Glycogen depletion issues (aka I’m a moron)
Posted on | March 3, 2009 | 3 Comments
Ok, so this was originally intended to be just another workout log post, but it’s turning out to be a reflection on me not thinking things through well.
Yesterday Rayna and I went to the gym. We’ve done a few long hikes and some stair climbing last week in preparation for an upcoming climbing trip to New Hampshire. Anyway, she took 1RMs in her core lifts (Backsquat, Shoulder Press and Deadlift) and hit PRs in all of them.
I intended to do the work capacity workout below:
Warm Up:
Barbell Complex (6 deadlifts, 6 bent over rows, 6 hang power cleans, 6 front squats, 6 push press, 6 back squats, 6 push ups, 6 overhead squats) at 88 and 99bs.
Then:
8 rounds of:
10 burpies, 20 sit ups
5 rounds of:
20m walking lunges, 50lbs dumbells, 10 ankles to bar
5 rounds of:
6 Thrusters (increasing weight each round), 10 dips, 10 weighted back extension
The plan was to finish the whole mess in around an hour of pretty much constant work. Here’s where the stupid part comes in; I’ve done 2-3 hour depletion/long endurance workouts based on circuits like this. I go through around 2500 calories in one of those monstrosities. I treat them like an endurance event, I need to eat more carbs beforehand, ramping up consumption as I get closer to the event, then eat some dried fruit or a gel midway through. When I manage the nutrition well I finish the long ones, tired but still functional.
I can also do hour long strength workouts without really worrying about carbs. There’s enough rest in those that it’s not a huge issue.
For some reason, I failed to make the connection that an hour or work capacity/aerobic work like this would hammer on me, like well – half of one of the long ones. It would probably burn something like 1000 calories, so naturally the nutritional approach needs to take this into account.
…Except it didn’t. I’d had some berries, an orange, and a few crumbled chips and lettuce with my taco salad (with grass fed beef) yesterday. Those were pretty much all the carbs I’d consumed.
I felt OK through the burpies and sit ups.
Then increasingly weak and queasy with the lunges. By the end of that set I would get confused and be forgetting what I was doing between exercises, just wincing in pain and walking around confused. The odd part is that I knew I’d done much harder workouts. So in my more coherent moments I wondered why this was hitting me so hard.
I finished one set of the thruster, dip,back extension triplet and sat down confused, nauseated and too weak to stand up. I took a few pictures of Rayna as she finished her workout and thought I was going to boot every time I stood up. I didn’t even do a proper cool down. I was too thrashed to do anything.
It was a bonk. A true, “muscle glycogen is gone, blood sugar is too low to function normally” bonk. I could barley move.
An hour and some food later I was fine. I do really well with a pretty low carb intake. But I’ve always known I had to eat more carbs when I did any kind of high intensity endurance work. I really need to start treating these hour workouts like mini endurance events.
Thought I’d share the learning experience with you guys.
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March 12th, 2009 @ 10:44 pm
Ive been in Ketosis for 4 days. Today I decided to hit the weights lightly because I knew this workout was gonna be brutal. It was the worst workout ever. I can do great on low carb maybe 60 grams a day, but this was same as you walking around confused and forgetting stuff.
March 13th, 2009 @ 8:55 am
I usually eat more than enough carbs to stay out of Ketosis, though I’ve dabbled in full on ketogenic diets in the past (Way in the past, when I dabbled in bodybuilding and couldn’t do anything useful with my strength).
If you’re going the really low carb route, Rob Wolf has an good piece somewhere where he suggests calculations for the carbs needed to provide adequate muscle glycogen for metcons.
It might be worth looking into. I spent a few minutes on his site (robwolf.com) trying to dig it up for you without much luck.
In my case, obviously the workouts I’m doing are significantly longer than Crossfit style metcons – but at a high enough intensity to switch the fuel demands to carbs.
March 14th, 2009 @ 4:04 pm
Thanks c, Ill look for robs post, seems interesting.