Hi I’m Kiefer, inventor of the dietary protocol Carb Back-Loading. Is Carb Back-Loading good?
No…
It’s f*cking awesome.
Why?
Because you get to eat junk at night. No, that’s not true; you should eat junk at night. Sure, Uncle Ben and that Quaker guy are all cool in their retro-chic way, but their low-glycemic food-stuffs is designed for sheep. Are you a sheep?
A sheep with flaming machetes, maybe, but not an ordinary sheep, so don’t eat ordinary sheep food. Slam the big-boy treats. You want to look like Arnold? Eat cherry pies. Want to look like Dr. Oz? Then eat your vegetables.
Here’s why you should pound “junk” carbs at night after you train:
1. You need to rebuild your glycogen stores to fuel performance. Skeletal muscle will recover from even the hardest workouts within 48 hours. Your nervous system, however, can take up to ten days to return to normal, because when you train, it works far harder than your muscles do relative to its capacity. Having sufficient glycogen in reserve will allow your motor neurons to fire at a higher level during training, enabling your muscles to fire with maximum force.
2. You need glucose for maximal contraction as sets approach failure. When you approach the anaerobic point during training, your muscles need glucose to continue contracting during the glycolytic (glucose-burning) cycle. Making sure your glycogen stores are full will allow your muscles to use fatty acids during training until the need for glucose arises—at which point glycogen is broken down and used.
3. Your glycogen levels may help muscular growth. The debate here makes a case for both sides of this issue, but research has shown that full glycogen reserves help limit the protein breakdown caused by training sessions. This also increases glycogen usage during your training session(s) the following day. The idea of replenishing your glycogen levels, then, is not to recover from today’s workout, but to prepare for tomorrow’s.
Gimme the damn twinkie…Kiefer said I need it.
4. High-glycemic carbs won’t kill your nighttime growth hormone release. Eating carbs before bedtime will disrupt nighttime release of growth hormone—an incredibly powerful fat burner and lean tissue builder. Your body won’t release growth hormone during sleep until about two hours after your blood sugar and insulin levels return to normal. Low-glycemic carbs keep your insulin and blood sugar levels elevated for hours. In contrast, high-glycemic carbs create a spike that ends within an hour or so of eating. In other words, eating junk replenishes your glycogen stores without interfering with your nocturnal hGH cycle. When you try to Carb Back-Load with brown rice and whole-grain toast, you’ll get subpar results, to say the least. This is why.
5. If you train in the early morning, you can get a bigger boost from your post-training nutrition. There’s an “insulin memory” to your night-time carb feedings that extends to your next morning meal. Creating a larger insulin spike before bed causes a greater insulin response to food the next morning. So, using the CBL manual to tweak your diet for such an event, you can get a larger anabolic burst after you’re A.M. training.
6. Insulin is an anti-inflammatory. Big insulin spikes can help speed muscle repair and growth. Oh sure, you need free-radical production during the training session to trigger growth, but too much ultimately slows progress. The effect is called hormesis: a little is good, a lot is bad. Using junk to cause large insulin releases can potentially decrease muscle protein breakdown and increase muscle protein synthesis in even more ways than simple nutrient delivery.
7. Who doesn’t want to end the day with a box of cherry turnovers?
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