Mark Bell's Power Project - 10 Minute Walk Talk with Andy Galpin - Post Workout Carbs

Episode Date: April 23, 2018

Today's special guest host for the 10 Minute Walk Talk is CSU Fullerton Professor, Andy Galpin. Andy has had great conversations with Joe Rogan and Mark Bell about diet and nutrition in the past, today he is focusing on post workout carbs. ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Stitcher Here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud Here: https://soundcloud.com/user-921692324 ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

What's up everybody? This is Andy Galpin and I want to talk to you today a little bit about post-exercise carbohydrate consumption. Smelly called me and asked me to talk a little bit about this and of course I said yes because unlike most internet celebrities out there, Smelly just doesn't rely upon his amazing looks and tremendous aesthetics to gain his followings. He actually has some brains behind that wonderful smile of his. Now, what I'm seriously mean though, is you all know his position on carbohydrates. He's got a book out about it, but what I love about him is he still asks people like me to come in knowing damn well, I'm going to tell you how good carbohydrates are

for you post-exercise so that all of you at home can can have the real full sense and get the equal picture and then decide on your own and we just need so much more of that in the field and i can't applaud i'm smelly enough for doing things like this and and having you letting you all hear the opposite side of the argument so like anything else if you've ever heard anything about me or been to my website, it's all about context. So what I want to do is maybe just go over a couple of different scenarios. Mark actually mentioned in his voicemail about this that he thinks that some part of reason why we're being told to have these certain carbohydrates plus exercise is actually potentially driven by some monetization and marketing schemes.

And I could certainly talk to you about that. I could give you a history of the field and walk you over why that actually is, but maybe we'll do that in a second part. So let Mark know if you're interested in something like that. But for now, let's focus on the actual question. And the answer is, yes, it does matter, but no, it might not matter. And it all depends on the situation. So it's pretty clear for most people that are consuming a mixed carbohydrate diet. So this would be people not in nutritional ketosis or on some other extreme diet. So people that are consuming some proportion of carbohydrates, and this would be probably anywhere between 20% of your macronutrients up to maybe 50 or 60%.

Now, carbohydrates post-exercise is helpful in maximizing the muscle recovery, whether you're talking about trying to enhance muscle growth or recovery for performance or endurance adaptations. Now, be careful here though, because this goes with a couple of assumptions. Number one, that you're doing this or you're exercising in a carbohydrate fasted state. So in other words, if you're working out say at five o'clock in the afternoon, and you've already had say 200 grams of carbohydrate throughout the day, then it probably doesn't matter a tremendous amount if you get your carbohydrates in prior to the workout, during the workout, or immediately post workout, or even if you wait a

couple of hours. The total amount of carbohydrate you ingest throughout the day probably matters more than whether you specifically get it post-exercise. If you want more specific data or data on this, I would encourage you to check out the International Society of Sports Nutrition's position stand on nutrient timing. It's free. You can Google search it and it covers a whole bunch of other topics outside of this, but they do have a little section on this particularly. If you're, however, though, say you're working out in the morning and you're early afternoon and you're fasted or for any other reason in a moderate to low carbohydrate state, that's lower than normal for you. In that case, getting carbohydrates in pretty quickly

after your exercise is actually beneficial. So it really comes down to context. Other things to consider though, look, for example, say you are in that situation, but you're not going to train for two or three more days after this. Well, then it probably doesn't really matter if you get in carbohydrates immediately post-exercise because you're going to have 24 or 48, 72 hours to recover. By the time you go to train again, you'll have replenished the glycogen storages. You'll be just fine. So even that same scenario, because what's happening in the next couple of days afterwards is different, then I would say I would go back to, well, it doesn't matter a whole lot. In terms of the actual type of carbohydrate, it's kind of the same answer. It really depends on a couple of things.

Number one, what do you normally consume? So anytime you consume something that's outside of the norm, it's going to have a different response relative to somebody consuming what they normally eat. something that's outside of the norm, it's going to have a different response relative to somebody consuming what they normally eat. So if you never eat carbohydrate or you never eat, say, fructose, and then all of a sudden you start slamming a bunch of fructose post-exercise, it may not work very well because you're not going to have the enzymes and the digestive processes needed to really use that maximally. I think most people make a mistake with the type and quality of the post-exercise carbohydrates they choose. I don't think this is a good excuse to drink

sugary, terrible drinks or eat candy. The general concept there is right in terms of if you're trying to maximize muscle growth or maximize recovery. and again, that's the key term here. If you're trying to maximize, if you're just trying to recover so that you can train a couple more days now or you have many different goals you're looking for, you may not need to maximize. So there might not be any difference from what you're doing and maximizing. So there might not be any difference from what you're doing and then maximizing. But some people say athletes that are training multiple times a day or in sports that require multiple competitions in a day or in a section of their training that's very high volume, you might need to maximize the recovery. In this case, the composition and timing is important. So always think in context.

There is never a single answer for any of these things. But going back to the point in terms of the quality, you do want to have carbohydrates that get into the system fairly quickly. Some people call these high glycemic index foods. I don't like that term particularly, but for most people it does make the right point. So things that are digested quickly, get into the blood quickly, and can be brought into the muscle fast. Fructose is okay for this, but not the single optimal solution because it has some mandatory digestion and processing that has to happen through the liver. So that slows it down a little bit. The endogenous oxidation rate, so your ability or the speed in which you can process it as a fuel source, is a little bit slower than glucose. But the beauty of it is most of the data suggests that it is a sort of a separate process from glucose. And so

they're actually additive rather than conflicting. So what I'm saying is if you ingest a meal that is a combination of fructose and glucose, they probably support each other and they don't really detract as best we can tell. Now be careful because there's a bit of a paradox here with getting through the gut. So if you load too much carbohydrate into digestion at once, you'll actually decrease the ability to get the carbohydrate out of the gut. And so you want to kind of work this system here where too much can make you feel terrible and counteract yourself. So in terms of the actual prescription of how much carbohydrate to ingest, and I'll come back and fine-tune the type of carbohydrate and give food

examples here in a second but in terms of the the amount it really depends on how much you normally consume so somebody who's consuming you know 200 to 250 grams a day of carbohydrate doesn't need to consume 150 grams of carbohydrate post-exercise but somebody who's maybe consuming 500-600 a day, you know, 100-150 grams post-exercise would be a lot, but they could handle that. Most people, if you're consuming, again, 200-300 grams carbohydrate a day, 50-60-70-80 grams post-exercise, if it's a good hard training session, it's probably good. If it's moderate, go on the lower end. And if it's a light session, maybe 30, 40, 50 grams, carbohydrate post-exercise is enough.

And of course, you've got to scale that up and down relative to body size. So if you're a 120-pound female, you've got to scale that down a little bit. If you're a 385-pound Mark Bell in his heyday, you've got to scale that up a little bit. So the numbers are always relative to body size but i'm just sort of talking to the average 150 to 200 and so pound person that's where most people sit so in terms of the food choices um you can use super low quality foods but for many many reasons we don't have time to get into today, I don't think that's the best option. So again, I don't think you need to be going out of your way to eat candy and sugar and Kool-Aid and things like that post-exercise. Now, I have one of my athletes, Olympic athletes

right now doing that. But this athlete is in a very unique situation, is training multiple times a day, is having all kinds of recovery problems. So one of the strategies we're trying is integrating some lemonade during her workout. And she sort of sips that throughout her workouts. And we're sort of in the middle of it right now. So I'm not really sure if it's going to be helping or not. We'll kind of have to see. But that's one experiment we are running for a bunch of different reasons. But you don't have to do that. You can certainly get it from more quality sources. There's a couple of places you can turn to. Again, fruit is absolutely fine, but real food is fine here.

You all can look up different foods that are within your preference and palette for high glycemic responding foods. And of course, you can go to white bread, different things like that. Again, I don't like that. I just don't think that needs to be a part of your diet unless you're really struggling with your recovery or your growth. I think we can get this from whole, real high quality foods for the most part. What that might mean is you might have to ingest some of those carbohydrates before your workout because they are a little bit slower releasing. This is your very standard veggies and fruits and good quality starches and rices and grains and things like that if those are sitting well with your

digestion. There's all kinds of different types of grains, so we don't have to throw all of them out the window just because one of them doesn't sit well with us. I would encourage people to explore different types of rices and things like that from around the world because maybe you don't handle say wheat or barley very well but maybe there's some Asian vegetables or stocks grains that you do handle well. So you can look to those or not. If you don't want to, that's fine too. You can do it without grains. It's not that difficult to get in good quality carbohydrates. If you're insistent upon having a supplement, I would actually encourage you to check out what are called resistant starches.

And these are very unique. You can get these naturally. Common examples are things like cooking a potato, mashed potato, cooling it in the refrigerator, eating it again the next day. What happens is the starch in the potato converts to what's called a resistant starch, or at least that's what some of the data suggests. And the beauty of that is when it gets sent to your gut, it actually gets processed and released more like a ketone body than a carbohydrate. And so that's a benefit there for those that are concerned with being in keto or other things like that. You can still eat a lot of carbohydrates. And this is a little bit of a tangent, but this is actually one of the things you're seeing from the ketogenic community is

they're starting to realize these same things. So they're sort of backing off the extremism in a lot part and realizing that a lot of quote-unquote carbohydrates, just because you see that on a chart on the internet, does not mean it's going to equal being a carbohydrate in your body. We have all kinds of conversations there. And so a lot of keto people are realizing, well, there's actually certain carbohydrates that I can eat that don't kick me out of ketosis.

And that's because a lot of them are not being processed like a carbohydrate. Again, actually knowing some physiology and some biochemistry, it turns out it's pretty important. Anyways, so going back to it, you can check out a company called 3Fuel, 3 as in the number 3 fuel, and they make a product called 3Carb. This is Brian McKenzie's company. And this is a very good resistance starch. We've actually tested this. We've done some 72-hour fasting and then consumed the carbohydrate, nothing but the carbohydrate, and still stayed in ketosis and actually saw dramatic maintenance of maximal exercise performance after three days of no food and just consuming this resistant starch. Waxing maize, really. And you can Google what those things are for more detail, but you can try something like that if you'd like. I have had a bunch of professional athletes take that, especially ones that are training multiple days.

athletes take that, especially ones that are training multiple days. And so what we actually do is they take it in between or during one of their workouts and about the time, um, the three carbs specifically, the testing we've done is it actually holds blood glucose pretty, pretty steady for about four to six hours. And this is actually exceeding some of the other brands that, um, that make similar products when we test them head to head. There's no magic cure though. There, even three carb has limitations and problems, but that's stuff to try if you would like. Again, though, to reiterate, my default is let's just get it from real food. So to summarize, you don't have to have it post-exercise. The total amount of carbohydrate you get throughout the whole day is probably most

important unless you're in a weird situation that you need to maximize recovery or maximize growth because you've got multiple training sessions or you've got to train again the next day or for whatever reason you're struggling to recover, things aren't working well. But for most people, it's probably not a huge issue. Nutrient timing like this is very low in my totem pole of things I pay attention to when I work with a person the first time or the second time. It's usually something I'll have a conversation. I'll say, look, this is not your problem. Let's handle the bigger things like sleep, hydration, stress, etc.

So anyways, hope that's helped. Happy to do another round of this and expand more on the conspiracy side of it, particularly that Mark kind of alluded to, or answering any follow-up questions on this. You can check me out at Dr. Andy Galpin on the social. My website has a bunch of free videos on things like this, and I'll try to make a video about this topic and throw it up on andygalpin.com. So that being said, much love, Mr. Smelly. Peace out.