Quote:
Originally Posted by Darryl Shaw
Emily,
The upper limit for glycogen storage in a well conditioned athlete is ~15g/kg BW so assuming you weigh ~60kg your poor starving muscles might be trying to pack in up to 900g of glycogen (most likely it'll be ~600g) along with 3g of water per gram of glycogen. This means you might need to drink up to 2.7L of water in addition to your normal fluid requirements plus a little extra if your high carb foods contain a lot of salt eg. bread. Then if you take into account the fact that glycogen resynthesis is pretty slow at ~5-7%/hour meaning it might take 20+ hours before your glycogen stores are topped up to capacity it's easy to see why you might feel thirsty for 24 hours or so after your high carb meal.
Of course you could avoid all this and improve your performance by eating more carbs more often.
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Thank you for the tip Darryl, but in my experience nothing will ensure my workouts go poorly like eating high-carb. I have gone off-diet enough times for that trend to become clear.