First Proper Keto Workout - Impressive Performance

(Cocker) #1

Just back from first high intensity workout under keto - martial arts themed HIIT…flurries of kicks/punches/burpees and other madness, for an hour. Not for the faint hearted…

…super impressed with the results…stamina/recovery is ridiculous…no noticeable loss of strength, but then it’s all body weight

…something unexpected - I was actually looking a little more pumped this morning…have, understandably had quite flat muscle since starting…as I would expect given the low carbs…this (pump) magnified further during the workout such that my forearms/shoulders even started to feel a little tight during press ups, punches etc…I guess it was just oxygenated blood to help with the fat based energy generation?

…had a bunch of post-workout blueberries/greek yoghurt…I know, technically they’re low carb’ish but had more than usual…wanna see what happens…if I can get my berry fix after a workout without worrying as much about quantity then I’ll be happy…pretty much every other carby food I ate was stuff that I knew I shouldn’t anyway (pastries etc)…

How exciting!

(John) #2

Sounds great. I have been reading a lot of Attila lately and i’m learning a lot and have quite a few ideas to test. Even though we don’t eat a lot of carbs, our liver is still making glucose for our muscles, when we work out we deplete quite a bit of it. We make more, but there is a limit to how much our muscles can hold. That and gluconeogenesis seems to be demand driven. If that is the case, while we would still see a spike in insulin, having carbs right after a workout would do a couple good things, replenish our glycogen stores but also slow down gluconeogenesis. I would rather the protein I take be used for something other than producing glucose, so if I can eat some carbs I should be able to accomplish that.

I have more testing to do but my first test seemed to work exactly like that, and Dr. Attila did a test eating quite a bit of carbs after a long ride and blood glucose numbers did not spike.

(Cocker) #3

Ah - that’s really interesting! Thanks @jmbundy! I’ll check out Attila. I kinda knew that glucose was still produced at some level for those tissues that needed it…but I didn’t know that we’d continue to create it to feed the muscle.

(John) #4

Yeah I was confused, I didn’t think our muscles really used glucose anymore, very much not the case. Here is his blog, some gets pretty dense which is why I am taking so long to digest it all.

This right here was a huge leap in my understanding about why anaerobic workouts are hard for us, but aerobic is way easier.

This 2 part series helped me understand a LOT about what is going on.

(Cocker) #5

Mmmmmm! More things to read and learn! :smiley: Thanks so much @jmbundy - that’s probably my evening/week/month taken care of.