Want to build muscle? Why carbs could be just as important as protein | Hacker News Reader

Want to build muscle? Why carbs could be just as important as protein

theconversation.com

31 pointsgnabgib21 comments

Carbs are vital for nutrient partitioning and uptake and this is why every serious athlete manipulates carb feeding, and bodybuilders especially play with insulin, etc. People were always mixing maltodextrin into their intra and post workout refeeds, and if a normal person tried eating the white rice portions bodybuilders and strength athletes eat alongside their other macros they’d be shocked. This is like how regular Gatorade with sugar took a heel turn when it tried to go mainstream “electrolytes healthy, sugar bad” despite the sugar being necessary for optimal replenishment as carbs aids electrolyte uptake in the gut and the sugar free versions are far less effective at rehydration [0].

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK231364/#:~:text=Glucos....

This isn't exactly news. I have a sports nutrition textbook from 2009 that recommends having carbs with your post-workout protein at a 3:1 to 4:1 ratio.

It has been the main view since at least the 80s but then we got a low carb high fat movement around 00s-10s that argued that carbs are a poison. Partly because if you stopped eating carbs, then you basically couldn't eat high caloric fast food.

So although common within the science community, many in the general population still have a negative view on carbs. I assume this article is aimed towards those.

Your “partly because” is way too dismissive. Low carb diets work because they radically change your perception of satiation.

This article is aimed towards people building muscle which is very obviously very hard to do with a low carb diet, and is not actually descriptive of most people doing low carb diets (who are generally on such a diet to lose weight).

I've tried to do heavy workouts on low-carb. Like you said, it's very effective for weight-loss. But there were a lot of thousand-yard-stares I gave, trying to get the motivation to pick up the heavy weights.

It takes your body around six months to adapt to a ketogenic lifestyle. Your mitochondria have to breed new generations that activate the genes they have for optimally utilizing ketones as fuel. One of the weird side effects of this is building muscle rapidly and the other is muscle fatigue and DOMS nearly disappear completely, enabling you to push yourself much further. Dr. Shawn Baker (a beast of a man and heavy lifter) lives a zero carb lifestyle and holds multiple world records in rowing despite being in his 50s. A personal anecdote I have is that I moved houses a couple weeks ago. After spending an entire day lifting and carrying heavy things I was convinced I would be unable to move from the pain in the morning. (I'm in my 40s.) But after spending a year on a no-carb diet I had a little soreness the next day and then was fine the day after that. I've gotten noticably larger instead of noticeable sorer.

You really do have to reel in your expectations for those first six months but after that your gains take off like a rocketship.

Perhaps IIFYM just doesn't sell as many books.

I started losing fat rapidly (and gaining muscle rapidly) as soon as I increased my carb intake dramatically. Turns out carbs and fat aren’t interchangeable for muscle recovery (for me at least) and so much of my weightlifting efforts had been going to waste with my low carb diet.

It’s really unfortunate how every few years “influencers” (today’s term, but celebrities and hucksters of all stripes have been doing this for decades) will come around and promote a new extreme diet that will revolutionize your weight loss and fitness “journey”. The anti carb version is particularly popular because you do see genuine short to medium term benefits thanks first to reducing water retention and the fact that these diets are essentially elimination diets so eliminating certain processed foods has an immediate benefit.

Throw in some nice cherry-picking results, human psychology where the diet didn’t fail you, you failed the diet so people aren’t willing to speak up when it doesn’t work for them, and in todays day and age paid commenters that will bombard YT videos with fake comments both pro on your videos and anti on videos by actual scientists who have studied this stuff and have seen remarkably similar results for decades.

After all, there’s not much money to be made in “eat foods. Mostly plants. Not too much”. Especially when on the other side it’s not just processed foods but even the meat and dairy industries that are massive operations making a lot of money (with some hefty tax breaks and subsidies thrown in to boot).

This is excessively cynical. Different diets work for different people. Diet is such a complex mixture of culture, social environment, work environment, personal values, the personal values of people around you, your surrounding physical infrastructure, your own psychology and finally your biology.

The answer to “what diet” is “keep trying them until you find one that works, then stick with it.” There is an infinite number of totally functional combinations.

Well yes, it is personal. As such no dietary advice is worth more than the experiments one conducts on themself, to see how one responds specifically.

If something isn't working, then sure, look to the science for potential solutions and try them out. Nothing, however is guaranteed.

If you're not getting the results you're hoping for, move on. Conversely, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, even if someone out there is telling you that you're doing it wrong.

For example I have a weakness for sugar cereal. I know it's on the bad list of sweet, ultraprocessed foods. I also know that, as a pre-workout meal, I perform great after crushing a half-box of Trix or Captain Crunch.

I can personally attest to low-carb. I lost 40 pounds in two years. It wasn't easy. No diet is. Everyone told me I'd gain it right back and gave me visceral reactions when I told them how I did it and how it's been years now since I've switched back to a sensibly balanced diet to maintain it.

I don't think people want that particular diet to work. Granted, it's got its downsides. And you can do it in a very unhealthy way. But being 40 pounds overweight was probably worse than intermittent lower-carb with healthy(er) options like chicken caesar salads, stuffed peppers made with turkey, or tuna salad on celery. It just let me eat less calories without as much hunger.

Same boat! Lost 60lb over 2 years or so, was definitely challenging, but have been able to keep it off after reverting to a more standard diet.

Does your low carb diet have the same amount of protein as your prior diet?

Probably more just to be able to fill in the calories. For instance, I probably ate a lot more tuna salad on celery than I would've if it were on bread.

Agreed. From personal experience, I can tell you that cutting out carbs in favour of protein actually made me lose muscle mass! Once I got my carbs and fats up and averaged around 1g of protein per pound of body weight, I was able to grow and maintain muscle much more effectively. Plus, I did not feel tired all the time, which I most certainly did when I cut out carbs!

Carbs have important ancillary roles in recovery and muscle build but the headline is wrong. Simply put: no carbs = reduced performance, no protein = death.

Not quite. A full protein, zero carb diet can be lethal quite quickly. I suggest you read about the dietary phenomenon called "rabbit starvation" (it has nothing to do with rabbits starving to death).

What about the things normal people want to build: strength or strength-endurance or endurance? How is that affected by carb/fat/protein ratio?

Carbs increase performance, recovery, and muscle protein synthesis and repair.

Nooooo the 90s are truly back

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