While a low-carb Paleo diet is phenomenal for supporting weight loss and improving health if you are overweight, out of shape, or obese, not everyone is trying to lose weight.
For athletes training to achieve a personal best running a 10k, triathlon, or qualifying for the CrossFit Games, your eating strategy will not be one-in-the-same.
Exercise is a catabolic process, triggering a release of stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline in order to raise blood sugars to fuel your activity. If you are exercising at a slow pace (less than 65% heart rate) your body has the time to use fat as a primary fuel source. However, as your exercise intensity increases your body quickly shifts to using muscle and liver glycogen (your body’s carb stores) to fuel exercise.
You have a limited capacity to store glycogen, which means after about 1-hour of training at a high intensity, you’ll likely have exhausted all your body’s glycogen stores.
What's the matter with low glycogen stores?
The research is quite clear that if you start your next training session with low or sub-optimal glycogen status, you’ll significantly reduce your capacity to work and your performance will suffer. A recent study of athletes who consumed only 40% of their total calories as carbohydrates and performed “two-a-day” training sessions suffered a significant decrease in their performance during the 2nd session because they did NOT adequately replenish muscle glycogen stores.1
If you are training at high intensity and following a low-carb diet, you are treading a fine line. If your goal is to be fit and lean, this isn’t really a problem. However, if your goal is optimizing your performance potential, eventually you will exhibit signs of overtraining and exhaustion.
Overtraining happens when you train intensely for too long, without adequate rest periods or tapers built into your training regime. While you do want to push yourself to the edge to stimulate a training adaptation (‘over-reaching’), you don’t want to push yourself over the edge!
Short-term symptoms of inadequate glycogen repletion include fatigue, reduced work capacity during training, poor recovery and extended delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). Long-term symptoms are pronounced fatigue, reduced strength levels and increased muscular weakness.