Post: #1

The title is from the article I was reading. I am not sure if this article is valid which is why I am posting it here. I was always under the impression that carbs right after heavy lifting was very beneficial.

I am doing RFL but messing with it around the edges.

I was googling to find out if carbs right after a workout, really count toward that stay under 50 g carbs benchmark in RFL. I know, I'm screwing around. But I was under the impression that carbs taken within 30 mins just get used right away.

But then I stumbled across this article which makes it seem like carbs post lifting is not a great idea. Any advice is appreciated. As I am getting older, I am trying to be better about eating. I used to eat just everything and stay in decent shape but it is getting harder. Thanks.

Quote:Taking in carbohydrates in the post-workout period has long been seen as an essential component of your muscle-building regimen. As I research though, it seems that post-workout carbs will have no impact. Learn more.

Taking in carbohydrates in the post-workout period has long been seen as an essential component of your muscle-building regimen. The more I research though, the more likely it seems that post-workout carbohydrates will have no impact or may even be counter-productive.

Please note that this advice does not apply to a higher carb diet like the 40/30/30 Glycemic Load approach. For that diet, work out the amount of post-workout carbs needed and stick to it.

First we'll look at the reasons why I've made this decision and then the logical implications following it.

1 NO BENEFITS TO PROTEIN SYNTHESIS
A study shows that the inclusion of carbohydrate in post-workout shake does not increase protein synthesis.

The following study took place in the Netherlands, the subjects being healthy young men. What was great about this study was that it was truly scientific in that it split the men into 3 groups, each ingesting different combinations of protein & carbohydrates. Therefore the only variable was the level of carbohydrate.

Each group performed resistance training for 60 minutes and was given either protein or a combination of protein and carbohydrate each hour for 6 hours after training. The amount of protein for all the groups was 0.3g per kg of bodyweight. The protein and carbs varied as follows:

Group 1 - Just protein, no carbs
Group 2 - Protein with 0.15g per kg of body weight of carbohydrate
Group 3 - Protein with 0.6g per kg of body weight of carbohydrate
Protein synthesis rates were then measured for 6 hours after training. The results?

The intake of protein after training increases protein synthesis.
The addition of carbohydrate (whether in small or large amounts) to this protein did not further increase protein synthesis at all. That may be surprising, but in my opinion it's great news, especially for the carb-cycling MuscleHackers.

2 THE IMPACT OF CARBS ON GROWTH HORMONE
Growth hormone levels are elevated after resistance training. It's well known that as insulin levels increase in the body, growth hormone decreases. A large spike in insulin will occur with the ingestion of high GI post-workout carbs. Therefore, it would seem that carb intake after resistance training may be counter-productive.

(I'm still searching for a study in respect to the above point. The only study I could find suggested that carbs AND protein post workout did not blunt growth hormone release. What is needed is an approach similar to the study above which isolates the variables - e.g. would protein ingestion alone have a more favorable impact on growth hormone levels?) Therefore, at the moment, this is intuitive.

3 IMPACT OF POST-WORKOUT CARBS ON FAT-OXIDATION
Obviously if you are taking time to refill your muscle glycogen stores with carbohydrate after a workout, you are reducing the amount of fatty acids your body will use to provide the energy it needs.

In order to keep fat-oxidation (using fat for energy, whether from body-fat or food) at maximum levels, it would make sense to leave the carbs out of your post-workout shake. In doing so you encourage the body to tap into it's stored fat.

SO, WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS OF THIS INFORMATION?
It makes the cyclical ketogenic diets easier to follow. Let's say that your daily carb intake Monday - Friday is 40 grams. You now won't lose 5 - 15 grams in a post-workout shake. You can spread those extra carbs throughout the day or have in one meal - e.g. you may feel you benefit from more carbs in you pre-workout meal.
Increased fat-burning. For the whole of the low-carb period, you now encourage the use of fatty acids for energy.

Possibly increased growth hormone levels throughout the low-carb period of a carb-cycling bodybuilding diet.

The exclusion of post-workout carbs seems to be a very positive move indeed. If you are worried about depleted glycogen levels, remember that you re-fill these 'storage tanks' during the weekend, and you are always free to have a mid-week carb spike if you feel your workouts are beginning to suffer towards the end of the working week.

REFERENCES
Am J Physiol Endocrinol Metab. 2007 Sep;293:E833-E842

https://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/ditch_p..._carbs.htm

Post: #2

A few things to unpack here.

To start off, with eating carbs regardless if it is pre, post or intra workout still count as carbs. Your workout will burn a certain amount of calories so while it may seem like they don't count because you'll be in a fuel deficit they still absolutely do.

Further more depending on when in the day your workout happens eating carbs post workout may actually be harming your ability to maintain a desired weight. For example, if you workout at 5-6pm eating carbs might be bad because you probably aren't going to be doing very much for the rest of your day so unless your metabolic rate is crazy high those carbs might get turned into fat. (Also considering how many total carbs you have allotted for the day)

The article is very good and has solid information but it gives too much of the science for a regular person to understand and act upon.

It's always been a general rule that your post workout meal should mostly consist of protein. Proteins help your body repair to the damaged muscle tissue from the workout you just had.

Also the thing to keep in mind is "Protein synthesis" the action of your body using the protein you have in your system to repair muscle tissue happens randomly. Mostly of the time it's during when you sleep, but can also happen in the middle of the day, and the process is short like around 15 to 20 minutes.

Also unfortunately the common knowledge idea that you need to consume 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight doesn't mean anything. I personally think it was put out there by the supplement companies to get people to buy their protein powder products.

In reality, it will only use what is available. So if there is not enough protein in the system it will go break down fat and carbs to repair the tissue. So while it is a good idea to consume alot of protein when you are looking to gain size/strength keep in mind that anything that the body doesn't use will be converted into fat stores. (The body will break down fat stores or carbs in the blood to get branch chain amino acids. The building blocks of muscles.)
It is better consume protein throughout the day and have a steady stream of protein in the body, just in case your body wants to start Protein synthesis while your at work.

Eating carbs or food in general an hour or 2 before your workout is bs and it doesn't do anything for your energy levels during the workout.
Its a placebo effect.
In reality, the food you ate 10-14 hours earlier will be the deciding factor. When you eat food your body goes and checks to see if the glycogen stores in your muscles are full or not. If they are not full then they use the food (protein, fat, carbs) to fill up the glycogen stores to prepare you for the next time you have intense physical activity ie working out. This process takes around 12hrs give or take. Anything that your body cannot use to refill the stores gets converted to fat.

Some may say what about pre-workout shakes, caffeine etc. Those are stimulants. They directly stimulate the CNS putting you in an energized state but it is not unlike a "paper tiger". Wherein you feel like you have so much energy to lift but once it wears off you crash hard.

Just like your test levels you cannot tell what your growth hormone levels are without blood testing. It is pointless to mention because it's not realistic to be getting blood tests 4 times a day to see if you're body has elevated insulin levels or not.

I personally like to get my carbs in in the first half of my day because i workout 1st thing in the morning. The amount if carbs i eat is dictated by what kind of work out I'm doing that day which i will know the night before when I'm prepping all my food.
If i'm looking to maintain size and bf% i'm ok with going to bed a little bit hungry. I'll drink water and green tea instead.

Post: #3

The reason for eating carbohydrates post workout is to replenish your glycogen stores.

You may already know this samsamsam, but for those who are reading, I'm going to give a quick overview of glycogen and energy storage in the body.

The body has two main ways to store energy: fat and glycogen. These are chemically two very different compounds. Fat is made from three fatty acids attached to a glycerol backbone. Glycogen is made up of a branching chain of glucose (sugar) molecules all attached together.

As a result of their different chemistry, they have different properties. Fat is more energy efficient by almost a factor of two. For this reason the body prefers to store excess energy as fat. However, glycogen has its own advantages. Because it is made of glucose molecules, which the body is very good at metabolizing, glycogen is faster for the body to burn up and get energy from. For this reason, glycogen is stored within the muscles to provide readily accessible energy when you are working out.

So when you are working out, your body breaks down its supply of glycogen within the muscles in order to provide fuel to power your muscles. If you don't have any glycogen in your muscles, it's still possible to work out, and your body will burn fat to power the muscles. However, it's harder (maybe impossible) to work out at the same level of intensity if your bodies glycogen stores are depleted. This is a well know phenomenon for marathon runners. Typically marathon runners cannot store enough glycogen in their muscles to last them the whole race. So at some point (usually around the 20th mile) they "hit the wall," which is their body switching from burning glycogen to burning fat.

With that as an introduction, let's look at the three points of the article:
1. No benefits to protein synthesis
The results of this study are not surprising, but the results don't really address the issue. The reason you eat carbs post-workout is to replenish your glycogen stores so that your next workout is better. This study appears to have only looked at a single workout. If study participants came to their one workout with full glycogen stores, then it makes perfect sense that carbs aren't going to affect protein synthesis after that workout. If they had done another workout, the no carb group probably wouldn't have been able to workout as intensely which could affect muscle synthesis.

2. The impact of carbs on growth hormone
I had never heard of this. It could be true, but the author couldn't find a study to back this up so I'd take it with a grain of salt. Also even if it were true, it's possible that the change in intensity would counteract any growth hormone benefit.

3. Impact of post-workout carbs on fat-oxidation
This stuff is all obviously true. If your body doesn't have glycogen to burn then it will burn fat.


Whether this is a good idea for you or not depends on your fitness goals.

If you just want to burn as much fat as possible, it might make sense to try no carbs after workouts. However, even then, if your workouts are shit because you don't have any glycogen, then you may lose muscle mass, which could make weight loss more difficult.

If you care about sparing as much muscle mass as possible, then I wouldn't recommend skipping carbs post-workout. However, you may want to give it a try and see how it affects your next workout. If you cut out the post-work out carbs, and you can still lift with the same level of intensity in your next workout, then there's probably not much benefit for you to keep having carbs post-workout.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any further questions.

Post: #4

Carbohydrate needs post workout are relative to glycogen useage during the work out.

Whey itself causes enough of an insulin spike that you don't need to use carbs post workout. However I really reccomend a simple carb paired with a fat (cream of rice with peanut butter is fine) 90 minutes pre workout to stabilise blood sugar during the work out, followed by highly branched cyclic dextrins paired with hydrolyzed casein DURING the work out.

The pre + intra nutrition is far more effective than post workout if you can handle the cost of HBCD with Hydrolyzed casein.

It's all relative to how hard you grind in your work out. The harder you go the more you have to gain DURING and AFTER the work out by solid pre and intra nutrition

Post: #5

Cool article. Here is a blog post I found a while back related to increasing HGH and there's a note about avoiding sugar specifically post workout to improve HGH levels:

"Avoid sugar after workouts. Consuming sugar (especially fructose) within 2 hours post workout will cause your hypothalamus to release somatostatin, which will decrease your production of HGH. Simple sugars that are high-glycemic also spike insulin levels. Not only does this lead to body fat storage, but it severely decreases the release of growth hormone."

http://www.thebodywellusa.com/dr-mike-ca...naturally/

Post: #6

(05-26-2017 08:22 PM)Steelex Wrote:  Carbohydrate needs post workout are relative to glycogen useage during the work out.

Whey itself causes enough of an insulin spike that you don't need to use carbs post workout. However I really reccomend a simple carb paired with a fat (cream of rice with peanut butter is fine) 90 minutes pre workout to stabilise blood sugar during the work out, followed by highly branched cyclic dextrins paired with hydrolyzed casein DURING the work out.

The pre + intra nutrition is far more effective than post workout if you can handle the cost of HBCD with Hydrolyzed casein.

It's all relative to how hard you grind in your work out. The harder you go the more you have to gain DURING and AFTER the work out by solid pre and intra nutrition

Thanks. Does it have to be that precise? Any natural foods that you could recommend? I may not have access to dextrins w/ hydrolyzed cassein.

It really is critical to eat before lifting?

Thanks.

Post: #7

(06-03-2017 12:28 PM)samsamsam Wrote:  

(05-26-2017 08:22 PM)Steelex Wrote:  Carbohydrate needs post workout are relative to glycogen useage during the work out.

Whey itself causes enough of an insulin spike that you don't need to use carbs post workout. However I really reccomend a simple carb paired with a fat (cream of rice with peanut butter is fine) 90 minutes pre workout to stabilise blood sugar during the work out, followed by highly branched cyclic dextrins paired with hydrolyzed casein DURING the work out.

The pre + intra nutrition is far more effective than post workout if you can handle the cost of HBCD with Hydrolyzed casein.

It's all relative to how hard you grind in your work out. The harder you go the more you have to gain DURING and AFTER the work out by solid pre and intra nutrition

Thanks. Does it have to be that precise? Any natural foods that you could recommend? I may not have access to dextrins w/ hydrolyzed cassein.

It really is critical to eat before lifting?

Thanks.

No it's not critical or precise.

The cream of rice with peanut butter or almond butter 90 mins pre work out is a really cheap thing you can get a lot of benefit out of. Thats fairly natural. It tends to clear the gut quickly yet causes a slow and controlled insulin release which is anti catabolic, as well as getting glucose into the blood and into the muscle over the whole work out. The idea is to get this process rolling before the work out starts.

For a lot of larger or more muscular lifters, they can go into a state of low blood sugar after 1-2 sets of heavy squats or deads, which can be a terrible feeling during training. We avoid that by using the slow release combo of peanut butter and cream of rice.

The HBCD and Hydrolyzed casein intra work out combo is excellent but there isn't a decent substitute. Bcaas and dextrose works alright but stays in the stomach too long. The hydrolyzed casein and HBCD mixes light, thinner than Gatorade, and leaves the stomach as fast as water does. That's excellent during a work out when we want to keep blood flow away from the digestive tract and into the muscles.

Post: #8

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4125607/
Though this relates to crossfitters and not bb's it still is a pretty precise study concerning pre and post carbs/protein.

I agree with steeelex. I've been preaching cpwo (carblesspost workout) forever now. Basically in a nutshell insulin sensitivity is increased during a workout for the next 36 hours! Or, until the body ingest Carbs. This insulin sensitivity is heightened by training fasted. (With the exception of 10g of bcaa's or efa's) But a lot of people are affraid of the idea. So if your new to dieting then I would recommend steelex's idea. If not, workout fasted (with the exception of 10g's of bcaa's, efa's) and don't ingest ANY carbs until 90 mins PRIOR to your next workout. I recommend trying it both ways (eat carbs immediately post workout for 90 days than 0 carbs until your next workout (90 mins prior) for 90 days) and report back with the diffrence.

From personal experience, cpwo is a very effective way to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time on either a cut or a bulk. Remember, if you try cpwo, it will not be easy. Took me a year to get everything down.