Do You Actually Need Intra-Workout Carbs? (Almost Nobody Does)

Do You Need Intra-Workout Carbs?

All right, so do you need the intra-workout carbohydrate or performance drinks that people are selling? What I'll tell you is in most cases you do not need intra-workout carbs, except in a situation where you are an athlete who's training, you know, a couple times a day, or in a situation where your training sessions are lasting greater than like 90 to 120 minutes of high intensity type of training, right? Like if you're going to the gym, you're lifting weights, you're kind of dragging ass and your workout ends out being, you know, a couple hours, you probably don't need an intra-workout carb.

To see why, you have to understand where the fuel for a hard session actually comes from.

Your muscles store carbohydrate locally as something called muscle glycogen, which is a chain of glucose molecules packed inside the muscle fiber itself, sitting there waiting to be broken down the second you start a hard set. A trained person who eats normally is carrying somewhere in the range of 300 to 500 grams of it across the body, and that is a large tank.

Lifting draws on that tank in short, sharp pulls. A set lasts 30 seconds, you rest two or three minutes, you do it again. Add up the actual working time in a typical hour of lifting and you might get 10 or 15 minutes of real effort spread across sixty minutes of standing around.

That pattern barely dents the tank.

So when someone sips a carb drink through a session like that, the carbs are not rescuing anything, because nothing was running out. They're arriving during the one window when you're least set up to absorb them well, since blood is being pulled away from the gut and toward working muscle.

The threshold where the math changes is continuous output, long hard uninterrupted work with your heart rate sitting high, which is why that 90 to 120 minute mark keeps coming up.

But if you're going in there and you're going full retard, and you're training and working hard, and it's high intensity, you're dripping sweat, and you're busting your ass, especially with like high intensity interval training, cardio, yes, the intra-workout carbs can be something that's valuable for you.

The guy training twice a day has a different problem. He isn't emptying the tank inside one session, he's fighting the gap between sessions, because glycogen refills at maybe 5 to 7 percent per hour, so if session two starts six hours after session one, the tank has not caught up. Carbs during the work buy back some of that time.

Everyone else is solving a problem they do not have.

But in my experience, in all the years that I've been going to the gym, there are very few people that I see in a commercial gym that have any use for those intra-workout carbs.

What most people feel when they say a carb drink helped is usually sodium. You lose a meaningful amount of it in sweat, and being low on sodium during training shows up as that heavy, flat, slightly dizzy feeling people mistake for running out of fuel.

Sodium is cheap to fix. Carbohydrate during a lifting session is not the fix for it.

Eat some fruit, grab an apple, maybe a banana and some berries before you train, add some sodium, electrolytes, maybe put that in your pre-workout if it's not included like it is in mine, and nine times out of 10, you'll be fine.

Give it 30 to 60 minutes before you walk in so the sugar has cleared your stomach and you're not training on a full gut.

Most of what I know about this came out of conversations in the free community, so if you want the rest of it and somewhere to ask, the men's group is here: https://www.skool.com/jh-iron-forge-brotherhood/about