Carbs Spike Your Insulin (But That's IDEAL for Muscle Growth) | Ep 437
Do carbs make you fat?
Are spikes in blood sugar and insulin a problem for health or weight loss?
Maybe you've been cutting carbs or tried keto or carnivore, yet your strength training progress has stalled, your recovery feels sluggish, and you're still not seeing the body composition results you want.
The problem isn't your discipline. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what insulin actually does (especially if you lift weights).
Insulin is not a "fat-storage hormone" but a nutrient-partitioning hormone whose effects depend entirely on context: your training status, muscle mass, and energy balance.
Learn how resistance training changes the way your body handles carbs, why lifters over 40 actually benefit from strategic insulin spikes, and how muscle tissue acts as a "sink" for glucose that determines where your nutrients go.
It's not about eating unlimited carbs but understanding why carb tolerance is built through strength training and how to use that to your advantage, and to stop fearing spikes in blood sugar.
Whether you want body recomp, trying to build muscle while losing fat, or wondering why your low-carb diet isn't working despite consistent strength training, this episode gives you an evidence-based framework to rethink your nutrition strategy.
Plus, get a simple post-workout protocol that can improve your next-day training performance.
Download my FREE macros guide: Nutrition 101 for Body Composition. Learn exactly how to set your protein, carbs, and fats for muscle building and fat loss using a flexible approach that works long-term: witsandweights.com/macros
Timestamps
0:00 - Why carbs and insulin don't automatically cause fat gain
3:20 - How training context changes what insulin does with your food
7:25 - The real reason lifters fear carbs (and why it's misguided)
11:55 - What insulin actually does (nutrient partitioning explained)
18:40 - How carbs support muscle building, recovery, and strength training performance
24:20 - Fat loss and insulin (why energy balance matters more than spikes)
29:20 - Acute insulin spikes vs. chronic dysfunction (the critical difference for body recomp)
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Philip Pape: 0:01
If you've been told that carbs spike insulin, and insulin makes you fat, and you've been restricting carbs because of it, even though you're resistance training and trying to build muscle, this episode is going to change how you think about food. Today I'm gonna show you why insulin spikes, spikes in blood sugar, are not the problem, and why, if you're lifting weights, they're actually part of the solution. You'll learn why chronic dieters get this wrong at the metabolic level, why muscle changes what insulin does with your food, and a post-training carb strategy that can improve your recovery within just one day. Carbs spike blood sugar, increase your insulin, that those occur and that they automatically cause fat gain is still one of the most persistent myths in fitness. And it's costing a lot of people, a lot of people, especially those over 40, a lot of women I talked to, peri postmenopause, it's costing you a lot of real progress, healthy living, thriving, longevity, all the things that you're trying to seek by doing it, and you're just cutting into those benefits because we can benefit tremendously from carbs depending on the lifestyle. And the lifestyle that you were talking about is the one that we espouse here in Wits and Weights. Now, you've probably heard that keeping insulin low is the key to staying lean. And maybe you've tried low carb, maybe you've tried keto, maybe you're still restricting carbs, even while resistance training three or four days a week, and you wonder why you don't have the energy or your performance feels flat or you're not building muscle or recovery is taking longer. The reality is that insulin is not a fat storage hormone. Let me repeat that. Insulin is not a fat storage hormone, it is a nutrient partitioning hormone. And what that means for you and for your body composition and for your muscle building depends entirely on ta-da context. Context, guys, what is so sorely missing from short form reels on Instagram. Context. Your training, your muscle mass, your energy balance, your goals, your lifestyle. When these variables are aligned, then insulin becomes an ally. Now, I shouldn't have to say that any hormone in your body becomes an ally because we are it's a natural part of our human existence. And if we are all living our natural human lives as we should, as opposed to in today's, you know, Western world, with the food supply we have and with the sedentary lifestyle and lack of any form of hard work or heavy lifting, then you know the discussion would go away. But we need to understand how to leverage our bodies here and support our muscle development and our energy and our recovery and all of the things that carbs are great for that do not inherently drive fat gain. Now, I want you to also stick around to the end of this episode because I'm going to tie this all together into a post-workout carb timing strategy that I think can noticeably improve your next day's training performance. One of the most common problems I see with clients, I'm going to share it with you. Takes about 60 seconds to explain, and then you can start using it after your very next training session. But really, let's get into the myth and why it persists. Why is this misconception about carbs and insulin and fat gain so sticky, right? That's the word sticky. I don't think people are scared of insulin itself. Most people don't even use the word necessarily in these discussions. They're scared of losing control and gaining weight, and they've never been able to successfully lose weight or lose fat. And maybe cutting carbs has worked for them, and maybe the fitness industry has given them a really convenient villain that is very convincing in terms of how it is portrayed. Here's what I hear in the industry, and I many of these things I believe them myself, and I know now not to be true. Insulin spikes automatically cause fat storage. Wrong. Carbs shut off fat burning. Kind of wrong. And it's wrong and right for the reasons that we need to understand. Low insulin equals better body composition. Carbs are fine for athletes, but not for regular people. There's some truth there too. So again, we're gonna get into nuance. Notice I didn't just shut all these down. There's some truths in these, but you have to understand what they mean and context. And I think these beliefs persist because of some things that stick out at me as I was reviewing why, right? First, there's this framing around metabolic health, metabolism, type 2 diabetes, diseases of aging, all of that that has bled into the general advice and insulin resistance. And most people have heard the term insulin resistance or insulin sensitivity, but usually we're talking about the negative side. And in a clinical setting, this insulin resistance is generally correlated with really bad things. You know, high insulin is correlated with really bad things, but we're looking at people who have chronic metabolic dysfunction rather than necessarily the acute post-meal response in healthy people. And I've had several discussions with folks on this, and most notably, Ben Ziel came on. He's a type 1 diabetic, and he all but said, look, if you don't have type 1 diabetes, or if you don't have diabetes, you don't have to worry about this stuff if you're lifting weights and you're eating well and you're active, right? It's not a problem. So again, we have to look at what population is being studied when we look at some of this data. Second, the keto and low carb narratives have just so ridiculously oversimplified the role of insulin and treat it as a villain, kind of like people treat cortisol as a villain or no, not or that those are the two that come to mind. I'm not thinking of another one off the top of my head. But those two people treat as these like boogeymen that we have to just crush and put in their place. So that's the second one. Keto, low carb, that whole narrative. The third thing is that people conflate or confuse acute insulin spikes, right? These are the normal, transient, necessary spikes of insulin that are short-term, like when you eat food and particularly carbs, with, and they conflate that with chronic versions of this, which is called hyperinsulinemia. And that's a different thing entirely when you have chronic spikes in insulin, which again tie to insulin sensitivity and eventually diabetes. And we're going to come back to that distinction because it is critical. And then fourth, fat storage gets blamed on insulin or hormones or carbs or whatever, instead of the context those hormones operate in. And that's because people want to scape goat. They want to scape goat that maybe relieves them of their responsibility to make better choices in their life. Let's just put it that way. And I'm not saying it's just about calories in, calories out, even though mathematically it is. There's a lot of upstream choices and influences on those choices, including, yes, genetics, appetite, hormones, et cetera, et cetera. But we can't look at it in a vacuum. Okay. We can't look at it in a vacuum and say, well, so always carbs are going to spike insulin, which is going to cause you to gain weight or fat. So I want to reframe this today. You see, I'm trying to dance around this in a nuanced way because I also do not want to make simplified blanket claims because that is not what we're all about. Insulin doesn't cause fat gain without a calorie surplus. Boom. That's the thing you need to remember. Insulin doesn't cause fat gain without a calorie surplus. Another way to put that is the only way you gain fat is with a calorie surplus. Fat gain requires excess energy, repeated overfeeding, overconsumption, potentially a poor use of those nutrients, right? How we partition the nutrients because of your lifestyle. And then how, and then low muscle mass or inactivity, right? So it really does all come down to the excess energy, but it's the excess energy in all of that context. And that context tends to produce the excess energy. Insulin just determines where nutrients go, it doesn't create energy out of nowhere. So that's that's my thoughts on where the Smith comes from. Now, let's do a little detour into insulin 101. What does it do in your body? And I'm not gonna dumb it down, I'm gonna simplify it in a way that I can understand it so you can understand it. Because I'm not a doctor, I'm not a scientist, but I do self-study all this stuff and I talk to lots of experts and I work with clients on a daily basis. So I consider myself quite educated from spending the time to think about and look into this stuff and also looking at what the actual evidence says. So when you eat, especially carbohydrates and protein, your blood glucose goes up, right? Your blood sugars go up. And then your pancreas releases insulin. Boom. Then insulin does a few things. Insulin shuttles glucose and amino acids into your cells, right? The glucose from the carbs, amino acids from the protein. This is how your muscles get their fuel and the building blocks to grow. Also, insulin suppresses fat oxidation temporarily. This is your fat burning, not fat loss, just the burning of fat. And even the word burn is kind of a layman's term, right? This is where the fear I think comes from, though. And we're gonna get to why this isn't the problem people think it is at all. This is not a problem at all, guys. Insulin also signals to your body that energy is available. Because remember, insulin is a hormone, so it's a signaling messenger, chemical signaling messenger. It tells your body energy. Hey, hey, body, energy is available. And then that affects other hormones downstream and other metabolic processes downstream. Insulin also reduces muscle protein breakdown, muscle protein breakdown. That's the opposite of muscle protein synthesis. So muscle protein breakdown, which we don't like when our muscles break down, even though it does always happen, right? We're always synthesizing and breaking down muscle tissue, but insulin reduces it. And this is huge for us as lifters. You know, we talk a lot about stimulating muscle protein synthesis, but reducing breakdown is the other half. And then insulin also enables glycogen resynthesis. So that means after you train, your muscles have to replenish their glycogen stores, and insulin facilitates that process. Now, your your brain is like working, like, okay, I see where this is all gonna come together, at least for the most part. Some of this stuff needs more explanation, I think. Now, here's a clarification about insulin. It does not cause fat gain without a calorie surplus. Have you heard that before? You probably did a few minutes ago because I said it twice or three times. And I'm gonna say it again because it needs to land. For you to actually store body fat, you need excess energy, meaning more calories than you burn over time. That's it. Insulin might determine whether those excess calories go more toward fat or muscle. That is true. But if there is no excess, there's nothing extra to store. Okay? So think of insulin as like a traffic cop that's directing nutrients to different destinations. It's not the person loading the trucks, right? If the trucks have your calories, have your energy in them, I'm like waving my hand as if you can see me. This is audio only. If you don't have extra trucks, insulin has nothing to direct toward fat storage. So that's insulin 101. Now, why is insulin so great for us? Why do we love insulin as a muscle-friendly hormone? Okay, this is the heart of today's episode. Because if you have any designs on improving your health and body composition, you absolutely must lift weights. And assuming you're gonna lift weights and have that kind of lifestyle, especially as we get older, okay, insulin is working for you under those conditions. And the conditions have to be the right conditions. We're gonna talk about it. You can't just, you know, lift for 30 minutes twice a week and then have a completely terrible lifestyle other way, other than that. There's a whole bunch of things. But the first big thing we want to talk about is that insulin is what we call permissive for muscle protein synthesis. It doesn't alone like maximally stimulate muscle synthesis. That that's what your protein does. Okay, and that's why we eat protein plus the lifting itself. But it it plays a supportive role by reducing breakdown, as we already mentioned. That's why it's permissive. In other words, it kind of like unlocks or makes the road a little bit bigger. So protein's like building the uh the muscle, insulin's preventing it from being broken down. That net muscle balance is what determines how much and whether you're gaining tissue over time. So you can see already how insulin is helpful for building muscle. Second, carbs and insulin improve your training performance. Okay, resistance training is what we call glycolytic. I haven't used that term in a while, but it simply means that your muscles run on stored glycogen when you're lifting heavy or when you're doing high volume work. Just like some forms of cardio are also glycolytic, like CrossFit, for example. When you have enough carbs, okay, and we can define what enough means, and it's gonna be highly variable. Excuse me. When you have enough carbs, you increase your training volume capacity as a result because training is glycolytic. And you improve your bar speed and you improve your power output, and you get better repeat set performance, you know, performance across sets where you don't have as big of a drop-off, you know, as many drop-off in reps. And then you would you reduce the how much exertion you perceive, so the same work feels easier. And why does that matter? Well, that matters because mechanical tension and volume are what drive hypertrophy, the building of muscle. It's not the insulin itself, it's that the insulin unlocks this higher level of performance and supports those inputs. Okay. So if you have reduced perceived exertion, higher bar speed, higher power power output, greater capacity, just think about how all that comes together to a lot more volume and intensity in the gym. Third, the glycogen replenishment from insulin means you have better recovery and better signaling of your recovery, which is like an adaptive process. You become a better recovery machine. So after you're done training, then you eat it carbs as well, because I'm a huge fan of post-workout carbs, and you get a blood sugar spike, an insulin spike from carbs, that's gonna drive the glucose back into your muscles from your bloodstream. That's gonna restore your glycogen. That's also then gonna reduce cortisol and improve your readiness for your next session, which by the way, side tangent, this is why I like working out in the morning for a lot of people, because it kind of sucks down some of that stress right at the beginning of the day. This is especially relevant if you are a higher volume lifter, which it's all relative. Like many of you are probably in that quote unquote high volume realm, even if you're like doing starting strength or something, because it's still, when you take the overall amount you're lifting, it's still pretty darn high volume. You know, if you're older, if you're over 40 and your recovery is just less than it was when you're younger, all of these things help. It helps to have more glycogen, period, which come from carbs. And then fourth, this is the one that is maybe the most important for some of you and it affects health and longevity and everything else. And that is insulin sensitivity. In your now insulin-sensitive muscle tissue, because you lift weights and muscle is insulin, increases your insulin sensitivity, glucose is going to preferentially enter your muscle. And that means less of the glucose spills over into fat tissue, and now your nutrient partition partitioning favors lean mass. This is really powerful because this means that even from the same overall, say calories, you're able to more efficiently shuttle those nutrients, that glucose, toward muscle rather than fat, right? And so that's where that's where when you get under the hood, it really does sometimes become more about calories in, calories out at some level. And the powerful thing is that resistance training itself, not just the muscle mass, not just the muscle mass resulting from it, but the actual training act of training increases insulin sensitivity as well. I talked about on the, oh, I was on a podcast recently, we talked about this, and I said the research shows 24 to 48 hours you after you lift, you're much more insulin sensitive. Like that it, so you're if you're lifting three or four days a week, you're constantly keeping that insulin sensitivity higher. And you're improving something called GLUT4 translocation. GLUT4 is G L U T all caps-4, if you want to Google it. This is like little doors that allow glucose to go into your muscle cells. And they get triggered by your training. They also get triggered by walking, by the way. This is why I'm a big fan of being active throughout the day. And this happens independent of fat loss. So the more you train, the more you move, the more active you are. And I don't mean high-intensity stressful chronic cardio. I mean just good low-grade chronic movement, chronic in a good way. The more you train, the better you move, the better your body handles carbs. Period. That's what that's my point. And so this aligns perfectly with what I've been teaching for years on this podcast. Muscle makes carbs even more attractive, quote unquote, safer, if I even need to use that term. Like you don't have to worry about them making you gain fat or worsen your health. They're actually an accelerate, accelerator, right? The more muscle you have, then the more muscles you can eat. And there are not going to be negative consequences. In fact, they're positive. Okay. Because you can tolerate them, you have better insulin sensitivity and everything else we just talked about. Now remember, I want to remind you, I'm going to share a specific post-workout carb strategy at the end that can improve your performance the very next day that ties all this together. So I do want you to stick around so you get the full picture, guys. All right, now if you're hearing this and you're thinking, okay, how do I actually figure out my carb intake? How do I set up my macros for this? I do have something for you I put together a while back. It's a free guide called Nutrition 101 for body composition. It's all about flexible dieting and setting up your protein, carbs, fats based on your goals, whether you're building muscle, losing fat, doing both. It's the same framework I use with my coaching clients. You're gonna love it. It's gonna teach you, even at the mindset level, how to think about food, but also the tactical level, how to calculate your macros. Go to wits and weights.com slash macros or click the link in the show note. I put the link in there. That's witsandweights.com slash macros. Now I know what some of you are thinking, okay, Philip, I'm trying to lose fat. So I heard you briefly say maybe maybe insulin does increase fat oxidation. And don't I want to keep the insulin low to do that? Right? Like, or you know what I'm saying? Low insulin and low carb will increase fat oxidation. So people get tripped on the up on this. I did a whole episode on this in the past. I don't have it with me, unfortunately, but it I've done several. You can look up lose fat versus burn fat. It's something like that. But number one, yes, insulin does suppress fat oxidation so that when insulin is higher, you're not burning as much fat in that moment. That is true. But okay, this is a critical, but that is a temporary effect. It lasts a few hours after a meal, and it has nothing to do with your overall energy usage and your energy system and whether you gain or lose fat. Whether you gain or lose fat has to do with energy balance, not whether you spiked insulin from your meal. Okay, I want you to remember this. You don't lose fat minute to minute. You lose it over days and weeks based on energy balance, not based on insulin in the short term and fat oxidation in the short term. Because guess what? If you're not oxidizing fat and your body needs energy, it's going to use glucose instead. So it's either going to use carbs or fat, whatever you have available for it. And the keto folks and the low carb folks are like, oh, all right, but that means we don't have any carbs in our system and we're just burning fat. Well, yeah, guess what? You're eating a lot more fat. You're eating a lot more fat. So the equation actually nets out. And there's actually some studies that show people who eat more carbs tend to burn. A few more calories from eating more carbs and people eat more fat, but that's a separate topic. I'm just gonna leave that to side, just fruit food for thought. So if you eat in a deficit, you're gonna lose fat. Doesn't matter if insulin spiked after every single meal and by how much. Once it drops, fat oxidation resumes, and your body can use carbs in the meantime. It doesn't matter. The body is constantly switching between fuel sources as it needs, and all that matters are the calories. Fat loss fails when calories are too high. It also fails when muscle mass is low, when your training stimulus is weak or you're not training, or when your diet is chronically stressful, not because you had rice or fruit. Okay. And that's when we say carbs, by the way, that is what we're talking about. We're not talking about pizza and donuts and muffins, even though they contain carbs. Those are processed carbs that also contain fats. Totally different things. All right, so let's talk about one of the other myths that I mentioned, and that is, you know, the acute spikes versus the chronic, the chronic spikes, which is called chronic hyperinsulinemia insulinemia. Insulinemia. Okay. And this is where we don't want to conflate these things because this is also causing confusion, let alone the ability to pronounce the word. Acute insulin spikes that we've been talking about. These are normal. They are transient, they're temporary, they're necessary for nutrient uptake. We see them in healthy, active people all the time. If you wear a continuous glucose monitor, you'll see your blood sugar spike when you eat carbs. Totally normal. Nothing wrong with it at all. The amount it spikes is nothing compared to the amount it would spike in a diabetic. You don't have to worry about it. Every time you eat a meal with carbs or protein, you're going to get an insulin spike. That's your body doing what it's supposed to do. That's why I don't even recommend CGMs for the vast majority of people, almost anybody, really. Even if you're trying to get your A1C down, if you start lifting weights, walking more, and eating balanced meals, you're probably going to solve the problem. So chronic hyperinsulinemia is different. That is when insulin stays elevated most of the time. And that is often a precursor to diabetes, or that's, you know, pre-diabetes seen in prediabatic patients. Driven by chronic overnutrition, which is a fancy word of a way of saying you overeat, okay? A sedentary lifestyle, a loss of muscle mass, or you know, you never built muscle mass in the first place, but as you get older, especially in your 40s and 50s, you've lost a ton of muscle mass, poor sleep, high stress, high intake of ultra-processed foods, we see it as well. There's some corollary factors there that have nothing to do with, you know, necessarily the food itself, so much as the correlation with that and the lifestyle. And so the difference here is kind of obvious at this point that one of these things, the the acute spikes as a normal physiological response, the chronic insulinemia is a metabolic dysfunction. It's a disease driven by lifestyle factors. All right. So what you have to understand is that the problem is not insulin spikes. The problem is not blood sugar spikes. The problem is living in a chronic surplus of metabolic dysfunction without a sink for those nutrients. Muscle is the sink. You see that? You see how we come full circle? Muscle is the sink. If you have adequate muscle mass and you're training regularly, your body has somewhere productive to send those nutrients. And then the insulin spike just becomes a feature of your life. You don't have to worry about it, it's not a problem. Now, real practical, I do like to make things actionable for you guys. Who does benefit the most from embracing carbs and everything that comes with it, including this insulin response? Okay, people who lift weights. So resistance trained people like those of you listening to this podcast aspire to be or are doing this already. People prioritizing muscle gain or body recomp, lifters who train regularly three to five days a week, midlife adults trying to preserve lean mass, anyone stuck in the uh under-recovering trap and now needs to recover better and eat more carbs. I would also put you in the camp of, hey, you should do it. You know, you're lifting, but you're under recovering. Let's get those carbs in. And maybe stop dieting for a while. When are carbs most useful? Before your training to fuel your training session, after your training for recovery. And people get confused on that. So we're going to touch on that one more time in our little technique I have at the very end of the episode. Higher volume training days for some people. Some people do like carb cycling, some people don't notice a difference because you're taking it away from your recovery days. So that's a little caveat on that one, but you can you may experiment with it. During maintenance or a slight surplus, absolutely, right? Like if you have a refeed or you're on a diet break, that's where the carbs come way up, and it's hugely beneficial for recovery and all the things we talked about. And then even during fat loss phases to try to keep some of that training quality and recovery in there. I just talked to someone in physics university today, and I said I looked at her fats and carbs in her fat loss phase and I said, why don't we dial the fats down even more to give it to carbs initially so you can really maintain some of that recovery early on? I don't like, even though, even though calories and carbs come down for fat loss, nothing says you have to like follow the book and follow carbs all the way down to an abyss. You can find you can find ways to get more carbs in. Sometimes lowering fats, sometimes lowering protein even is a worthwhile trade. Sometimes it's adding more fiber into your diet, so then you could eat more non-fibrous carbs because you have the extra calories now to work with, things like that. Now, when might carbs be reduced? All right. Well, if you're gonna have a bunch of sedentary days or you know, go on a trip or something like that, you're not training for a while, that might be a time to shift to a little bit of a lower carb diet. Not a low carb diet, just you don't need as much. So low activity periods, sedentary periods, you could do it for short-term appetite management sometimes. You know, when you're in a fat loss phase, they're gonna come down. Obviously, people are sedentary, not resistance training, I guess, need to keep their carbs down. And I feel sad for them because they need to be not living that way. But if that's the case, yeah, then carbs are probably gonna make you fat because you're just overconsuming calories. All right. The key theme here is that you're you gain carb tolerance through training and you use them. You use them well, and there we go. All right. All right, now I want to tell you what I'm not claiming here because the nuance just always gets lost in the arguments back and forth online. Okay, I don't want you walking away with a straw man version of this message. And by the way, if you heard this on YouTube and you're commenting already because you're a low-carb zealot or a keto zealot, you didn't listen to the episode and you didn't get to this point. This episode is not saying that more carbs automatically equal more muscle. No, you have to lift, you have to eat protein, you have to track your metrics. It's not saying that insulin is the only growth signal. Remember, insulin is a helper. It is not saying calories don't matter. Actually, the opposite, I've said it multiple times. Calories are the main thing at the end of the day that matter when it comes to your change in body mass. It's not saying that everyone should eat high carb all the time. And it's not saying that diabetics should ignore their medical advice because diabetics are a whole different population, not being addressed by what I'm talking about today, even though they definitely benefit from the lifestyle factors we talked about today. What I am saying is that insulin works with your training, your protein, your calories, your lifestyle to support muscle growth. Okay? They all have to be in place. And this is consistent with something I talk about constantly, which is the muscle first philosophy. When you prioritize building muscle, it's not just changing how you look, it's changing your metabolic system for the better for life, for a long, wonderful life. You're increasing your glycogen storage, you're improving insulin sensitivity, you're creating a bigger metabolic buffer. So you can eat more food. Come on, raise your hand, you want that. Eat more food, you can recover better, you could diet less often. Yes, raise your hand, you want that too. Building muscle is not just about aesthetics, it's a great, great side effect of it, but it's building a body that handles nutrition more efficiently. And then nutrition comes along for the ride, and you want to eat better and you want to use more carbs because they're fuel, and on and on and on. And then you have less restriction, more flexibility, and it just all flips that mindset from restriction and carbs are the enemy to hey, carbs are a tool that I've I'm using for my training and for my muscle, and I love them, and we're gonna eat them and enjoy them. And then you stop fighting all this and nonsense, fighting all this and listening to all this nonsense. All right, so I want to tell you that post workout carb strategy. Remember, if you do want to dial in your macros and understand how to structure your nutrition for any phase that you're in, go ahead and grab my free guide at witzawaits.com slash macros. That's the nutrition one on one for body composition. It's all about flexible dieting. Go to witzawaits.com slash macros. All right, here is that post workout carb strategy that I promise. It's very simple, but within about an hour and a half to two hours after your resistance training session. Okay, it doesn't have to be 10 minutes. You have a buffer here of an hour to two hours. Consume a meal or shake that includes both protein and what I call fast digesting carbs. Okay. And I'm talking for many people, this is 30 to 50 grams of carbs, depends on your size and how many calories you have. Sometimes this is like a one to one to three to one carb to protein ratio. Honestly, the protein's a little bit less important, even though it's helpful because you'll probably need a lot of protein throughout the day anyway. But I like all these carbs because, oh, let me let me tell you how to get it. You could do like a protein shake with banana and oats, right? You could do chicken and rice. You could do Greek yogurt with fruit and honey. Like that's what I mean by fast digesting. I love bananas before and after workouts, to be honest. And the reason that this works is that we talked about how your muscles are primed to absorb glucose after training, where insulin sensitivity in muscle tissue is at its highest. It gets really jacked up and then it starts to fall gradually over the next 24 to 48 hours. Of course, it's still much higher than baseline because you lifted weights. The carbs you eat around the first couple hours after you work out, though, are going to go toward replenishing your glycogen primarily. And you might get a little bit of an edge on that versus fat storage, and it improves your body composition. This is great if you're trying to body recomp as well, because you'll probably notice better performance in your next session the next day or two days later. I mean, it depends on your split. If you're doing like, you know, four days a week or whatever, you have back to back, you're gonna have less fatigue, better work capacity, improved recovery because you ate carbs not too long after your last workout. It sounds counterintuitive, like, oh, that's crazy that the carbs then affect the next day. But try it, try it. By the way, this is also why I think it's good not to carb cycle as a first resort because your recovery day carbs can help your next day's training carbs, but not in the same way we're talking about here. That's just a side tangent. I want you to try after your next training session, have protein and a decent amount of fast digesting carbs within an hour or two of your workout and compare how you feel the following day versus, say, when you skipped the carbs or you delayed them by a lot more or didn't even eat at all. Right? Compare the two and see if there's a difference. All right, that's it for today. This was one of those episodes where I'm just trying to shift your perspective and challenge those deep-seated beliefs about carbs and insulin you may still have. If you're lifting, if you're building muscle, if you're eating appropriately for your goals, insulin is your friend. You don't have to fear blood sugar spikes, you don't have to worry about CGMs, any of that stuff. It's only gonna help you. Until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights. And remember, the next time someone says they've embraced a low carb lifestyle, I want you to share wits and weights with them. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
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