Carbohydrates

[tinyGuy]

Can someone tell me, why are carbohydrates so important? I see that a lot of guys eat a lot of carbohydrates before a show or so...why?

[baseline_9]

Carbohydrates are the body prefered enery source, depending on intensity of activity (however im not going into any more detail on that)

Carbohydrates or carbs are stored in Muscles, Liver and a small amout as free carbs (glucose) in the blood stream

You are refering to what is know as 'carbing up'

This is implimented pre-contest ( one or two days before i believe) after dehydration/water manipulations have been used to reduce water held sub-q

For each gram of carb/glycogen held in a muscle there will also be 3 grams of water

The theory is that you can water deplete creating a hard dry look then carb load to pull water back into the muscle to basically blow them up and give them a round look. Potassium and sodium loading is also used

Im no expert with contest prep and im sure that sum1 like fireguy could answer ur Q the best

[gbrice75]

Dude, no offense but this is a completely elementary question. You can find this answered a million times over on this forum alone, let along google. Do a search!

[tinyGuy]

Carbohydrates are the body prefered enery source, depending on intensity of activity (however im not going into any more detail on that)

Carbohydrates or carbs are stored in Muscles, Liver and a small amout as free carbs (glucose) in the blood stream

You are refering to what is know as 'carbing up'

This is implimented pre-contest ( one or two days before i believe) after dehydration/water manipulations have been used to reduce water held sub-q

For each gram of carb/glycogen held in a muscle there will also be 3 grams of water

The theory is that you can water deplete creating a hard dry look then carb load to pull water back into the muscle to basically blow them up and give them a round look. Potassium and sodium loading is also used

Im no expert with contest prep and im sure that sum1 like fireguy could answer ur Q the best

Thanks a lot!

[LBSOMEIRON]

Actually. I like this question a shit ton more than someone that pretends to know a lot more than they do, asks for advice, and them continues to pry until they get the answer they want. Even worse, people dabbling in sauce when they have no business even taking creatine. This board is filled with them.

Tiny, see if this helps. Carbs are basically sugar. You have simple sugars or saccharides, double sugars or di-saccharides and multiple sugars like oligo-saccharides. Then there are complex carbs and starches that contain even more of these sugars, but in return free them much slower into the blood. So what do we need these sugars for? Well, once in the blood the sugar invariably converts to glucose.

It doesn't matter whether you ingested glucose, dextrose, fructose or sucrose or any combination of these and other sugars, the end product in the bloodstream is glucose. Glucose or blood-sugar. So the intent of ingesting carbs is to get a higher blood-sugar level. Once that happens one of two things can happen. The first is that the higher blood-sugar level stimulates the pancreas to create insulin.

Insulin, when it gets to certain receptors on a cell, can stimulate that cell to absorb more nutrients like protein and fat and micronutrients. The entire goal of bodybuilding nutrition is after all to get the building blocks, amino acids, into the muscle cells to build extra mass.

The second thing that can happen is that the body feels that blood-sugar is too high. In first instance that means insulin decreases and the receptors downgrade at which point extra carbs turn to fat. Not really what you want, but that just means you shouldn't eat high carb meals within a certain time of each other. What it also does is absorb the carbs into the cell and turns them to glycogen. Glycogen is the building block of the body's energy source Adenosine Tri-Phosphate (ATP).

So you need a high glycogen storage to function to optimal extents and deliver good work in the gym. But every time you expend energy, like with exercising, you lower glycogen storage by burning ATP. So you need to replenish those sources if you want to keep doing well.

The interesting thing about glycogen replenishment, and the reason I have kept advocating high carbs for bulking even in the face of much disapproval, is that 1 gram of glycogen in the cell also increases the water inside the cell by 2.7 grams. What are the benefits of this? First of all this means that for every gram of glycogen absorbed in a muscle cell you gained 3.7 grams of muscle-weight. Not too shabby huh, because you just increased food efficiency by 370 percent. What more water in a cell also does is increase the volume, and it allows more other nutrients in the muscle.

Transport becomes easier and that allows things like protein and micronutrients to enter the cell in large amounts, and that combination improves your chances of making that 2.7 extra grams you gained a permanent thing. More water in a cell is anabolic. That is the same reasoning behind supplementing creatine which recycles ATP and increases water inside the cell. So that's why we need carbs.