Carbs and Exercise: How, Why and How Much Carbohydrate You Should Eat to Fuel Fitness

Carbs are absolutely essential for optimal sports and fitness performance: 

• If you fuel with the right balance of carbohydrates, you can take your training to the next level, grow more muscle and prevent burnout.
• If you undereat carbs, you risk fatigue, lethargy, brain fog, and most importantly- leaving results on the table when it comes to your performance! 

Below I've outlined why this is, how much you need depending on how exercise you do, and how that actually looks over a day with fuelling meals.

How do carbs fuel exercise?

The body's preferred source of fuel is something called glucose, which is known as a simple carbohydrate.

Carbs provide a 'fast' source of energy because we can break them down into glucose quickly and efficiently, for use in muscle contractions - aka. exercise!

The body can also use FAT or PROTEIN to fuel exercise however it is less efficient because we need to go through extra steps of metabolism to turn them into glucose molecules.

How do carbs prevent muscle protein breakdown?

If we don't eat enough carbohydrate, the body can convert protein from our stores into glucose, or energy. This is a problem because this stored protein actually comes from our muscles - which is the last thing we want to burn off!

If we eat enough carbs to fuel our exercise, this means we don't burn off muscle for energy and we retain muscle instead.

How much carbohydrate should I eat for exercise?

Put very simply, the more exercise you do, the more energy you need, and therefore, the more you benefit from carbs.

Here are the carbohydrate consumption guidelines for fuelling exercise (provided by the American College of Sports Medicine):

Daily requirements range from 3g/kg at the lower end of intensity for the average exerciser up to more extreme 12g/kg for high-intensity exercisers of 5 hours per day.

Example:

A 60kg athlete might need a minimum of 3g/kg body weight.

60kg x 3g = 180g/day

Hopefully, this encourages you to think about the role carbs have to play in your fitness and physique

To learn more about food for YOU when it comes to exercise, you can join me in FUELLED 

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