Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [82]
Should I carbo-load by eating pasta the night before a competition?
The origins of the pre-race spaghetti dinner go back to pioneering Scandinavian studies in the 1960s. Researchers found that if you started depleting your carbohydrate stores a week before competition by exercising hard and eating only fat and protein, your body would “super-compensate” by storing extra carbohydrate in your muscles when you carbo-loaded in the final few days. This led athletes to adopt a difficult and often unpleasant week-long carbohydrate depletion-loading regime before competitions.
There was one key problem with the initial studies: they used untrained subjects. Later researchers showed that trained subjects depleted their carbohydrate stores through the daily act of training and gained no additional benefit from adding a depletion phase. An Australian study in 2002 took things one step farther, showing that you can maximize your carbohydrate stores by eating 10 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight for just one day, as long as you don’t exercise vigorously that day. Continuing on a high-carbohydrate diet for another two days did nothing to further enhance carbohydrate stores in the Australian study.
It’s important to note that 10 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram is a very large amount—far more than you’ll get from a simple pasta meal. In fact, researchers have found that most athletes fail to fully max out their carbohydrate stores. If you’re a 70-kilogram (155-pound) athlete trying to pack in 700 grams of carbohydrate, you’d need to eat about 10 plates of spaghetti. Even over the course of a full day, it’s difficult to eat this much without supplementing your regular meals with sports drinks and other concentrated sources of carbs.
Having a full tank of carbohydrates won’t increase your peak running, cycling, or swimming speed, but it should allow you to maintain your pace for a little longer before your carbohydrate stores are depleted and you “hit the wall.” As a result, there’s no particular benefit to carbo-loading for shorter events where you don’t have time to completely deplete your body’s stores. For exercise lasting less than about 90 minutes—researchers disagree about the exact threshold—you don’t need to carbo-load.
Even for longer races like marathons, the evidence isn’t as clear as once thought. In the studies that showed carbo-loading benefits, subjects often weren’t allowed to consume any carbohydrates during the exercise trial. In real life, though, you’re free to drink sports drinks or swallow gels during marathons or long tennis matches. When you’re allowed to top up your stores like this during the actual event, the evidence that carbo-loading helps is much weaker. And there’s a potential downside: when you store carbohydrates, your body stores water along with it, meaning that a successful bout of carbo-loading can add several pounds to your competition weight. How you should balance these pros and cons depends on your personal experience—whether your stomach can handle ingesting carbohydrates during a competition, whether you’ve “hit the wall” in previous competitions, and so on.
There is one other factor that a pasta dinner—or any day-before loading, for that matter—can’t handle. While you sleep, about half the carbohydrates stored in your liver as glycogen will be consumed to fuel your nervous system. These liver glycogen stores help maintain normal blood sugar levels and fuel crucial organs like your brain, which can’t access all the glycogen stored in your muscles. For that reason, top endurance athletes make sure they get up several hours before competition (no matter how early that is!) and eat some easily digested carbohydrates like a banana, oatmeal, or a bagel to top up their liver glycogen.
What should I eat to avoid stomach problems during exercise?
Your stomach gets