Training With Carbs – Solving the Intra-Workout Nutrition Puzzle

Workout nutrition can be a royal bitch to figure out. When you’re trying to plot out an intelligent diet and supplement plan that optimizes your training gains, it can seem like the story you’re getting from the experts changes every week.

First, they’ll tell you to eat carbs before, during, and after every workout. Then they’ll advise you to avoid them and do all your training in a fasted state. Throw in a healthy dose of the latest top-secret pre-workout super-enhancer, and you’re left with a confusing jumble of conflicting advice that gets you nowhere fast.

The latest big debate in the fitness world pertains to whether adding carbohydrates to your intra-workout drink will help or hurt your results. To properly address this, we first need to define a term you’ve probably been hearing quite a bit lately: Peri-workout nutrition.

Peri-Workout Nutrition

The prefix peri- means “around,” and peri-workout nutrition refers to the periods before, during, and after your workouts. The good news for you here is that the hormonal and metabolic changes caused by resistance training make it possible—and even easy—to manipulate your peri-workout nutrition and tailor it to match your goals. This can be done in a wide variety of ways.

What Do You Want From Your Workouts?

Before we start putting together an intra-workout or peri-workout nutrition plan, however, you’ll need to decide exactly what you’re after, and what you want to get out of the foods you’re eating. Is it fat loss? Improved recovery? Muscle gain? If you’re smart, all three will appeal to you simultaneously—and if that’s the case, you don’t have a ton of wiggle room in terms of your supplementation. Yes, it’s possible to significantly improve your physique by capitalizing on these time periods, but you need to do this the right way.

Unfortunately for all of us, there isn’t a hell of a lot of research yet when it comes to consuming carbohydrates during resistance training. We’re packed to the gills with studies on aerobic exercise, but as usual, few researchers concern themselves with finding ways for people to get huge through real science. We can, however, take what we do know about intra-workout nutrition and combine it with our knowledge of physiology to extrapolate some educated conclusions that will help.

Intra-Workout Science

Carbohydrates are highly effective at causing insulin spikes in the human body. Insulin is a hormone that serves multiple purposes, but its most immediate effect is the lowering of blood glucose levels. It’s important to note here that all foods spike insulin to some degree, and not just carbs. Fatty acids, certain amino acids—leucine, in particular—and certain gastrointestinal (GI) hormones all elicit insulin responses. In other words, when you eat that burrito bowl from your local Chipotle, your blood glucose levels rise, and your body starts secreting insulin.

Insulin decreases the levels of glucose in your blood by way of GLUT-4, a transport protein that moves to the surface of cells to allow your muscle and fat cells to suck up the glucose in your bloodstream. Too much glucose in your blood can potentially be toxic, and if that glucose is left to float around on its own for too long, you won’t like what it does to your health. Insulin also increases the synthesis of glycogen, fatty acids, and protein—and it decreases the breakdown of all three, as well.

Carbs Between Sets

The first benefit of intra-workout carbohydrates is a significant one: They’ve been found to inhibit protein breakdown. Because insulin can stimulate protein synthesis and halt protein breakdown, it’s often referred to as “anabolic and anti-catabolic.” Any mention of catabolism tends to terrify people—although it shouldn’t—so the idea that insulin is anti-catabolic will sound pretty appealing to most. From a practical standpoint, this is seemingly a no-brainer: Less protein breakdown combined with more protein synthesis will yield the net positive protein balance necessary to gain tissue.

There’s a problem with this, though. It’s very easy to forget that one of insulin’s other main actions is the inhibition of lipolysis. Lipolysis is the breakdown of fat, and depending on your goals, this could present you with serious difficulties. If you want fatty acids to be released during your workouts, insulin will get in your way.

Even if reducing body fat is your ultimate goal, you probably shouldn’t view your resistance training as your primary means of burning fat. Fat loss occurs when you create the right environment through your diet, and not during your training sessions, no matter how intense they happen to be. Regardless of what you do in the gym, you need for lipolysis to overwhelm lipogenesis—the creation of fat—if you want a set of six-pack abs.

Feeling Down?

Every time you set foot in the gym, you’re a different person. This means your training readiness will fluctuate on a hourly basis because it’s affected by your stress levels, nutrition, and recovery from previous workouts. Some days you’ll be flying around the gym, and some days you’ll drag. When you’re having a “low” day, ingesting intra-workout carbs can give you the kind of quick-surge energy that can turn a horrible workout around in a hurry.

To Build Muscle:

Intra-workout carb consumption gives you a window to increase your daily carbohydrate intake at a time where carbs are less likely to be stored as fat. It’s extremely difficult to gain mass while you’re limiting your carbs, so it’s beneficial to keep your intake as high as possible while still keeping fat in check.

When you’re within a dieting period that allows you to add intra-workout carbs, use simple sources like coconut water or glucose tabs. Your sources here should be easy-to-ingest carbs with a fast digestion rate. Other popular choices include dextrin, Gatorade, and Vitargo. Keep your dosage at a moderate level—20-50 grams should be plenty.

A study from the International Journal of Sports Medicine compared the effect of a carbohydrate + electrolyte intra-workout feeding vs. a placebo drink in a 60 minute bout of high intense cycling. What they found was that performance was improved in the carb + electrolyte group by 2.3% and the cyclists completed their set amount of work almost a full 2 minutes ahead of the placebo group. Part of the reason I recommend coconut water is not only for the carbohydrates but the electrolytes (sodium, potassium) it provides.

Also, keep in mind that if, in addition to your intra-workout carbs, you’ve consumed a balanced pre-workout meal containing carbs, you don’t need to rush into a heavy, carb-laden post-workout meal. At this point, your body will contain an ample supply of nutrients, and your glycogen stores won’t be as depleted as usual.

To Lose Fat:

As discussed previously, both fat loss and muscle gain are functions of the entirety of your diet. What you do in your peri-workout windows matters, but everything else you do throughout the day is far more important. When fat loss is your main goal, you’ll probably want to skip intra-workout carbs altogether. Stick to amino acids for your intra-workout nutrition and save the carbs for when you’re ready to focus on building muscle again. There are two reasons for this.

First, ingesting carbs during your workouts will inhibit fat oxidation, meaning you won’t burn much fat while you’re training. Next, if you’re constantly replenishing your glycogen stores throughout your sessions, your muscle and liver stores won’t be as depleted as they typically would be post-workout. This will have a small effect on reducing insulin sensitivity, but it’ll also limit insulin responsiveness, a quality that requires glycogen depletion. An increase in post-workout insulin sensitivity will lead to supercompensation when carbohydrates are introduced.

In a recent study from the Journal of Applied Physiology, the researchers had two groups of volunteers perform 6 week endurance training. One group was fed carbohydrates prior to and during the training and the other group trained fasted. In the fasted group, intramyocellular lipid (IMCL) breakdown was enhanced in both type 1 and type IIa fibers yet this wasn’t seen in the carbohydrate group. Also, the fasted group experienced a much higher rate of fat oxidation compared to carbohydrate (21%vs6%). The fasted group but not carbohydrate, prevented exercise-induced drop in blood glucose.

Things change somewhat if you’re resistance training in a fasted or depleted state. Ideally, you’ll want to start your workouts with full energy stores, but this occasionally won’t happen. When you’re faced with this situation, you’ll want to take just enough fast-acting carbs to get you through your training session. The same holds true for diets that allow carbs only before, during, or after workouts. Intra-workout carbs can be extremely useful in scenarios where most of your day is spent with low insulin levels.

It’s Not Magic

Chances are you’ve been led to believe that nutritional programming is a world of absolutes, and that every step of the process is set in stone. The best thing you can do for your training—and for your appearance—is to drop this notion immediately. Contrary to popular belief, there’s no magic 30 minute window where you’re completely anabolic, nor do you have to eat every two or three hours in order to keep making progress. This is bro-science at its worst, and both of these “principles”—and many more just like them—have been proven to be completely inaccurate.

The main idea here is that you want to promote proper blood flow, hydration, and nutrition to fuel and rebuild your muscle during the course of your workouts. This requires a synergistic blend of nutrients that includes intra-workout carbs at the levels I’ve prescribed. To optimize this protocol, couple your intra-workout carbs with a blend of amino acids—specifically leucine. It’s the perfect anabolic signaler, and ingesting 5-6 grams during your workouts will give you noticeable gains in size, strength, and overall performance.

If you’re trying to shed fat in a hurry, cycle off your intra-workout carbs for a while and focus on leucine as your main consumption target during workouts. To add mass without excess fat, combine your amino acids with a solid intra-workout carb regimen, and watch your workout intensity go through the roof.