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A PRIMER
CARBOHYDRATES
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Why Carbs?
For many years the conversation around sports nutrition centred carbohydrates.
While this macronutrient may have fallen out of favour in some circles, and a lot of
interest has instead started to revolve around protein in the popular fitness press,
this is more to do with the marketing of unproven dietary practices and supplements
than it is a change in the broader evidence base.

If looking to perform feats of athleticism, especially those lasting a long time,

carbohydrate is still the fuel of choice for your body. Let’s talk about why that is.

ATP 101
When your body does anything – whether that’s to contract a muscle, transport
something around within a cell, digest food, or think a thought – it requires energy.
This energy is stored within the body as adenosine triphosphate or ATP, which takes
the form of a main adenosine body attached to a ribose sugar, followed by a string
of three phosphates.

In order to perform an action, an ATP binds to whatever is going to be doing

something and loses a phosphate. The breaking of this bond releases the energy
necessary to perform the action but of course now the ATP (now an adenosine
diphosphate or ADP) is not able to be reused. This is a problem because the human
body only stores around 6 seconds worth of ATP at any one time, meaning that ADP
needs to be recycled. This is where our energy systems come in.

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Energy Systems Introduction

The term energy systems describes the metabolic pathways that our bodies use to
recycle ATP using the nutrients we eat, primarily fat and carbohydrate. These are
typically broken down into aerobic and anaerobic pathways though it’s a little more
complex than that. The main energy systems for human metabolism are:

Aerobic Lipolysis – Breaking down fat in the presence of oxygen

Aerobic Glycolysis – Breaking down carbohydrate in the presence of oxygen
Anaerobic Glycolysis – Breaking down carbohydrate in the absence of oxygen

For completeness there is also the phosphocreatine pathway that utilises creatine
phosphate, but that’s a little beyond the scope of this piece.

Each of these energy systems see nutrients entering a cell. In the case of the first two
the substrate – fat or carbohydrate – is processed using oxygen before entering the
mitochondria: The powerhouse of the cell. Here a large amount of ATP can be
produced. In anaerobic situations, however, oxygen cannot enable these substrates
to be processed and enter the mitochondria and so they must be processed outside.
This has important implications.

Energy Systems in Practice

To illustrate how this works, consider an imaginary runner
looking to complete a 5k in a PB time of 17 minutes.

This athlete would first warm up by performing some light to

moderate intensity specific movement followed by some
dynamic stretching. As their heart rate would remain far below
65% of max this could be fuelled primarily via aerobic lipolysis
meaning that fat could adequately fuel this activity – the reason
for this is that this low-effort activity can be performed by slow-
twitch or Type1 muscle fibres, rich in mitochondria, and their
breathing and heart rates can both fully supply the necessary
oxygen.

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this could be fuelled primarily via aerobic lipolysis meaning that fat could adequately
fuel this activity – the reason for this is that this low-effort activity can be performed
by slow-twitch or Type1 muscle fibres, rich in mitochondria, and their breathing and
heart rates can both fully supply the necessary oxygen.

Now the athlete starts. The pace that they are looking to hit necessitates pushing
hard, so their heart and breathing rates both increase to allow for proper flow of
oxygen and nutrients. This allows for the metabolism of both fatty acids and
carbohydrates to occur within the type 2a muscle fibres, with the demand for carbs
increasing proportionally to intensity on account of the relative ease with which
energy can be extracted quickly.

As their pace further increases, the supply of oxygen becomes far outstripped by
demand for new ATP, and so anaerobic metabolism predominates. This simply
involves breaking down glucose – the main carbohydrate for human nutrition – and
fermenting the resultant substrate to lactate and hydrogen (hence the misnomer
‘lactic acid’). At this stage, Type 2b fast twitch muscle fibres, which are extremely
sparsely populated with mitochondria, are doing a lot of the hard work.

The same is true of resistance training, with percentage of maximum heart rate
being somewhat analogous to proximity to failure.

Energy Systems and their

consequences
Because the relative demand for fast energy increases as intensity of exercise does,
so too does the relative demand for carbohydrate. Owing to the speed with which
carbohydrate can be metabolised and the inability of mitochondrially challenged
Type 2b muscle fibres to metabolise fatty acids very well, carbohydrates become
necessary for intense exercise.

So, does this mean you can’t exercise without carbohydrate? Of course not, people
do this daily, but it does mean that in a situation where your glycogen levels are low
(towards the end of prolonged exercise bouts, or if you are eating a generally low
carbohydrate diet) that you’re likely to hit fatigue far sooner.

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Indeed, while overall results of research on low carb diets are mixed, the picture gets
clear when intensity is accounted for – lower intensity exercise, and single bouts of
higher intensity exercise can be performed just fine on lower carbohydrate intakes
(indeed it’s possible that a lower carbohydrate intake may be ideal for ultra-
endurance sports where fatty acids can make the ideal fuel owing to the low
intensity), but as soon as repeated bouts are needed or duration extends, issues are
likely to arise.

So how much?
While low carbohydrate intakes are in vogue, and low carbohydrate dieting shows
some promise in ultra-endurance exercise where intensity is extremely low,
carbohydrates remain the choice fuel for athletes looking to maximise performance.

The International Society of Sports Nutrition recommend that athletes training for 2-
3 hours per day 5-6 hours per week consume 5-8g of carbohydrate per kilogram of
bodyweight per day. While this may be a little more training than many recreational
athletes do, consuming at least 3-5g/kg is a good recommendation for this group.

As boring as it may be compared to the idea of eating only steak eggs to give you the
energy you need, for athletic performance, pasta and rice are still very much on the
menu!

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References
Lima-Silva AE, De-Oliveira FR, Nakamura FY, Gevaerd MS. Effect of carbohydrate
availability on time to exhaustion in exercise performed at two different intensities.
Braz J Med Biol Res. 2009 May;42(5):404-12. doi: 10.1590/s0100-879x2009000500002.
PMID: 19377788.

Chang CK, Borer K, Lin PJ. Low-Carbohydrate-High-Fat Diet: Can it Help Exercise
Performance? J Hum Kinet. 2017 Mar 12;56:81-92. doi: 10.1515/hukin-2017-0025.
PMID: 28469746; PMCID: PMC5384055.

Chad M. Kerksick, Colin D. Wilborn, Michael D. Roberts, Abbie Smith-Ryan, Susan M.

Kleiner, Ralf Jäger, Rick Collins, Mathew Cooke, Jaci N. Davis, Elfego Galvan, Mike
Greenwood, Lonnie M. Lowery, Robert Wildman, Jose Antonio & Richard B. Kreider
(2018) ISSN exercise & sports nutrition review update: research & recommendations,
Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 15:1, DOI: 10.1186/s12970-
018-0242-y

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