If you have been following the Train Smart Not Hard principles and eating clean you should have seen major improvements in both your physical and mental health.

Now I am going to introduce you to a concept that you will love called Carb Back-loading.

The Eat Clean principles of Train Smart Not Hard are quite restrictive and can take quite a lot of mental strength to stick to, I know, which is why it is nice to be able to have a break now and again and indulge yourself. Hey, you only live once right, and if your diet is 99% clean most of the time you should see no detriment in allowing yourself the occasional treat as long as you are smart about it.

So what is carb back-loading?

It is a very simple concept that will allow you to burn fat and build muscle.

It is the very opposite of what most people do which is eat carbs in the morning.

The body is more sensitive to insulin in the morning and so people believe that if your body is more sensitive to insulin it can use it better.

This however is not true. The insulin is not there to help you to utilise carbohydrate, but is there to help you store the carbohydrate.

This is not necessarily a bad thing if you are an endurance athlete, but for your typical sedentary person it is not what you want to be doing.

What you want to do is save your carbohydrate to later on in the evening.

This is because later in the evening you are carb-insensitive. People commonly believe that because of this they should not eat carbs because the sugar would build up in the blood stream and not all of your tissues could utilise them efficiently and you would burn out your central nervous system.

BUT if you train in the afternoon you can cause your muscle tissue to continue to utilise carbohydrate whilst at the same time stopping your fat cells from being able to store it. Insulin behaves differently in the evening if you can train at the right time.

So, carb back-loading is simply not eating carbohydrates for the first half of the day. You save them and eat them in the evening after you have trained. This will allow you to eat a lot of carbs without gaining or storing it as body fat, in fact it will help you to gain muscle mass and lose body fat.  

The whole concept makes dieting stupidly easy.

There is a common misconception that the body needs carbohydrate to fuel a workout. However, if you go the majority of the day without carbs two things happen.

Firstly your body has no problem maintaining blood sugar levels and secondly your body responds faster to exercise in regards to the sympathetic nervous system. By which I mean you will release adrenaline faster and your body will become more sensitive, particularly to the fat burning properties of adrenaline and you will have bigger rushes of adrenaline.

So, there are three large fat burning effects to leaving carbs until later in the day, not eating them before a workout and training in the afternoon. And there are absolutely no benefits to eating carbohydrates before a workout.  

Foods that you can carb back-load:

• Baked sweet potatoes with coconut oil, butter and cinnamon.

• Cherry Turnovers

• Doughnuts

• Cookies

• Ice-cream

• French Fries

• Cheese Cake

• White Rice

• Pizza

• Yams

• Bananas

• Cakes

• Sweets

• Chocolate

Do not go overboard though, just satisfy your cravings.

You can thank me later 😉

Train Smart Not Hard!