Why Do I Need Carbs During Training?

There has long raged a debate about whether athletes should fuel themselves on more fat or on more carbs and to answer this question, Dr. Louise Burke from the Australian Institute of Sport ran a series of studies. 

Burke’s research was called the Supernova studies and assessed the performance outcomes of elite race walkers when they consumed a high carbohydrate diet vs a low carb high fat diet and the results were truly interesting. 

The initial study showed that during the initial training block all participants, regardless of diet, improved their VO2 max in response to the training they had completed. However there were marked differences when it came to how these athletes metabolised energy during exercise. 

After three weeks on a high fat diet, these participants become much more efficient at burning fat during exercise and the high carb participants became much less efficient at burning fat during exercise. Similarly, when the intensity of exercise increased, the high fat group showed much worse ability to metabolize carbohydrate compared to the high carb group. 

What this resulted in was an 8% better performance by the high carb group compared to the high fat group, and this result has been repeated many times over in the scientific literature. But why did this happen and why did the high carb athletes consistently perform better?

It happens because even though fat is a more energetically dense molecule compared to carbs, our body can produce more energy faster by breaking down the smaller carbohydrate molecule and converting it to energy. At high intensities of exercise, the high demand for energy means that the body prefers to break down carbs to get the energy faster. 

However, there is a limited store of carbohydrates in the body available to be broken down for energy and this is why we see high intensity athletes drop off dramatically once their ‘glycogen’ levels have depleted. They simply don’t have the fuel to sustain the high intensity effort.

So what can you take away from this as an athlete? Well if you want to perform as best as you can for as long as you can during high intensity activity, you need to 1) have adequate stored carbs in your body before you start and 2) continue consuming carbs during your workout to ‘top up’ your energy stores. 

How much should you have? Well, you don’t even have to worry about that because we did all the work for you when we developed Trainade Performance. It contains both carbohydrates and electrolytes in a ratio that is optimal for your energy levels during training.