Bodybuilding Forums

For the three rest days - midweek/weekend, is the amount of carbs supposed to be equal to the amount of protein? How high is high?

So if I'm 150lbs eating about 200g of protein and about 100g of fat on lifting days, do I consume around 200g of carbs on each rest day?

Generally for most people if their carbs are more than 50% of the their total calories this is high carb. But for low carbers this could be lower. Around 40% (in the GLAD range) is just fine. But if you want to keep it simple just do what you say. Eat the same amount of protein and carbs and you should be ok(this in general come to a 40/40/20). But generally do not be afraid to bump the carbs to 250g or even 300g(for a day though not longer!) if you feel like so...That's why it's called a carb load

For a point of reference, my weight currently fluctuates between 210 and 216 between carb-ups. I aim for around 600g of carbohydrate on my high-carb day. I try to only carb up one day a week, but some weeks I fudge it an extra day. I generally eat around 130g of protein on that day, and try to keep my fats as low as practical.

--Matt B.

redgiki:
I aim for around 600g of carbohydrate on my high-carb day

Wow, can you really eat 600g of 'clean' carbs (rice,pasta,bread,oats etc...)? The only way I imagine my self doing this is by adding junk food or/and some weight gainer.

Do you include creatine and sodium load in your carb loads? Or it is unecessery?

Depends on your definition of "clean". No soda, but plenty of fruit and vegetable juices (home juiced and pre-packaged). Lots of fruit, particularly raisins (I love raisins!), potatoes (not fried if I can avoid it), sometimes a whole-weat bagel (though with my gluten intolerance, I often regret this), and then at some point during the day I'll give myself a "treat", usually a Snickers bar.

A key to hitting a high carb target on a carb-up day is fruits and fruit juices. Dried fruits, particularly, aren't very satiating but really pack in the carbohydrates and nutrients. I like to juice my own fruits and vegetables in my home juicer -- carrot orange juice is weird but tasty! -- as well as do plenty of the frozen concentrated variety. If you allow fruit juices, hitting 600g per day is pretty trivial. Also, if you allow yourself bread, it's pretty easy to consume hundreds of grams of carbs. Due to my apparent -- but undiagnosed -- wheat intolerance, though, I prefer to avoid breads.

Sugary sodas make it even easier, but I avoid those for many reasons.

Just sit down with TheDailyPlate or FitDay.com and plan a few menus. You'll find that it's really easy to hit even 1000 grams of carbohydrate in a day if you want to, with or without sugary drinks. A number of experiments have been performed with healthy-weight people indicating that if there is insufficient fat and protein in the diet, even a 10,000 calorie-per-day diet of primarily carbohydrates leaves test subjects hungry at the end of the day.

--Matt B.

Oh,yes fruits/juices are excellent choice but I seem to have intolerance in fruits and juices myself. I generally avoid them during the day them but still eat them around working out hours. I am not so concerned on the nutritients since the tons of veggies I eat have in general the same nutritients as fruits...

For the weekend rest days, two days in a row, should they both be two individual carb up days, or are they supposed to be seen as one carb up day over 48 hours?

I've been treating them as individual days themselves. Everything seems to be going fine.

melville49 wrote:I've been treating them as individual days themselves. Everything seems to be going fine.

I carb up for 24 hours; if I go longer than that, it's an "oops", not a carb-up

A lot of people aim for double the carbs on Saturday as Sunday, since the glycogen reserves are filling up and the muscles are becoming more insulin-resistant, while the fat's insulin resistance remains around the same.

--Matt B.

Makes sense. I'll stick to what I've been doing and getting great results.

Thanks for all the replies.

melville49 wrote:For the three rest days - midweek/weekend, is the amount of carbs supposed to be equal to the amount of protein? How high is high?

So if I'm 150lbs eating about 200g of protein and about 100g of fat on lifting days, do I consume around 200g of carbs on each rest day?

I'm not an expert on this, but 200g of protein seems like a massive amount of protein if you're 150lbs; and from what I understand, excess protein gives us the same effects as carbs, defeating the purpose of the low-carb diet.