Do you remember back in your middle school/high school years when you would hear a coach tell athletes to eat a carb heavy meal the night before a big game?

Whether you thought of that saying as an awesome chance to go eat all the spaghetti ya want or just went “Yeah Yeah Coach,” and proceeded to eat nothing that night because the new Zelda game was the bomb, your coach was right!

Carb-Loading is a classic move that athletes use to prep for big competitions all the time. And you know what? You just most likely carb-loaded this weekend when you loaded up on cookies, mashed potatoes, and those maple covered brussel sprouts!

While it’s not something we want to make a habit, your one weekend of eating everything you want hasn’t knocked your fitness journey off course. In fact, your body is probably craving its’ usual diet today and is sick of the sugar.

Even more fun, is that you have just primed your body to hit a workout like today’s workout at the gym, a heavy deadlift ladder!

All of those carbs that you had, are currently stored as short term energy in your body and are coupled with some repaired muscles from a 2 day break from training. Which means you might walk into today’s workout and feel like you can push your redline longer, move heavier percentages of your 1 rep max for more reps, and bounce back from your efforts faster!

Why is that?

Think of your body like a car.

You normally run your body on nice clean fuel and your goal is to maintain a healthy lifestyle. That fuel is nice and easy for your body to process so you can use as much energy as possible without much waste (need to store it as fat).

When you have a big meal, you are using very energy dense fuel. While it isn’t the best for your engine, your body can handle it! As long as you workout in a relatively close window to the carbo-load, your body is gonna give you a ton of energy to use from that Christmas Day fuel so that you use up as much as you can! (Professional athletes typically carb load 1-3 days before a competition, although the anything beyond the day before is usually gradual and programmed by a nutritionist). 

If you are feeling like you have excess energy in your system after the Holidays and want to learn how we can help ya burn it off, click HERE to schedule a free consultation with one of our coaches!