If you’re doing carb cycling, it’s normal to want strategize your diet around your workouts. Should your high-carb or low-carb days fall on training days or rest days? Here’s what you need to know!
More food = more fuel to crush your workouts. Simple enough, right? So if you carb cycle, it seems logical to match up your nutrition with your most challenging and easiest workouts.
More specifically, here is what most people mean by “matching” carbs: You’d eat more carbs on an intense workout day, like a lower-body workout or a really tough circuit workout. Lower-carb days, you would save for smaller muscle groups like arms, shoulders, abs, lower-intensity cardio, or a rest day.
But is this really something you need to stress out about? Let’s dive in!
Is Matching Carbs To Your Workouts Necessary?
Training “high” on some days and “low” on others is a classic approach that bodybuilders and athletes have used for decades to help get the most out of their diet and training.
Unfortunately for those of us who aren’t bodybuilders or pro athletes, life doesn’t always allow you to match your workouts to your calendar. Not to mention, what works for people who work out for a living… often doesn’t for the rest of us that are simply trying to get in shape and live a healthy lifestyle!
So let’s say you miss a workout or have a low-carb day that ends up being higher carb. Do you need to rearrange your whole week and start rescheduling workouts or cutting carbs? Definitely not!
Here’s why— Unlike pro bodybuilders, we don’t really have any two-hour leg days at V Shred. Even the workouts in our Clean Bulk program don’t require that kind of commitment. We’re all about finding the minimum effective dose of training and using targeted intensity rather than volume to change your body.
In other words, all of our workouts, like Toned in 90 Days, Ripped In 90 Days, Fat Loss Extreme Male, Fat Loss Extreme Female, and MOVE, aren’t so long and brutal that you need to be “carbed up” to survive them.
If you’re doing carb-cycling correctly — which is a whole other discussion — you should be able to perform any V Shred workout on any day. Eat enough protein, eat enough but not WAY to many calories, and let the carb days fall where they may!
Our approach to nutrition and training is meant to create changes in your body that last. It’s not about looking your best on a single day and then having an “offseason” afterward, as all those bodybuilders do.
Your Body Needs Fuel Every Day
Another reason to not stress out about matching your carbs: Your body is still in recovery mode for days after an intense training session. So those extra carbs from a high day, even if consumed 24-48 hours later, will still be put to good use.
That also makes your overall approach to nutrition more important than what happens on any particular day. No matter the day, just consistently hit the macros you’ve established that are best for your body type and goals in our V Shred App for IOS or Android — that is what is most important!
Now, suppose you consume fewer carbs and feel like you need more fuel to power through your workout. In that case, you can always pound some Sculpt Nation PRE 15-30 minutes before you hit the gym or sip on some BCAAs intra-workout.
Nail the Fundamentals of Your Nutrition
If you are still worried if you are doing it right for your goals, that’s where our V Shred coaches and trainers can help you find an approach that works for you— which may or may not be carb cycling. We create customized meal plans and workouts every day for people of all types, living every kind of lifestyle.
Interested? Get your plan from our V Shred Custom Coaching team or email coaching@vshred.com to learn more.