being able to burn fat,
while taking a little bit of the stress off my body,
I think I'm going to still get the training benefits
of a restricted carb approach
with just more a carb appropriate approach
and be a little bit healthier
while still getting that ability to burn fat as fuel.
So for most easy rides, easy runs, easy swims,
I'm not taking UCAN before or during
unless it's a super long endurance ride
where I'm gonna need some calories.
But what I will do is when I have a workout
that is two three, four hours long,
and I need some calories,
I don't have to stress anymore about finding a low carb bar.
I can just take UCAN
and make sure that I'm still keeping my blood sugar low
but getting easy access to carbs.
Now we ride.
(upbeat music)
So now that I am appropriately toasted up,
just going to do 30 minutes,
Oh hey, Siri set an alarm for me in 30 minutes,
30 minutes in the sauna space.
So now that workout is done, I need to recover.
So now I have a mixture of carbs plus protein
and I use the UCAN energy plus protein
gets me that nice blood glucose response,
UCAN carbs and a little bit of protein.
I can feel myself getting studly or by the minute.
(soft music)
Okay so let me walk through really, really quickly
what the timed carb approaches that we discuss
in our book "Triathlon Nutrition Foundations."
This is a blog post that we put together with UCAN,
I'll put the link to it in the description below
if you want more information,
and if you want to get a discount on any UCAN products
you can just go to UCAN.co
and use the coupon code Taren for 20% off.
So what we have is two different buckets.
We have a low intensity workout nutrition plan,
high-intensity workout nutrition plan
and then a race nutrition plan.
For a low-intensity workout nutrition plan,
all we say is eat before, definitely eat before
and eat during just don't have carbs before or during
or if you really wanna have carbs
and you don't wanna spike that blood sugar,
then you can use something like UCAN
which does the same thing as if you had restricted carbs,
but definitely eat.
In general I'm not a big proponent
of like really, really extreme diets.
That's why I'm not even calling
what I'm doing anymore low carb,
because even though it was still like
130 to 150 grams of carbs,
people would hear low carb and think keto
and then even take it a step further
and think fasted
instead I'm just calling it a timed carb approach
because sometimes you have some carbs,
sometimes you don't have some carbs.
But for the low intensity workout
you don't wanna spike your blood sugar before or during.
So something like UCAN bar or a protein bar
or if you wanna go natural
like an omelette, something like that.
And then during the workout
you can again have those same bars
or if it's a shorter workout, just the UCAN hydrate
which is nothing but electrolytes and no carbs in it.
Coming down to the high intensity workouts,
you need access to carbs and muscle glycogen
in your muscles.
So in that case, again, you can have carbs
from UCAN while not spiking your blood sugar
or have something like a piece of fruit beforehand.
I recommend somewhere around 30 to 40 grams
of carbohydrates prior to a high intensity workout.
If the workout is 75 minutes or less,
just have some electrolyte powder.
If it's 75 minutes or more
then you can have yourself some carbohydrates.
Getting into the race nutrition plan, what we recommend is
in the six weeks leading up to a race,
you pick the one day per week
that is most similar to a race.
Normally the long bike followed by a brick run
and you make that a race simulation day.
And what you do in that case is
you have a breakfast with all the carbs,
the idea is that you train with low blood sugar
to teach yourself how to burn fat.
So you can get access to that fat as fuel
and then you race with high blood sugar.
So you have access to the fat as fuel
and access to those good sources of carbs.
I like to have carbs that lasts a long time so I use UCAN.
And what I have for breakfast is overnight oats
with a scoop of UCAN powder in there.
Between breakfast and the race start,
I'll have a UCAN bar.
And then we have a calculator that,
I'll put a link to it in the description below
what we did with Omni calculator
that calculates the exact amount of calories you need
during a race or during your training.
And you just have that in equal intervals.
And in this case, again, you have it from carbs.
You take fluids in a sip every about five minutes
at a rate of about one bottle per hour.
If you are burping a lot,
probably bring it down a little bit or switch to water.
Or if you're feeling thirsty, ramp it up a little bit.
For the run you wanna stick to fluids for your calories.
So something like a gel.
UCAN again, has UCAN in form of a gel.
I like to use on a race course.
I'll actually just grab one handful of Coke,
one handful of water, sip each,
have a little bit of a tube of electrolytes in my pocket
which I'll actually use from again UCAN
like I use UCAN a lot.
And I have for a lot of years
long before they were a sponsor.
Now if in your training
you've done the low intensity workouts with low blood sugar,
you're gonna be able to access as much as
three times more energy from your stored fat in a race.
You're gonna need that for a Half Ironman
or an Ironman certainly
like just the way the math works out,
you need to be able to access that fat as fuel
and you can't do it
if you're just having carbs all the time.
For low intensity workouts, keep that blood sugar low.
That good aerobic capacity and that good ability to burn fat
then gives you the ability to absorb
the high intensity workouts and actually get faster.
And if you are giving your body a lot of blood sugar,
a lot of muscle glycogen availability,
you can hit higher peaks so you're going to get faster.
Then you go into the race
and execute the race with the right nutrition plan,
there's almost no reason that you should be slowing down
or not showing the total depth
of your fitness that you've built.
You still have to do the training,
but nutrition isn't going to hold you back.
Now, if you want more info,
you can go and get
the "Triathlon Nutrition Foundations" book.
We did a book on running foundations.
We did bike foundations.
We did swimming foundations.
We did nutrition foundation
which is stuck at the border because of COVID.
We can't actually get the physical copies for our own book.
And if you want a full training plan
with the time carb approach,
put into every single workout
what you should be having
how many calories you should be having
whether you should have carbs or not for a certain workout,
go to our app where we include that
in all of our recommended training at app.mymottiv.com.
That is it for today.
Still have carbs.
Just choose your times, choose your moments.
You choose your moments
when you go super super hard in training.
So choose your moments when you need carbs
to go super super hard.
But don't restrict them.
Don't restrict a lot.
You do you. Enjoy life.
Carbs are super enjoyable they're delicious.
Later Trainiacs.