Dear Fixmyfitnessclub.com members…I don’t believe in the glycemic index
About 5 tenths of a gram of carbohydrate per pound should be consumed in about the first hour after exercise. So even somebody who does 20-30 of minutes activity especially if it’s at a reasonable rigorous level, and say that if they weigh 100 pounds they should get about 50 grams of carbohydrate. Then in about 3 hours they should eat about another 5 tenths gram per pound of body weight. So that means that in about 3 hours after an exercise session a 100 pound individual should be consuming about 100 grams of carbohydrate. The data certainly supports if that occurs there’s going to an adequate repacking of glycogen especially in the liver tissue, but also in the muscle cells which are clearly the ones that have a significant need for carbohydrate during exercise.
Do you know the term EPOC exercise? Excess “post exercise oxygen consumption” it suggests that there is an elevated metabolic rate following an activity session. So that when I stop exercising I don’t immediately come back to a resting metabolic rate so that I have to pay back the oxygen deficit and there’s some neuro processes and reloading oxygen on myoglobin and things like that.
So my feeling about the glycemic index is that it doesn’t have a lot of practical application. We know that fruit juice is very quickly absorbed. The sugars from juice are very quickly absorbed into the bloodstream. During post exercise you probably don’t want a whole lot of fiber what you’d rather have is a lot of fluid and a lot of free available sugar to repack glycogen. That’s mostly important for fairly well trained people. Obviously people who are untrained are burning very few calories during a session it’s not as critical as an issue as an endurance athlete for instance. My question is how much real life application does the glycemic index have because we typically don’t eat food isolated we eat foods in combination with other foods. So… the glycemic index is probably questionable in terms of whether that’s what happens to blood sugar after a meal that has carrots and potatoes and gravy and a little bit of roast beef or something. Because your blood sugar is going to be totally different in response than just to the carrot. The question is in a tri-athlete that’s transitioning between stages would I recommend a little bit of cranberry juice at the stations? I would say you should dilute it one to one with water. What you want during performance is a substance that is about six to eight percent sugar. In cranberry juice in its regular form is a lot more than 6-8% it’s probably 12-15%. The difference between what you can see during an event and what you can see after the event is substantial obviously. Because if I have a fluid that is more than 8% sugar it stays in the stomach and can actually draw water into the stomach to dilute. What you want is the water to be available to the system as quickly as possible. So during the race dilute the juices at least one to one maybe even two to one water to juice and that gives you the good glucose source but it also allows a lot of water release. Apple juice has a tremendous amount of free fructose. This vital information can make the world of difference in your performance.
#Dave Parise #FitnessFixer #Fixmyfitnessclub.com
