Fasting and Early-Morning Workouts
It would be unfair to leave you with the idea that your performance will be absolutely impaired if you skip breakfast before an early-morning workout. Indeed, itis crazy to think you should get up at 4 a.m. to eat before your 5 a.m. training run(at least the women’s soccer team told me it was). Oh, better make that 3 a.m. soyou can have time to adequately hydrate.In truth, eating before an early-morning workout is not always necessary.Research and intuition hold that the preevent meal is more likely to make a difference the longer and more intense your training session or race and if you paid little attention to your nutrition for a couple of days before the event.I have established what I call the three-to-four flat rule for my early-morning runs.
If I have eaten well the day before and am adequately hydrated, I can run an easy three to four miles (5-6 km) on just a few sips of water and feel fine. If I run a little harder, a large glass of a fluid-replacement beverage or diluted fruit juice holds me over. But if I run four miles or more, I need to get out of bed a little earlier so I have time for a light carbohydrate breakfast 45 to 60 minutes before Irun. The same goes for hilly workouts. Figuring out a similar rule or set of personal guidelines might be beneficial. It lets you know your limitations and may even give you a few extra moments of valuable sleep.
Carbohydrate Loading and Nutrition the Week Before Competition
Carbohydrate loading, or glycogen supercompensation,as it is also called, is practiced by many endurance athletes and sometimes other athletes for the purpose of elevating their muscle-glycogen stores above normal before a major competition or event. Indeed, this practice has been found to improve performance in male athletes performing endurance exercise lasting more than 90 minutes. Performance improvement in female athletes has also been noted but not as consistently as in male athletes.Glycogen supercompensation is different from simply eating a high-carbohydrate diet before competition in that it requires the athlete to follow a diet-and-exercise protocol for five to seven days before the chosen competition.
The early classic carbohydrate-loading protocol of the 1960s and 1970s included a depletion phase that typically required the athlete to exercise until near exhaustion the week before competition and then eat a diet very low in carbohydrate (less than 10 percent of energy) for three days. This was followed by three days of a high-carbohydrate(approximately 80 to 90 percent of energy) diet.
Modified protocols that include a training taper, which may or may not begin with a depletion bout of exercise, have been developed more recently because the three-day low-carbohydrate phase produced negative side effects, including weakness, irritability, carbohydrate cravings, and susceptibility to infection. The modified protocols simply involve following a typical carbohydrate diet (55 to 60 percent of energy) until three days before competition and then switching to a high-carbohydrate diet while at the same time tapering.
Although omitting the depletion phase and simply following a high-carbohydrate diet, compared to a lower-carbohydrate diet, for several days before competition has been noted to improve performance during running, soccer, and other sports, this type of regimen is not truly carbohydrate loading because it simply ensures that glycogen stores are adequate rather than supercompensated at the start of exercise.As an endurance athlete, then, how do you carbohydrate load? Unfortunately,there is no definitive answer. Despite numerous studies, there is no set and agreed-on protocol for muscle-glycogen loading.
Two recent studies have also produced nearly conflicting conclusions about the correct diet and training regimen for glycogen loading. One study found that an exhaustive taper is necessary in order to maximize the glycogen supercompensation effects. Male athletes in this study either performed a glycogen-depleting exercise (120 minutes of moderate cycling followed by 1 minute sprints to exhaustion) or a nondepleting exercise(20 minutes of moderate cycling) before following a high-carbohydrate diet that provided 9 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight for seven days.
The muscle-glycogen content of the athletes in the glycogen-depleting exercise group was elevated by 138 percent of baseline on day three and by 147 percent on days five through seven; whereas, the muscle glycogen in the group that exercised for 20 minutes was elevated by 124 percent of baseline on day three and declined between days three and seven to a value similar to baseline. The athletes were allowed to exercise for just 20 minutes daily during the weeklong loading phase.
The second study found that a short-term bout of high-intensity exercise followed by a high carbohydrate intake enabled athletes to attain supercompensated muscle-glycogen levels within 24 hours.In this study, male athletes performed a short sprinting regimen on a stationary bike, consisting of 150 seconds of above-maximal effort followed by 30 seconds of all-out cycling,and then one day of a high-carbohydrate diet that emphasized high-GI foods and provided 10.3 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight. Muscle glycogen stores were found to increase on the order of 80 percent in all muscle fibers during this 24-hour regimen.
This was comparable to or higher than those reported during two- to six-day regimens.As you can see from these two studies—one stating that a long taper is necessary for glycogen supercompensation and the other stating that supercompensation can be achieved in 24 hours after intense exercise and high carbohydrate intake—it is difficult to make specific suggestions. And this is particularly true for females because both of the studies were conducted on men. Because both protocols seem to have an influence on supercompensating glycogen stores, athletes may want to select the most convenient protocol. However, it is still believed that athletes should not perform true glycogen-loading regimens more than a few times a year.
This is because the enzymes in the body seem to adapt and lose their ability to respond to the loading protocols by packing in extra glycogen. Thus,you should use glycogen loading only before your most important competitions.Furthermore, because glycogen loading can result in a small amount of weight gain(0.5 to 1 kg [1-2 lb]), it may not help athletes in events where even a small amount of excess body weight can impair performance, for example, during shorter running events. The weight gain concern does not apply during endurance events because benefits gained from the extra fuel offset any negative effects from the small weight gain, which is usually lost as exercise progresses.
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