Speaking to recovery meals after training, something I always suck at, what are folks typically eating immediately after a session? Say a 60-90 minute run or a pretty tough bike with intervals at near FTP for 60-90 minutes?
the forum is not an appropriate place to give you a detailed education so that you can understand why the specifics of calorie intake are critical in what your body will metabolize for muscle contractions. The study summary I provided has an excellent bibliography- if you are not just trolling, and actually are interested in this subject, I suggest you read some of the referenced materials.
Ultimately, if this will, or will not work for you is a very simple process of testing. 40 years ago the type of communication we are now enjoying was hardly imaginable, yet here we are! Ironically, the physiology and principles involved in low carb/high fat are not new- but were the norm for the majority of time our species has existed! Have fun!
Speaking to recovery meals after training, something I always suck at, what are folks typically eating immediately after a session? Say a 60-90 minute run or a pretty tough bike with intervals at near FTP for 60-90 minutes?
I just have a glass of chocolate milk
From all your posts, I think you’re just eating too much outside of training. Less crap food, more clean food. KISS
I’m both openminded and skeptical at the same time. I think it’s possible that something real is going on here, and I’m intrigued by the Sami Inkinen story as well.
What you’ve referenced is not a study, it’s a case report from a poster session. So an interesting anecdote but far from a real study. I am openminded enough to have listened to the entire podcast with Maffetone and Dr. Stevens. FYI, she mentioned that she fueled on the bike with honey and on the run with flat coke. So essentially sugar, and a bit of caffeine from the Coke. She mentioned she also took in some fat but didn’t specify what or how much.
I think it’s interesting that Sami didn’t change his training, and it wasn’t all low intensity low HR stuff, and he appears to have also gotten the same fat burning effect. I do find the Maffetone HR stuff a but cultish. As a 62 year old male with a relatively high max HR for my age of ~190, I’d end up with a training ceiling of 123 bpm, factoring in my age and putting back 5 bpm for being well trained and healthy. For perspective, I might average a HR of 135-150 for long endurance rides & runs. I like to be competitive in my performance, but mostly training and racing is about having fun and staying fit. All I can say is if Iimited my training to that HR ceiling it would be incredibly tedious, slow, and unenjoyable, so don’t think I’ll be trying that anytime soon even if it does have long term benefits.
A clear takeaway of the podcast with Dr. Stevens is that she had been chronically overtrained, and for her a bout of low intensity training might have been just what the doctor ordered to restore her body and her motivation.
I’m not too nitpicky about recovery drinks/meals. I make sure it has both carbs and protein. I often add some powdered L-glutamine to it, an amino acid to help with muscle recovery. I pick whatever I have around. Might be orange juice with the l-glutamine and some nuts. Might be milk and crackers and hummus. The amount I eat is dictated by how hungry I feel.
You can definitely be more scientific about it, but this works for me.
This is not an appropriate place to talk about what you should eat during the race and why? Seems to me this is exactly the place! If you think I am a troll, you do not know the definition. It is more likely that you are a troll, but I believe you are instead just in a bubble. I am familiar with Phinney’s work on this subject which is referenced on the poster. Most of his studies have been uncontrolled and he draws erroneous and unsupported conclusions to support his prior biases. His one controlled study of trained cyclist he claims as support that ketogenic diets are a benefit for competitive cyclists, touting that at 60% to 65% VO2max average performance was not adversely affected, however he ignores the fact that that effort level is way below race intensity and that in his study the ketogenic athletes had deteriorated performance at higher intensities while the “high” carb athletes had no deterioration in high-effort performance, but even THEY were restricted from eating as much carbs as they should and might have done even better if allowed to supplement even more carbs. Also the standard deviation of the change in performance of the ketogenic athletes was so high as to make the results unbelievable, even at low effort levels.
LOL- I am 61, and also have an HR profile that does not fit the 180-age, although in fairness to Maffetone he designed it to be safely in the aerobic zone, meaning for some it will be in the very low aerobic zone, for others at the high end. You can perform blood lactate testing with a Lactate Pro to determine the specific point when your metabolism transitions to dominate sugar burning.
In my personal use of this protocol (low carb/high fat), I have had very similar results to those noted by Sami. Most of the year I train easier, in my case an HR of about 135, running or riding. 4 weeks before a big event I do a 3 week “over reach” block, in which I only observe HR for reference, but train to PE, pace and speed- followed by a taper week. I have also noted that since switching to low carb, high fat- my respiratory rate stays lower even when I push harder, which is a indicator that I am not moving into sugar metabolism. I started this diet change (training and meals) last October, and have not yet raced, but have done a couple of 8 hour bike-run bricks at 70.3 effort- (HR 155ish), eating only a mix of sunflower seeds, walnuts and blue cheese (about 600-700 kcal), and have had no drop off in energy- and my recovery has been in line with when I used sugar based nutrition.
The referenced material is indeed a case report from a poster session, but it is in fact a summary from a detailed study done by Maffetone. I have not asked for the study detail, but he may share, depending on his agreement with the study subject 
And 130kcal/hr is not absurdly low for a lightweight female triathlete. Her previous number is unbelievably high - 450/hr after the swim - probably higher on the bike. This is more than a large professional male triathlete can handle without gastric distress. No wonder she had severe gastro issues! Just eliminating all the gastro issues from excessive over-fueling during the race could account for her performance increase,
That’s not exactly what is going on. As an athlete piles on more and more carbs in their daily diet, they become less and less sensitive to insulin. And then they need more carbs for insulin to extract the same amount of energy out of the food. It’s the same process as a kid becoming diabetic from drinking cokes all day. The body becomes numb to insulin, because there’s so much insulin being created in response to all the sugar coming in. Stevens wasn’t choosing to eat 450 sugar cals per hour, she was having to eat 450 sugar cals per hour to generate the same energy to move forward at the same speed as her competition.
Since that is way too much fuel to digest hour after hour, high-carb dependent athletes like Stevens (and many of us) blow up a while into the run. We either get sick from trying to eat all the sugar we need, or we bonk from our stomachs shutting down right before getting sick and now we can’t make the energy to keep going.
The trick that is proposed here is to eat way less sugar and simple carbs in your daily diet, get those calories from fat and slow carbs instead, which in turn increases your body’s sensitivity to insulin, which in turn makes your body able to keep running on less carbs coming in.
There’s also the problem that carbs coming in signals your body to turn off fat burning, because you don’t need fat because you have carbs. So again, less sugar coming down the pipe turns the fat burning furnace on more and more.
In Steven’s case, she swapped out the carbs in her daily diet for fat, which raised her insulin sensitivity, which in turn lowered her need for carbs and upped her internal fat usage for fuel at the same time.
The quoted statement above doesn’t pan out exactly how you’d think. If she just cut the carbs during the race before fixing her metabolism, she’d bonk. At her past metabolic state, she had to have those carbs to race at all. It’s fixing the underlying metabolic issues by adjusting the daily diet that worked and shifted her carb needs to where they are now.
People can go get tested to see how high of a carb burner they are. The Tri Shop in Dallas did it for me a while back and I came back super high, and also recently came back from blood testing as nearly pre-diabetic. All this while being super fit and low body fat from training for Ironmans. The big giveaway is not being able to have a strong workout without gatorade or other sugary stuff. I didn’t understand the impact of the high sugar burn rate at the time, because I was way more focused on FTP. But FTP is useless if you’ve bonked because you can’t feed the engine fast enough.
A mistake people make trying to fix themselves is removing too many carbs too soon and/or not replacing their calories with fat. Go slow and enjoy the process.
BTW, “1000 calories from soda is not the same as 1000 calories from broccoli” is definitely true, but if it took as long to digest those soda calories as it took to digest the broccoli ones, they’d be a hell of a lot more alike.
+1
These threads tend to end up in the weeds, there is some nice grass in there as well:)
My food for thought:
Fat burns in a glucose flame; taking availability out of the equation it is largely an intensity dependent relationship
Fuel workouts in line with the proportional demand and supply, but be ready to accommodate for your ability to assimilate
Although not mutual exclusive: separate fitness/session/performance goals, health, and weight loss in dietary considerations. You may be able to envelop all of them, but at the price of dilution.
Translating and generalizing research in terms of diet/performance is problematic at best; there are massive subjective variables
Cheers!
And 130kcal/hr is not absurdly low for a lightweight female triathlete. Her previous number is unbelievably high - 450/hr after the swim - probably higher on the bike. This is more than a large professional male triathlete can handle without gastric distress. No wonder she had severe gastro issues! Just eliminating all the gastro issues from excessive over-fueling during the race could account for her performance increase,
That’s not exactly what is going on. As an athlete piles on more and more carbs in their daily diet, they become less and less sensitive to insulin. And then they need more carbs for insulin to extract the same amount of energy out of the food. It’s the same process as a kid becoming diabetic from drinking cokes all day. The body becomes numb to insulin, because there’s so much insulin being created in response to all the sugar coming in. Stevens wasn’t choosing to eat 450 sugar cals per hour, she was having to eat 450 sugar cals per hour to generate the same energy to move forward at the same speed as her competition.
Since that is way too much fuel to digest hour after hour, high-carb dependent athletes like Stevens (and many of us) blow up a while into the run. We either get sick from trying to eat all the sugar we need, or we bonk from our stomachs shutting down right before getting sick and now we can’t make the energy to keep going.
The trick that is proposed here is to eat way less sugar and simple carbs in your daily diet, get those calories from fat and slow carbs instead, which in turn increases your body’s sensitivity to insulin, which in turn makes your body able to keep running on less carbs coming in.
There’s also the problem that carbs coming in signals your body to turn off fat burning, because you don’t need fat because you have carbs. So again, less sugar coming down the pipe turns the fat burning furnace on more and more.
In Steven’s case, she swapped out the carbs in her daily diet for fat, which raised her insulin sensitivity, which in turn lowered her need for carbs and upped her internal fat usage for fuel at the same time.
The quoted statement above doesn’t pan out exactly how you’d think. If she just cut the carbs during the race before fixing her metabolism, she’d bonk. At her past metabolic state, she had to have those carbs to race at all. It’s fixing the underlying metabolic issues by adjusting the daily diet that worked and shifted her carb needs to where they are now.
People can go get tested to see how high of a carb burner they are. The Tri Shop in Dallas did it for me a while back and I came back super high, and also recently came back from blood testing as nearly pre-diabetic. All this while being super fit and low body fat from training for Ironmans. The big giveaway is not being able to have a strong workout without gatorade or other sugary stuff. I didn’t understand the impact of the high sugar burn rate at the time, because I was way more focused on FTP. But FTP is useless if you’ve bonked because you can’t feed the engine fast enough.
A mistake people make trying to fix themselves is removing too many carbs too soon and/or not replacing their calories with fat. Go slow and enjoy the process.
BTW, “1000 calories from soda is not the same as 1000 calories from broccoli” is definitely true, but if it took as long to digest those soda calories as it took to digest the broccoli ones, they’d be a hell of a lot more alike.
Regarding insulin sensitivity, it appears the opposite to what you say is true. High carb, low fat diets actually increase insulin sensitivity.
http://www.rice.edu/~jenky/sports/Insulin.athlete.html
and
http://www.ajconline.org/article/0002-9149(92)90981-4/abstract?cc=y=
I eat all the carbs I want. And I want a lot. And I burn a lot of fat. In Zone 1 I burn 0.87 g/min of fat and in Zone 2 0.86 g/min. This is comparable to the amount of fat burned by some grand tour cyclists they tested and shared the results with me (anonymously of course). The biggest difference was those cyclists kept it level into zone 3 and I dropped to 0.71. Still not terrible, and improvable with the right training. So obviously my high-carb diet has not ruined my ability to burn fat and made me “carb dependent”. Inkinen’s results of something like 750kcal/hr (if memory serves) from fat translates to 1.39g/min. I think that is pretty un-precedented. I would love to see an expert physiologist’s analysis of his results and methodology.
And 130kcal/hr is not absurdly low for a lightweight female triathlete. Her previous number is unbelievably high - 450/hr after the swim - probably higher on the bike. This is more than a large professional male triathlete can handle without gastric distress. No wonder she had severe gastro issues! Just eliminating all the gastro issues from excessive over-fueling during the race could account for her performance increase,
That’s not exactly what is going on. As an athlete piles on more and more carbs in their daily diet, they become less and less sensitive to insulin. And then they need more carbs for insulin to extract the same amount of energy out of the food. It’s the same process as a kid becoming diabetic from drinking cokes all day. The body becomes numb to insulin, because there’s so much insulin being created in response to all the sugar coming in. Stevens wasn’t choosing to eat 450 sugar cals per hour, she was having to eat 450 sugar cals per hour to generate the same energy to move forward at the same speed as her competition.
Since that is way too much fuel to digest hour after hour, high-carb dependent athletes like Stevens (and many of us) blow up a while into the run. We either get sick from trying to eat all the sugar we need, or we bonk from our stomachs shutting down right before getting sick and now we can’t make the energy to keep going.
The trick that is proposed here is to eat way less sugar and simple carbs in your daily diet, get those calories from fat and slow carbs instead, which in turn increases your body’s sensitivity to insulin, which in turn makes your body able to keep running on less carbs coming in.
There’s also the problem that carbs coming in signals your body to turn off fat burning, because you don’t need fat because you have carbs. So again, less sugar coming down the pipe turns the fat burning furnace on more and more.
In Steven’s case, she swapped out the carbs in her daily diet for fat, which raised her insulin sensitivity, which in turn lowered her need for carbs and upped her internal fat usage for fuel at the same time.
The quoted statement above doesn’t pan out exactly how you’d think. If she just cut the carbs during the race before fixing her metabolism, she’d bonk. At her past metabolic state, she had to have those carbs to race at all. It’s fixing the underlying metabolic issues by adjusting the daily diet that worked and shifted her carb needs to where they are now.
People can go get tested to see how high of a carb burner they are. The Tri Shop in Dallas did it for me a while back and I came back super high, and also recently came back from blood testing as nearly pre-diabetic. All this while being super fit and low body fat from training for Ironmans. The big giveaway is not being able to have a strong workout without gatorade or other sugary stuff. I didn’t understand the impact of the high sugar burn rate at the time, because I was way more focused on FTP. But FTP is useless if you’ve bonked because you can’t feed the engine fast enough.
A mistake people make trying to fix themselves is removing too many carbs too soon and/or not replacing their calories with fat. Go slow and enjoy the process.
BTW, “1000 calories from soda is not the same as 1000 calories from broccoli” is definitely true, but if it took as long to digest those soda calories as it took to digest the broccoli ones, they’d be a hell of a lot more alike.
Regarding insulin sensitivity, it appears the opposite to what you say is true. High carb, low fat diets actually increase insulin sensitivity.
http://www.rice.edu/~jenky/sports/Insulin.athlete.html
and
http://www.ajconline.org/article/0002-9149(92)90981-4/abstract?cc=y=
I eat all the carbs I want. And I want a lot. And I burn a lot of fat. In Zone 1 I burn 0.87 g/min of fat and in Zone 2 0.86 g/min. This is comparable to the amount of fat burned by some grand tour cyclists they tested and shared the results with me (anonymously of course). The biggest difference was those cyclists kept it level into zone 3 and I dropped to 0.71. Still not terrible, and improvable with the right training. So obviously my high-carb diet has not ruined my ability to burn fat and made me “carb dependent”. Inkinen’s results of something like 750kcal/hr (if memory serves) from fat translates to 1.39g/min. I think that is pretty un-precedented. I would love to see an expert physiologist’s analysis of his results and methodology.
So what actually does increase one’s ability to burn fat then? A bigger aerobic engine? Sorry, it’s tough to keep up with a lot of the more scientific discussion here and I’m trying to understand it as someone newer to endurance sports and nutrition.
And 130kcal/hr is not absurdly low for a lightweight female triathlete. Her previous number is unbelievably high - 450/hr after the swim - probably higher on the bike. This is more than a large professional male triathlete can handle without gastric distress. No wonder she had severe gastro issues! Just eliminating all the gastro issues from excessive over-fueling during the race could account for her performance increase,
That’s not exactly what is going on. As an athlete piles on more and more carbs in their daily diet, they become less and less sensitive to insulin. And then they need more carbs for insulin to extract the same amount of energy out of the food. It’s the same process as a kid becoming diabetic from drinking cokes all day. The body becomes numb to insulin, because there’s so much insulin being created in response to all the sugar coming in. Stevens wasn’t choosing to eat 450 sugar cals per hour, she was having to eat 450 sugar cals per hour to generate the same energy to move forward at the same speed as her competition.
Since that is way too much fuel to digest hour after hour, high-carb dependent athletes like Stevens (and many of us) blow up a while into the run. We either get sick from trying to eat all the sugar we need, or we bonk from our stomachs shutting down right before getting sick and now we can’t make the energy to keep going.
The trick that is proposed here is to eat way less sugar and simple carbs in your daily diet, get those calories from fat and slow carbs instead, which in turn increases your body’s sensitivity to insulin, which in turn makes your body able to keep running on less carbs coming in.
There’s also the problem that carbs coming in signals your body to turn off fat burning, because you don’t need fat because you have carbs. So again, less sugar coming down the pipe turns the fat burning furnace on more and more.
In Steven’s case, she swapped out the carbs in her daily diet for fat, which raised her insulin sensitivity, which in turn lowered her need for carbs and upped her internal fat usage for fuel at the same time.
The quoted statement above doesn’t pan out exactly how you’d think. If she just cut the carbs during the race before fixing her metabolism, she’d bonk. At her past metabolic state, she had to have those carbs to race at all. It’s fixing the underlying metabolic issues by adjusting the daily diet that worked and shifted her carb needs to where they are now.
People can go get tested to see how high of a carb burner they are. The Tri Shop in Dallas did it for me a while back and I came back super high, and also recently came back from blood testing as nearly pre-diabetic. All this while being super fit and low body fat from training for Ironmans. The big giveaway is not being able to have a strong workout without gatorade or other sugary stuff. I didn’t understand the impact of the high sugar burn rate at the time, because I was way more focused on FTP. But FTP is useless if you’ve bonked because you can’t feed the engine fast enough.
A mistake people make trying to fix themselves is removing too many carbs too soon and/or not replacing their calories with fat. Go slow and enjoy the process.
BTW, “1000 calories from soda is not the same as 1000 calories from broccoli” is definitely true, but if it took as long to digest those soda calories as it took to digest the broccoli ones, they’d be a hell of a lot more alike.
Regarding insulin sensitivity, it appears the opposite to what you say is true. High carb, low fat diets actually increase insulin sensitivity.
http://www.rice.edu/~jenky/sports/Insulin.athlete.html
and
http://www.ajconline.org/article/0002-9149(92)90981-4/abstract?cc=y=
I eat all the carbs I want. And I want a lot. And I burn a lot of fat. In Zone 1 I burn 0.87 g/min of fat and in Zone 2 0.86 g/min. This is comparable to the amount of fat burned by some grand tour cyclists they tested and shared the results with me (anonymously of course). The biggest difference was those cyclists kept it level into zone 3 and I dropped to 0.71. Still not terrible, and improvable with the right training. So obviously my high-carb diet has not ruined my ability to burn fat and made me “carb dependent”. Inkinen’s results of something like 750kcal/hr (if memory serves) from fat translates to 1.39g/min. I think that is pretty un-precedented. I would love to see an expert physiologist’s analysis of his results and methodology.
So what actually does increase one’s ability to burn fat then? A bigger aerobic engine? Sorry, it’s tough to keep up with a lot of the more scientific discussion here and I’m trying to understand it as someone newer to endurance sports and nutrition.
Yep, the consumption of fat unequivocally (temporarily) increases insulin resistance (as well as noticeably slowing down how quickly carbs are digested). The suggestion to the contrary earlier in this thread belongs in the category of interesting (and ultimately incorrect) speculation rather than an empirical observation. The notion that one would want to eat a high-fat snack while working out/racing kind of blows my mind. (I’ve eaten plenty of high-fat fuel while alpine climbing and winter camping, but those are far longer duration, lesser intensity activities, i.e. you’re trying to fuel multi-day efforts.)
As for what (if anything) increases one’s ability to burn fat, I don’t have any particular insight there.
Not sure how you know how many calories you are burning as well as their specific make up, what type of equipment are you hooked up to while you are running?
In regard to the “advise” from your helpers at CU, I would suggest you may want to be very careful in use of their advise, as it could be harmful to your health
Some actual FACTS you may want to consider:
Many Elite endurance athletes are doing quite well on low carb, or ultra low carb diets with high fat diets, including Dr (yes DOCTOR) Amanda Stevens, who recently did a lifetime best 8:52 IM, at IMAZ 2015, at age 39! The overall amateur winner of the 1st IM Maryland spoke about his use of this type of diet in his Slowtwitch interview. There are certainly hundreds, quite possibly thousands successfully using this type of diet.
Additionally, the human species progressed through well over 99% of their existence on this type of diet. The addition of high carbs and sugars is relatively recent, as in the last few hundred years.
AND- all of the following diseases have been strongly correlated to the cultural change to high carb diets- Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and many cancers. Look up Dr Johannes Coy, and you will find that for over a decade many cancer patients in Germany have been put on no sugar diets, with a complete cure rate over 5x higher than Chemo and radiation therapy. The science behind this is well documented and easy to find. I also recommend you actually read Maffetone’s work and his published case studies, they are well done and quite compelling, and, oh yea, he is not selling ANYTHING.
For better or worse, humans make a lot of unhealthy choices, such as drinking, drug use, AND sugar addiction. You are welcome to your choices, but please do not attempt to rationalize it by ignoring and denying readily available facts
And I would be careful throwing around stats such as “complete cure rate over 5x higher than chemo.” Don’t get me wrong I am all for low/no sugar but to say it can cure cancer is ridiculous. There are also many documented cases of people who had rather slow-grown low grade cancer who refused chemo and conventional medicine in place of “no sugar diet” and are no longer alive. I believe there was a well documented case of a woman Oprah Winfrey interviewed a few years ago with breast cancer she refused conventional treatment and died soon after. Oprah practically begged her, "who not try both etc etc.
…to clarify “complete cure rate” in the context intended are the number of treated patient who are found to be completely clear and free of the specific cancer 5 years after conclusion of treatment. The data in Germany, where ultra low (zero) sugar diets (not intended to be used while fully healthy and active) as a treatment for certain specific cancers are used, has shown to be 5x greater than chemo or radiation therapy. The reason for this is actually quite simple (although technically very detailed) and explained in detail if you do a google search on Dr Johannes Coy anti cancer diet. To be careful, and clear, this is NOT a cure for ALL cancers, but is very effective with cancers of a specific cell type. While it will in fact kill 100% of the cancer cells, something chemo and radiation therapies often do not do, none of these treatments restore already damaged organs and cells, that takes time, something some patients may not have. The main point here, is that while our bodies certainly need sugars, our genetically preferred diet was in the 15-30% cho range, not the 50-70% that has become quite common today. So while sugar/cho is essential, too much can be very harmful.
Thank you for pointing out the need for clarification.
BTW- I had no idea how high my sugar intake was until I did a food log and the math. I thought I was closer to 30, but was much closer to 70. The eye opener and accounting was due to being diagnosed pre-diabetic! Three months after overhauling my diet, my blood tests were back well within the normal range
So what actually does increase one’s ability to burn fat then? A bigger aerobic engine? Sorry, it’s tough to keep up with a lot of the more scientific discussion here and I’m trying to understand it as someone newer to endurance sports and nutrition.
Spend a lot of time training in the zone where you are burning a lot of fat. The more you use and stress your fat burning system, the more efficient it will become. It would be particulary good if you can pinpoint the spot where your fat burning drops off and spend a lot of time just barely below that, but absent a metabolic test, use Coggin’s methods to calculate your training zones and spend a lot of time mid zone 2. It should feel quite easy, which causes a lot of people to do their longer workouts too fast much of the time and it’s easy to convince yourself that if your working harder your training will make you faster, but you actually end up not effectively targeting any particular energy system or neuro system… which is why easy should be easy and hard should be hard! Too many people do easy too hard and hard too easy.
For instance last night I did a 90 minute run. My open half marathon pace is 6:40, but my fat burning starts to drop some as I get faster than 8:00 pace, so I did the whole run last night at 8:00/mile. I used to do these runs at 7:15-7:20 which ironically is less effective!
So what actually does increase one’s ability to burn fat then? A bigger aerobic engine? Sorry, it’s tough to keep up with a lot of the more scientific discussion here and I’m trying to understand it as someone newer to endurance sports and nutrition.
Spend a lot of time training in the zone where you are burning a lot of fat. The more you use and stress your fat burning system, the more efficient it will become. It would be particularly good if you can pinpoint the spot where your fat burning drops off and spend a lot of time just barely below that, but absent a metabolic test, use Coggin’s methods to calculate your training zones and spend a lot of time mid zone 2. It should feel quite easy, which causes a lot of people to do their longer workouts too fast much of the time and it’s easy to convince yourself that if your working harder your training will make you faster, but you actually end up not effectively targeting any particular energy system or neuro system… which is why easy should be easy and hard should be hard! Too many people do easy too hard and hard too easy.
For instance last night I did a 90 minute run. My open half marathon pace is 6:40, but my fat burning starts to drop some as I get faster than 8:00 pace, so I did the whole run last night at 8:00/mile. I used to do these runs at 7:15-7:20 which ironically is less effective!
So how do you determine your Coggan zones for running considering they are power based and designed for cycling it appears? Just assimilate an avg heart rate to each power zone and transfer to running? My FTP on bike is a measly 248 currently and my open 1/2 mary pace is around 8:45/mi. I am assuming that for long runs I need to be somewhere in the 10-11:00/mi pace then?
How did you determine where your fat burning drops off? Is there a physical change that allows you feel the change?
Ironically, the physiology and principles involved in low carb/high fat are not new- but were the norm for the majority of time our species has existed! Have fun!
They were the norm UNTIL people became obsessed with going as fast as possible for as long as possible. Then a different diet was required.
You can use this - It’s Friel, not Coggan -
http://home.trainingpeaks.com/blog/article/joe-friel-s-quick-guide-to-setting-zones
But I do it a bit differently. Instead of a 30 minute time trial to determine threshold pace, for my run FTP I use a pace a little slower than 10k pace. Like 10k + 9 seconds. Works well for me. YMMV.
Yep, the consumption of fat unequivocally (temporarily) increases insulin resistance (as well as noticeably slowing down how quickly carbs are digested). The suggestion to the contrary earlier in this thread belongs in the category of interesting (and ultimately incorrect) speculation rather than an empirical observation. The notion that one would want to eat a high-fat snack while working out/racing kind of blows my mind. (I’ve eaten plenty of high-fat fuel while alpine climbing and winter camping, but those are far longer duration, lesser intensity activities, i.e. you’re trying to fuel multi-day efforts.)
As for what (if anything) increases one’s ability to burn fat, I don’t have any particular insight there.
For my next race I think I’ll fill my bottles with clarified butter and bacon bits. I’m sure to set a PR by 30 minutes!
Some general thoughts and ideas:
Adopt a healthy diet that is sustainable for you.
If you’re looking for a diet, I would recommend checking out Racing Weight as a resource. There’s nothing magical/novel about this diet (ie: vegetables, fruits, lean proteins, whole grains and essential fats). The DQS that this diet uses is a simple and effective tool.
The best time to lose weight seems to be in the general period (ie: off season, base, winter, etc) but it can also be done in the specific period (ie: build, race, spring/summer, etc)
The 500 calorie daily deficit seems to work well.
Create this deficit at night (ie: go to bed a bit hungry).
In terms of training nutrition, it seems that a lot of people over-estimate their nutritional needs (ie: too many calories) before, during and after workouts. However, do not try and create your calorie deficit around your training. You want your nutrition to be optimal to optimize the actual workout. But once again, do not over-estimate your need for calories.
With your training zones, do the appropriate intensity/duration to optimize performance and don’t worry about “fat burning” zones. Your weight loss is going to come via going to bed slightly hungry.
In terms of fueling your workouts and races, there’s a reason that the overwhelming majority of triathletes of all abilities have their best performances incorporating “sugar” in their training and racing.
Lastly and respectfully, I get that body composition is hard but this seems to be the classic forest/trees scenario. It really is pretty much as simple as all of the above.
Good luck with your training and racing.