Why You Should Eat Carbs, if you want to get better at Crossfit.

There is a lot of stigma around eating carbs, and often when trying to loose weight you have heard you should cut out carbs - follow a high fat diet or a high protein diet ect. And perhaps you have tried with good results, on your weightloss. But now your performance has plateaued and you are feeling beat up from your regular Crossfit Classes and your strength is improving at all.

Would you believe if I told you its the lack of eating Carbohydrates that is messing you up?

Below we are going to look at, in normal people language, with tiny bit of sience how carbohydrates actually help your performance in CrossFit workouts. Because it does & quite a lot. 

As written in my previous blog post on energy systems and HR-Zones, our bodies are programmed to use the carbs stored in our muscles & the carbs floating in our blood and as soon as they are depleted, our bodies start to search for ways to preserve energy. Once this happens, you can expect an increase in fatigue, decrease in power, decrease in strength, leading to weak results in CrossFit.

Understanding the energy systems is essential to understand why eating carbohydrates is going to help. 

How Carbohydrates Help

Eating carbohydrates increases one’s ability to endure and recover. This is because of the extra store of carbohydrates in the muscles and liver called glycogen. A lot of researches have said that athletes & fitness enthusiasts need to replenish carbohydrates in their bodies, especially during intense trainings & workout routines. 

Consuming carbohydrates can also help in one’s performance and delay one’s fatigue. Compared to protein and dietary fat, carbohydrates are actually the most efficiently broken down & metabolized form of energy in the body that athletes & fitness enthusiasts need.

Carbohydrates in CrossFit

When preparing your body for CrossFit, it all boils down to nutrition – more specifically, carbohydrates. Why? Because routines such as presses, explosive cleans and rapid-fire rounds of swings & dips require a lot of energy to fuel short, high-intensity workouts. That, carbohydrates can give your body. With the high intensity nature of the sport, the body utilizes MOSTLY carbohydrates to keep up the speed and explosiveness of the movements.

Depending on one’s workout routine, a CrossFit Athlete should consume at least 3-12 grams of carbohydrates per kilogram of bodyweight to help power up throughout the day. However, the intake should be adjusted depending on the intensity & duration of routine. Of course, the higher the intensity, the higher the energy required. Any increase in high-intensity routines should require a higher intake of carbohydrate.

If you would like to find out how much energy you need, you can begin by labelling your workout routines. For example, you can name them from ‘light’ to ‘moderate’ to ‘hard’. Your intake of carbohydrates should vary along with the intensity of your workouts.

And, a kind reminder from me to you. Carbohydrates are friends, not enemy. They are to be consumed in appropriate quantaties to the sport your are doing and its duration. Remember that there’s a huge difference between running a marathon (4:00+ hours ) that requires constant flow of glycogen, eating during the workout for keeping up that intensity & doing a 5-10 min high-intensity workout that requires power. With CrossFit, eating carbohydrates as a part of your diet is your fuel for that kind of high power output.

If you have any questions about nutrition in Crossfit. If you would like to know more about how much and when to get some help adjusting your nutrition for better performance check out my remote nutrition coaching HERE