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Lead Stories: Friday, December 5, 2008

Low-carb, high-fat diets negatively affect performance

Posted November 17th, 2006 at 12:00 PM by Martin Kennedy

Section: Nutrition, Healthy Eating, Race Prep & Recov

A recent study from South Africa, published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, shows that eating a low-carbohydrate diet slows extended sprint performance of cyclists. Competitive bicycle racers ate a high fat or high-carbohydrate diet for six days followed by a high-carbohydrate diet for one day and completed time trials on their bikes. Then they ate the opposite diet for six days followed by a high carbohydrate diet for one day and repeated their time trial. Diets did not affect their times or power output for 100 kilometers (62 miles), but the high fat diet slowed their sprint performance over one kilometer (0.6 miles).

Muscles get their energy from sugar and fat stored in muscles or from the bloodstream. The limiting factor in how fast an endurance athlete can exercise is the time it takes to transport oxygen from the blood in the lungs to the muscles. Muscles require far more oxygen to burn fat than to burn sugar for energy. So when a muscle runs out of its stored sugar, called glycogen, it becomes less efficient, hurts, is difficult to co-ordinate and slows you down. Read the rest of this entry »

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