Should you sleep low to boost performance? Thought experiment time.

Say you train hard, hard enough to deplete a significant amount of glycogen.

Your muscles are empty, sensitive to the effects of insulin and screaming for a couple of potatoes

to refill glycogen.

What do you do?

In most circles, the answer is to eat those potatoes and refill those glycogen stores.

And why not?

The post-workout period is a special window of opportunity for eating a bunch of carbs

and having them go to the right places with minimal insulin required.

They won't contribute to fat storage.

They'll go straight to your muscles.

Restocking glycogen sets your muscles up to repeat the hard work and keep up with your training.

It makes sense. What if you didn't eat the potatoes after a hard workout? What if you abstained from

carbs entirely after a glycogen depleting workout? What if you just went to bed without any carbs in your supper?

What if you were an elite athlete and skipped the carbs?

That's exactly what a team of French researchers had a group of highly trained male triathletes do,

according to a study released a couple months back.

They were exploring the effects of a sleep-low eating regimen on the type of performance

indices relevant to endurance athletes.

It was a really interesting study.

First of all, everyone was highly trained.

These were elite triathletes, the cream of the crop.

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