Optimizing Carbs for Performance: Part 1

As dancers you are training many hours a week and pushing your body to work extremely hard. Ensuring your food intake and nutrition are optimal for enhancing performance is important for competitive level athletes. As I’m sure you know, carbohydrates are an important fuel source for your body, helping fuel ATP production in the mitochondria of all of your cells. Our mitochondrias are the powerhouses of our cells where ATP, our body’s energy currency, is created. Glucose from carbohydrates are the main fuel source for muscle cells, helping power your long workouts and dance training sessions. Not all the carbohydrates you consume go directly to glucose and then ATP production at that moment though. Some of our carbohydrates are converted to glycogen and stored in muscles. Glycogen is the storage form of glucose, allowing our bodies to have an on-demand fuel source within our muscles that can be used during exercise. 

The timing of your carbohydrate consumption relative to your exercise can be altered to help to optimize glycogen stores in your muscles. Optimizing muscle glycogen stores can help improve athletic performance, having more fuel available stored in your muscles. Glycogen supercompensation is a nutritional strategy utilized by athletes in order to maximize glycogen stores in their muscles and liver. When an athlete engages in intense exercise, the glycogen stored in their muscles and liver gets depleted.

The process of glycogen supercompensation involves purposely structuring the intake of carbohydrates before and after exercise to enhance glycogen storage beyond normal levels. A typical athletic protocol involves depleting glycogen stores through intense exercise, followed by a period of carbohydrate loading. The depletion phase consists of athletes engaging in prolonged and intense exercise, such as a competitive dance practice, endurance training, or high-intensity interval training. All of which significantly lower the glycogen levels in muscles. 

The carbohydrate loading phase is also known as the “two hour window” for glycogen supercompensation. After an intense bout of training, the insulin receptors in your muscle cells are super sensitized to insulin. This means that they are able to uptake more glucose into their mitochondria, converting it to more glycogen for storage. Meals consumed during this two hour window should be mainly simple carbohydrates (with a relatively high glycemic index) and a serving of complete protein sources (refer back to our post about protein to understand how to get complete sources of protein!). This meal should also consume very low amounts of fat. The consumption of fat blunts the post-meal glucose and insulin spikes. In your average person, consuming fats with carbohydrates is an ideal nutritional strategy as creating a more blunted glucose spike is good for blood sugar control. In contrast, athletes can utilize the insulin spike after meals to their benefit. Insulin, your hormone that drives glucose into cells, is anabolic. Anabolic hormones encourage growth and building storage supplies. Thus insulin as an anabolic hormone helps drive more glucose into the muscle cells, helping to increase muscle glycogen stores.   

Ensuring athletes have enough glycogen stored in their muscles to support their physical demands is critical to maintaining muscle. If an athlete doesn't have enough fuel from carbohydrates, protein stores in muscle can be used. Using the amino acids in protein as a fuel source means that the protein in muscle needs to be broken down. Although this is a physiological adequate way to provide ATP for the cells in our bodies, breaking down muscle is not ideal for any athlete. In addition to this, the cumulative effect of inadequate glycogen stores is a decrease in available energy and a decrease in muscle contractile force during exercise, all presenting as fatigue during exercise. 

Evidently carbohydrates are critical for exercise. They are always the limiting fuel, the quickest energy source, can be used to create energy with or without oxygen,  and they help spare the use of protein as fuel. A high carbohydrate diet is associated with both a higher initial muscle glycogen concentration and a greater endurance capacity. 

References

Brody T. Nutritional Biochemistry. 2nd ed. Academic Press; 1999.

Bendich A and Deckelbaum RJ. Preventive Nutrition: The comprehensive guide for health professionals. Humana Press; 2005.

Groff JL et al. Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism 2nd ed. West Publishing Company; 1995. NATUROPATHIC CLINICAL NUTRITION

Gaby AR. Nutritional Medicine: a textbook. 2010

Shils ME et al. Modern Nutrition in Health and Disease. 10th ed. Lippincott Williams and Wilkins; 2005.

Werbach MR. Textbook of Nutritional Medicine. Third Line Press, Inc.; 1999.