If you’re looking to build muscle, maximizing your glycogen stores is important. What this does is enables you to work out with the intensity you need to build muscle each and every workout.
When muscle glycogen stores begin to run low, the workouts will begin to drastically suffer and as such, you won’t be able to push yourself effectively.
Why Muscle Glycogen Is Depleted
Muscle glycogen is essentially the stored form of muscular energy that you have in your tissues.
Whenever you are performing the type of exercise that cannot run on fat as fuel (such as weight lifting or high intensity sprints), you’re going to see muscle glycogen levels dropping.
Once these drop low enough, further muscular contractions will not be able to take place and high intensity exercise will cease.
This is what happens when you feel like you’ve ‘hit the wall’ during a lifting session. Even though you may feel mentally strong enough, your muscles have said ‘enough’.
How To Replace Muscle Glycogen
In order to replace this muscle glycogen then, you must begin to consume carbohydrates that will move into the muscle tissues and be stored for later use.
The amount of carbohydrates that will be necessary to consume will depend upon how drastically you have depleted the muscle, which relates to both the length and intensity of the session.
Maximizing Muscle Glycogen
To maximize the muscle glycogen, you should focus on consuming foods that are high in starch or glucose, as this is the type of carbohydrate that will move into the muscle cell. Fructose, on the other hand, will get directed towards the liver, so it’s not going to do anything for helping with the intensity of your workouts.
Furthermore, the sooner after a workout you can begin the feeding period, the better you will replace the lost muscle glycogen.
If you wait too long once that ‘post-workout window’ is over, you will really reduce the extent to which muscle glycogen is replaced, thereby potentially affecting the intensity of your next workout.
To add to this, immediately following that workout, you should aim for fast acting carbohydrates, since this factor also affects how effectively your muscles will recover.
This would include carbohydrate-rich foods such as bagels, rice cakes, sweetened cereal, and white toast with jam.
So, next time you’re finishing up a workout, make sure you keep replenishment in mind. In order to build muscle you are going to have to continually workout with enough intensity and the only way that is going to be possible is if you’re continually keeping those muscle glycogen stores stocked.
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