Four grams of glucose circulates in your blood. When that happens, your liver steps in and makes sure your blood sugar level goes back to those four grams, with the help of its glycogen stores.

Of all your organs, your brain is the one using most of your blood sugar. When things are not normal, it adapts and learns to use other substrates as fuel. However, as long as you eat a mixed diet, it very much prefers glucose. One example of an abnormal condition is when you eat a ketogenic diet.

It just means that they force your brain to adapt to other fuel sources than the one it prefers. However, your muscles weigh a lot more than your liver, which means that the total amount of glycogen you store in it is much more significant.

The average adult can store a little more than half a kilogram of muscle glycogen. The glycogen stores of an elite-level endurance athlete are much larger than those of a couch potato. Your body adapts your stores according to your needs.

If your muscles need a lot of high-quality fuel readily available, your body makes sure you can store it, too. A high-level cross-country skier might be able to hold twice as much muscle glycogen as the average person. For example, a kilogram bodybuilder is probably capable of storing massive amounts of muscle glycogen.

Your muscles oxidize stored glycogen, turning it into the ATP molecules they need to contract. The higher your intensity, the more motor units associated with fast muscle fibers you activate.

Low-intensity exercise relies more on fatty acids as fuel. Your muscles require carbohydrates in the form of muscle glycogen and blood glucose for peak performance. In other words: the harder you train, the more you rely on muscle glycogen and blood glucose to fuel your workout.

Even though your liver and your muscles are your two primary glycogen deposits, you also store smaller amounts inside your red and white blood cells, in your kidneys, and the glial cells of your central nervous system. Pregnant women hold a certain amount of glycogen in the uterus as a glucose source for the embryo: a nifty little mechanism that grants the fetus access to sugar during the early parts of the pregnancy.

And when they consumed sugar-based candy during the marathon, they fended off fatigue effectively. The amount of glycogen stored in your liver and muscles depends on what you do and how much you eat.

When you exercise or perform some other type of physical labor, you fuel that activity with glycogen from both the liver and muscles, depleting your reserves.

You drain your liver glycogen to keep your blood sugar stable and use muscle glycogen to fuel your muscle contractions. If you eat plenty of carbohydrates and enough calories, you replenish those reserves in between workouts, allowing you to perform as good or better next time you exercise.

If you exercise regularly, your body adapts and enables you to store more carbohydrates as muscle glycogen. A casual, non-overweight endurance athlete needs between and grams of carbs a day to replenish and maintain high glycogen stores after a workout.

Muscle glycogen concentrations are usually measured in millimoles per kilogram, either as wet weight or dry weight. Dry weight means that you subtract the water in the tissue from the result, and those values are 4.

Fueling with fat is enough, and you have plenty of that to last a long time. You can release up to 20 times more glucose per minute from your glycogen stores during high-intensity exercise.

When you exercise with high intensity or long duration, you more or less empty your muscle glycogen stores. You reach the point of fatigue and have to lower your training intensity to continue.

If you regularly train without eating enough carbohydrates, your muscle glycogen levels keep diminishing, day by day, and you might not be able to perform to your usual standards.

During exercise, you drain your glycogen stores. If you want to fill those stores again, you have to eat or drink enough carbs in time for the next training session.

After a workout or any other glycogen-depleting physical activity, your muscle cells are more sensitive than usual to any carbohydrates you eat. They are ready to soak up all the carbs you give them and store them as glycogen to perform better next workout.

At this time, your insulin sensitivity is as good as it gets, the capacity of your muscle cells to absorb glucose is improved, and your levels of the enzyme glycogen synthase are high.

Eating or drinking carbs now stimulates insulin release and glycogen synthesis. Because your muscle cells are wide open and ready to receive the sugar you give them, you can shovel a lot of glycogen into them in a short amount of time.

One gram of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight per hour lets you store as much glycogen as possible inside your muscles.

Too much for the casual athlete, in most cases. That would mean grams of carbs over 4 hours. While these amounts are unnecessary, maybe even detrimental, for the casual athlete, they might be essential for high-level athletes who train every day or even several times per day.

Even professional athletes might find themselves hard-pressed to consume such amounts. One scenario where you benefit from pounding the carbs would be if you compete in multiple events over the same day.

Or during an especially tough training period, if you have several training sessions every day on the agenda and repeatedly empty your glycogen reserves. If you have 5—6 hours to replenish your muscle glycogen as much as possible, you need to eat or drink 1 gram of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight per hour during those hours.

If you have 24 hours, you need around 10 grams of carbohydrates per kilogram of body weight during that time if you want to fill your glycogen stores again after depleting them.

You also need plenty of calories. Enough energy is vital in this process. Not only does he have to eat large amounts of carbs, but he also needs a lot of calories. The carbs he needs to restore his muscle glycogen adds up to 3, calories all by themselves.

Add to that 2 x 80 grams in the form of protein, and you have another calories right there. Plus to calories from fats. As you can see, you end up with more than 4, calories for an average-weight athlete. It can be necessary. That number of calories is not too much for an endurance athlete, but many feel that it means an uncomfortable amount of food daily.

Adapt your carbohydrate intake to your training schedule. To ensure as fast and complete glycogen replenishment as possible, you need to satisfy the following four criteria: 22 23 24 Large amounts of carbohydrates Frequent carbohydrate-rich meals High glycemic index Reach at least caloric balance Strength Training If your focus is lifting, you have it easier.

Strength training burns through a considerable amount of muscle glycogen per minute. A strength training session is most often split into short periods of near-maximal and depleting efforts and rest periods, unlike endurance training. In aerobic exercise, the same muscles contract without pause for a long time, thereby using more muscle glycogen.

You might train chest and triceps one day, legs the next, and then finish off your split with a back and biceps workout. You deplete muscle glycogen locally, meaning in the working muscles. Glycogen stores in your other muscles remain intact.

Any kind of average diet will replenish your glycogen stores in time for your next workout, as long as you eat enough calories.

The one exception might be the type of whole-body training gaining popularity in recent years, where you train the entire body every day, day after day, five days in a row.

The ones you like the best and find it easy to eat enough of. Only high-level endurance athletes need to pick and choose between specific carbohydrate sources depending on which ones give the most efficient glycogen synthesis.

Those two things determine if you will replenish your muscle glycogen, not if you get your carbs from pasta, pancakes, or sponge cake.

That said, fructose is not as useful for muscle glycogen storage as glucose or starchy carbs. Your liver has first dibs on the fructose you eat. You might have heard that you should avoid fat after a workout since a fat-rich meal slows down gastric emptying and delays your uptake of carbohydrates and protein, and therefore glycogen synthesis as well.

In a real-life scenario, post-workout fat or no post-workout fat does not seem to make any difference. You can safely drench it in a fatty sauce if you like. Solid foods and liquids fill your glycogen reserves equally well, as long as you get the same amount of carbs.

Glycemic Index, or GI, is a measure and ranking of how much the carbohydrates you eat affect your blood sugar. High GI foods make your blood glucose levels spike rapidly, which tells your pancreas to release insulin to keep your blood sugar in check.

When the Glycemic Index was a new and fresh concept, many believed we had found the holy grail to control body fat and body weight. Today, we know that glycemic index is pretty much irrelevant and that energy balance trumps glycemic index every day of the week.

If you eat primarily high GI foods the day after a depleting workout, your blood sugar and insulin levels spike. Probably not. Neither does it matter when you have more than 24 hours between workouts.

In those cases, the total amount of carbs you eat is much more critical. By eating your carbs with other nutrients or together with certain supplements, you can speed up glycogen synthesis a bit. Some athletes need up to 10 grams of carbs per kilogram of body weight per day to replenish their muscle glycogen completely.

Since you also need to rest from training and eat plenty of calories, it can be tough to get enough. Any help along the way from other nutrients and chemicals might be welcome. Everyone knows carbohydrates release insulin.

The simple carbs are basic sugars which are easy-to-digest. On the other hand, the complex carbs contain longer chains of sugar molecules and take more time for the body to break down and use.

Simple carbs should be consumed when an athlete is in the midst of training or competition. They also work quickly immediately after a workout to replenish glycogen stores. For example, both corn syrup and natural orange juice are considered simple carbs but consuming the juice from an orange is far healthier than consuming a corn syrup-laden soda drink.

Likewise, good starches complex carbs would include oats, beans, or vegetables versus processed breads that are high in flour, sugar, and yeast. In fact, the ability of carbohydrates to improve exercise performance is not limited to ingesting carbohydrates; simply rinsing the mouth with carbohydrate solutions without swallowing has been shown to improve aspects of exercise performance such as endurance capacity and bench-press repetitions.

However, the amount of carbs consumed and the timing when you are eating is critical to avoid weight gain. The key to sustaining the capacity for continued physical activity without gaining weight is to digest enough carbohydrates to maintain muscle and liver glycogen stores fuel without going overboard.

Additionally, carbs should be combined with proteins to stimulate muscle repair as well as fluids to ensure proper hydration. Depending upon training intensity and duration, carbohydrate intake might vary from 1. As a general rule, many endurance athletes try to consume grams of carbohydrates per hour for up to 3 hours of exercise and grams of carbohydrates per hour for exercise lasting longer than 3 hours.

Furthermore, you should eat a combination of carbs and proteins within 2 hours after a workout as insulin secretion, which promotes glycogen synthesis, is better stimulated when carbs and protein are consumed together. Plus, as mentioned earlier, proteins help stimulate muscle repair.

It is well established that beginning exercise with ample muscle glycogen stores is an important contributor to improved exercise performance. The glycogen supercompensation effect achieving extra high glycogen levels due to carbohydrate depletion followed by loading was first demonstrated in When someone experiences defective muscle glycogen storage, he or she can develop a number of symptoms and impairments.

Examples include muscle pain and fatigue, stunted growth, liver enlargement and cirrhosis. Popular Nutrition Posts All Time This Week {position} Detox Your Liver: A 6-Step Liver Cleanse.

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However, there are times when simple carbohydrates are ideal. During and immediately before and after intense or long-duration exercise, choose simple carbs; any other time, complex carbohydrates are a better choice for steady blood sugar levels and other health benefits due to their high content of fiber and nutrients.

Athletes need more carbohydrates than the general population to ensure adequate muscle glycogen stores. The recommended dietary allowance RDA for most adults is grams per day.

Individuals who engage in regular physical activity need an amount matching the frequency, duration and intensity of exercise sessions. The American College of Sports Medicine currently recommends athletes get 2. For a pound person, that's to grams per day — well above the RDA for the general population.

Meeting those needs takes a dedicated and focused dietary approach. Eat carbohydrates throughout each day, not only when you're preparing for a tough workout or athletic event.

Whole-grain toast, oatmeal, yogurt and berries all are carbohydrate- and nutrient-rich breakfast foods. For lunch, a rice bowl with veggies and tofu hits the spot, and at dinner, pair protein with sides of sweet potato, spinach and quinoa.

Nutrition Nutrition Basics Food and Health. The Best Foods to Build Glycogen By Jody Braverman, CPT, FNS, RYT Updated Dec 20, Reviewed by Andra Picincu, CN, CPT. com may earn compensation through affiliate links in this story.

Learn more about our affiliate and product review process here. What Is Glycogen? Video of the Day. Glycogen Foods to Focus On. Brown rice Beans Potatoes and sweet potatoes Barley Oatmeal Quinoa.

Healthy sources of simple carbs include:. Fruits Energy bars Bread Low-sugar sports drinks. Building and Maintaining Glycogen.

Was this article helpful? During exercise, especially intense endurance exercise, your body needs a lot of energy. As the intensity of your exercise increases and you approach your VO2 max, your metabolism goes up, while your digestion goes down.

This means that glycogen becomes increasingly important, as your body will rely on its glycogen stores to keep running. Unfortunately, your body will deplete its glycogen stores in approximately 2 hours of intense exercise. Once that happens, you will bonk or hit a wall or, in simplest terms, not be able to continue with your physical activity.

For this reason, endurance athletes pay special attention to glycogen and use several strategies to keep glycogen stores as full as possible.

Since your glycogen stores are directly linked to your carbohydrate intake, most of these strategies revolve around nutrition. If you want to keep your glycogen stores as full as possible, you need to intake a sufficient amount of carbohydrates.

But simply intaking large amounts of carbohydrates is not the way. You must also respect your body's ability to digest carbohydrates and the natural limits of your glycogen stores.

While both can be improved with training, there are limits to that as well. To properly manage your glycogen stores, you should consume carbohydrates before, during, and after exercise. Ideally, you want to begin your endurance exercise with your glycogen stores fully loaded.

To achieve that, athletes use a strategy named carbohydrate loading. Basically, this involves eating plenty of carbohydrates in the days or hours leading to the physical activity. While there are several detailed strategies out there how to best perform carbohydrate loading, you can follow these simple guidelines.

During intense exercise, you want to preserve your glycogen stores as long as possible. To achieve this, you need to sustain a sufficient intake of carbohydrates.

The amount required depends on the intensity of your exercise and your physical preparation, but a rule of thumb is 60 to 90 grams of carbohydrates per hour.

The ideal source of carbohydrates is a combination of two simple sugars, glucose and fructose. Glucose is your body's main source of energy , has a high glycemic index, and will be quickly absorbed into your system, significantly slowing down your glycogen consumption.

Fructose has a low glycemic index, but in combination with glucose it allows you to use both carbohydrate transporters in your body , which improves absorption and is the only reasonable way to absorb 90 grams of carbohydrates per hour.

To sustain such a carbohydrate intake, athletes primarily use energy gels and isotonic drinks , but sometimes they also use other sources of food, such as gummy bears , bananas, or white bread.

After intense exercise that lasts several hours, even if you sustained proper nutrition during exercise, your body's glycogen stores will be close to depleted. Refilling your glycogen stores is part of proper recovery , which also includes an intake of protein to feed your muscles and an intake of minerals aka electrolytes to rehydrate.

While you could achieve this with regular food, proper recovery requires the intake of these nutrients within 30 minutes after exercise , which is why athletes most often use recovery drinks.

The main negative effect of glycogen depletion is running out of energy. Whether you are an endurance athlete or working at the office, your body needs energy to sustain physical and mental activity. Glycogen, or its related processes glycogenolysis and glycogen synthesis, is directly linked to stress.

As stress increases, glycogen decreases. And as glycogen decreases, stress increases. There are several negative effects of long-term stress , which is something that affects several endurance athletes.

Since depleting glycogen stores is a regular process in endurance sports, stress is a constant factor you should be mindful of. Additionally, you may suffer from stress because of your mental processes. In this case, check out these useful tips from a sports psychologist.

During intense exercise, you will deplete your glycogen stores within 2 hours, which has negative effects, such as running out of energy and increasing stress. To fill glycogen stores and slow down glycogen consumption, you should intake carbohydrates before, during, and after exercise.

The best way to sustain a sufficient carbohydrate intake, especially during exercise, is by using dietary supplements, such as energy gels and isotonic drinks. After exercise, we recommend using a recovery drink. As a cyclist, chances are you heard about VO2 max and are looking for ways to increase it.

If you want to learn more about VO2 max and how to measu Endurance athletes, especially cyclists, don't leave home without their sports bottle. But perhaps you wonder, what exactly does that bottle contai New customer?

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