Nutrient timing and meal frequency are closely related. For example, technically speaking, timing your protein doses is both an aspect of meal frequency and nutrient timing. Consuming a pre and post workout meal is both an aspect of meal frequency and nutrient timing. With that said, I’d like to offer further insight into the aspects of nutrient timing that may be relevant to powerlifting performance.
Carbohydrate Timing
Of all the macronutrients, carbohydrates probably offer the most opportunity for manipulation in terms of nutrient timing. In fact, there are sensible ways to manipulate carbohydrate intake both within a given training week and each given day.
Daily Carbohydrate Timing
Most of the recommendations for carbohydrate manipulation involve timing your intake around
workouts. This recommendation is centered upon the fact that peri-workout carbohydrate consumption can often boost performance. Eating carbohydrates pre-workout tops off your glycogen stores and can delay time to fatigue for a weightlifter. Similarly, consuming carbohydrates post workout can help replenish glycogen stores more quickly. While it is not necessarily of great importance to replenish glycogen quickly if you train only once per day, this may be a consideration nonetheless.
The second reason carbohydrate timing is often suggested around workouts has to do with the fact that you’re more likely to partition nutrients favorably during this window. If you have an immediate need for glycogen, such as fueling the creation of new ATP or replenishing diminished muscle stores, the glycogen you consume is much less likely to be stored as fat. Additionally, glycogen synthesis is most effective post-workout. In other words, there may be a body composition benefit to consuming a large portion of your carbs in the peri-workout window.
Exactly how much of your carbohydrate intake should come in the peri-workout window? Personally, I recommend consuming ~50-60% of your carbs in this period. I typically aim for ~20-30% in the pre-workout meal and ~25%-35% in the post pre-workout meal. Keep in mind that, for athletes training once per day, there may not be any tangible body composition benefit to such carbohydrate timing. In practice, I’ve seen better results with this protocol, but I want to be clear what the basis of my recommendation is.
Weekly Carbohydrate Timing
The basis for weekly carbohydrate timing, also known as “carb cycling”, is very similar to that of daily carbohydrate timing. Those who advocate carb timing believe that you will receive favorable nutrient partitioning if carbohydrate consumption is limited to times when it is needed most. Others simply believe that carbohydrates serve no other purpose than to refill glycogen. As such, they tend to recommend higher carbohydrate intakes on workout days versus off days.
While I am skeptical that this practice provides any meaningful return in terms of body composition, I do recommend an element of weekly carbohydrate cycling for those in a caloric deficit. I make this
recommendation primarily for psychological reasons. Having one or two days per week where your carbohydrate and overall caloric intake are higher can massively boost compliance to a tough dietary protocol. This practice is called “refeeding” or having a “refeed day”. Refeeds help because you know that you’re never more than a few days away from a more “normal” day of eating. Compliance is more than half the battle in terms of achieving your nutritional goals.
Who doesn’t love the occasional cake, cookies, and ice cream!? Refeeds can help you fit some of these types of foods into your diet without “cheating”.
Now, don’t me wrong, there is also a physiological basis for my recommendations. Outside of the possible nutrient partitioning benefits, which I remain skeptical of, having periodic refeeds, where overall caloric intake and carbohydrate intake are temporarily spiked, can help transiently increase hormonal markers such as leptin and thyroid. While support in the literature probably isn’t there, countless bodybuilders and iron athletes can attest to the fact that having periodic refeeds keeps them from stalling out on their diets for much, much longer than when they’ve tried dieting without refeeds.
I’ve personally found them invaluable while dieting down.
Of course, additionally, if you’re deep into a diet, your carbohydrates are likely to be quite low overall.
When this happens, training begins to suffer. By timing your refeeds, or higher carb days, with your toughest workouts you can provide yourself with a temporary performance spike due to the larger amount of glycogen in your system. This can be of critical importance once you start getting down towards the end of your diet where progress starts to become dicey. And because the refeed days are still happening within the context of a diet, you’ll still lose weight at the end of the week.
Setting Up “High Carb Days”
Let’s talk about the practice of actually setting up a high carb day. Remember, we want a day that is both higher calories than normal and more carbs than normal. In order to achieve this in practice, we’re going to lower protein, low fat, and increase carbs beyond where they normally are.
Let’s say you are a male who weighs 200lbs and are currently aiming for a caloric deficit. Let’s set-up the theoretical diet:
1) You’d look back to Chapter 8 and see that 12x body weight is a decent starting point for a cut: 200*12
= 2400 calories.
2) You’d then set your protein needs. For overall protein needs, we can see that we need approximately
~1.1-1.4g/lb: 200*1.1 = 220g of protein. Because we don’t want to go insane, or be unrealistic, we’re going to convert this to a range of 210-230g or 220g +/- 5g.
Keep in mind that there are 4 calories per gram of protein. In other words, 880 of our calories are coming from protein.
3) Next, we’re going to calculate fat. Because this is a deficit, and we want to keep carbs high, we might use the lower end of the fat recommendations and go with 20%. 2400*.2 = 480 calories. There are 9 calories in each gram of fat: 480/9 = ~53g of fat. As above, we’re going to convert fat into a range of 48-58g or 53g +/- 5g.
4) Finally, you’re going to calculate your carbohydrate needs by allocating everything that is left. In order to do this, we have to subtract our calories from protein and fat from our total overall caloric intake:
2400-480-880= 1040 calories. There are 4 calories per gram of carb: 1040/4 = 260 carbs. Our final carb range is thus 255-265g or 260g +/- 5g.
5) Okay, at this point, we’ve got our baseline diet: 2400kcal, 220g protein, 53g fat, and 260g of carbs all plus or minus 5g. Coincidentally, this is how we get our calorie range as well.
6) For our high carb days, we’re going to increase carbs by ~50% from normal: 260*1.5=390g of carbs +/- 5g.
7) We’re going to lower our protein down to the needs of someone closer to maintenance because our calories will be higher on this day anyways: 200lbs*1.0g/lbs= 200g of protein +/- 5g.
8) We’re also going to lower the fat that we use for this day down ~2.5%: (2400*.175)/9=~47g of fat +/- 5g.
9) Here’s our freshly calculated high carb day: 200g protein, 390g carbs, 47g fat, ~2780 calories all +/- 5g.
You’re going to have to keep in mind that, because these days are higher calorie, they also impact your weekly caloric total. You’ll have to adjust for this in calculating your average weekly calories. Keep in mind that I have provided a spreadsheet which sets up all of this for you automatically.
As far as placement and frequency, again, I recommend two of these per week placed on your most difficult training days. Let’s say you train Mon/Wed/Fri/Sat. I’d recommend placing the two high carb days on Monday and Friday. If you train on Mon/Tue/Thu/Fri, I’d recommend placing the two high carb days on Mon/Thu. This way, you get the direct performance benefit on Monday and Thursday, but your glycogen stores are also still transiently higher for the workout the following days on Tuesday and Friday. In fact, this is EXACTLY how I set people’s programs up when they’re running PIP2 or higher from ProgrammingToWin.
Summary: EatingToWin “High Carb Days”
In sum, here’s the recommendations I’m making for the EatingToWin System:
1) Two high carb days per week
2) Carbs should be ~50% higher than on normal days 3) Decrease protein down to ~1g/lbs or ~2.2g/kg 4) Decrease fat ~2.5% from normal days
5) Time the high carb days with your hardest workouts of the week
Keep in mind that there are many other reasonable ways to include high carb days. You can only do one per week if you want. This will keep your normal days both higher carb and higher calorie. However, if you choose to do it the way I’ve presented here, just keep in mind that the spreadsheet will then be able to calculate all of it for you automatically AND you’ll be able to use this exact strategy with the PTW programs. In fact, this strategy was explicitly developed for use in conjunction with PTW programs.
Fat Timing
Fat timing isn’t nearly as exciting as carbohydrate timing. In fact, I honestly don’t even have much to say here. The one nutrient partitioning recommendation that I can make, in terms of fat, is to limit fat in the peri-workout window.
The reason I’m recommending limiting fat in the peri-workout window has to do with the fact that fat tends to greatly slow down digestion and absorption rates. If you’re following the EatingToWin system, you’re likely consuming a massive amount of carbohydrates both pre and post workout. What we don’t want is for the absorption of those carbs and proteins to be slowed down. That somewhat defeats the purpose of centering them around the workout in the first place.
Additionally, there may be a potential nutrient partitioning benefit to limiting fat in the peri-workout window. Working out itself improves both insulin sensitivity and increases muscle protein synthesis. If
you’re consuming a large amount of fat, at the time when insulin is being peaked by your huge carbohydrate meals, you may end up having that dietary fat very efficiently shuttled off to fat storage.
After all, that is essentially insulin’s job: it is an anabolic transport hormone. In any case, this may or may not matter, but it bears mentioning as a potential nutrient partitioning benefit.
As a practical recommendation, limit fat intake in the peri-workout window to less than 10g per meal.
Protein Timing
At this point, we’ve already gone over protein timing. Remember, to maximize MPS, you have two main concerns: 1) ensure you’re getting protein in your pre and post workout meal and 2) eat ~30-50g of protein every ~4-6 hours.
See the Protein section of Chapter 9 for more detailed discussion on this subject.
The Relative Importance of Nutrient Timing and Meal Frequency
A tendency that most of seem to have is to give undue importance to details when it comes to nutrition.
Make no mistake about it… If you violated every single recommendation that I just made above, but you still hit your caloric intake goals and got your macros right, you’d make excellent progress. If you
mastered every recommendation that I just mentioned above, but you didn’t get your caloric intake or macronutrient distribution correct, you might make “reverse progress” towards your goals.
My main point here is that you should never put a nutrient timing or meal frequency concern ahead of your macros and your overall caloric intake. Those are still the predominant factors here. I’d rather you skip a meal and hit your macros than hit your meals and skip your macros. Don’t miss the big picture.
No one is going to be perfect every day. 90%+ of your results still come down to just eating the right amount of food and the right amount of protein, carbs, and fats.