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Practiced by bodybuilders and regular fitness enthusiasts alike, carb cycling is the reduction of carbohydrate intake on non-training days and increase carbohydrate intake on training days. I’ll briefly cover some of the proven benefits in this article. Since the 90’s (when the low-carb diet first became popular), people have vilified carbohydrates like no other nutrient, blaming it for fat gain, insulin resistance, and other negative effects. However, it’s important to understand that carbs have their place in your diet and can have significant positive effects if consumed at the right time. First of all, carbohydrates are important in restoring muscle glycogen levels after an intense workout. What do I mean by intense? A heavy weight-training workout or high-intensity interval session would qualify; a thirty-minute jog would not. When muscles are worked intensely, stored glycogen is released to fuel those muscles. Carbohydrates help to restore these glycogen levels by being converted into glucose after they’re digested, which are then stored in the muscles. A persistently super low-carb (ketogenic) diet encourages fat to be used as fuel, but glucose is the body’s preferred muscle fuel. Thus, if you want to perform better, increasing carbohydrate intake on workout days will help. Another benefit of carb cycling is its positive effect on leptin, which is a hormone that controls a long list of bodily functions ranging from satiety and metabolism to sex drive. High-carb refeeds (occasional high-carbohydrate meals) boost leptin more effectively than low-carb meals that (which have virtually no effect on leptin), in turn, boost satiety, making diet compliance easier. I prefer to implement these high-carb refeeds on every training day in the style proposed by Martin Berkhan in the Leangains method. This takes advantage of the post-workout nutrient partitioning window (the body’s tendency to shuttle nutrients to the muscles in the post-training window), Martin explains: If A can be manipulated via a subtle energy deficit and regular refeeds of the right macrocomposition (carb refeeds acutely increase leptin, while fat has no effect), this should prove beneficial to circulating leptin levels during the diet. It might prove fruitful to "trick" the last few pounds of fat off while venturing into the single digits. A recent study exemplifies the benefits of cyclical low-carb diets. British researchers instructed one group of women to eat 650 calories less and extremely low-carb (less than 50 grams) two days a week and eat normally on the other five days, another group to eat low-carb with no calorie restriction, and yet another group restricted calories every day of the week. What did they find? The intermittent low-carb groups lost more weight (four more pounds, on average) than the group that ate low-calorie meals every day. What do you think the researches believe is the reason was behind the increased weight loss? You guessed it, increased leptin. I definitely recommend that you implement carb cycling into your fitness plan whether you count calories or not. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below. That’s it for this week. You can stay connected with my fitness ideas by going here: http://www.nextphasefitness.com/blog/
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