Insulin, your best friend, your worse enemy…
As I write this article, I’m having as a snack a dish made of tuna, cottage cheese, olive oil and oregano. It’s late in the night I trained only in the morning today, so I’m avoiding triggering insulin just before going to bed. Why? That’s what we will find out.
I will address each of these in one separate article, how these controllable factors can have a positive or negative influence on performance, the big plus here is that most of the advices are useful for non-diabetics athletes too.
As I usually tell my athletes, diabetics have a great self awareness and self knowledge as we are always testing our blood glucose levels after meals, training sessions, before going to bed and after waking up in the mornings, this teaches us how our body can react to certain things that “healthy”, non-diabetic athletes, wouldn’t know.
For this first article, I will write about Insulin, a hormone with intensive effects on both metabolism and several other body systems (eg, vascular compliance). Insulin causes most of the body's cells to take up glucose from the blood (including liver, muscle, and fat tissue cells), storing it as glycogen in the liver and muscle, and stops use of fat as an energy source
That means, Insulin can either make you FAT or help you to RECOVER faster from training, but how can you control that? Timing of meals and type of food comes into play.
-Using insulin to speed up recovery:
Your biggest meal of your day should be within 30 minutes after the longest training session. If you do your longest session ini the morning, eat like a king for breakfast, the goal here is to trigger insulin release by your pancreas into your bloodstream, note that straight after training, your body need way less insulin to process the same amount of carbs. When training, I need around 6 units of fast-acting insulin to cover my standard breakfast, if I eat the same meal but without any training before it, I need at least 10 units, more than a 50% increase!
The meal post training is going to be mostly carbs, some protein (the ratio 4g carbs/1g protein is great), but you should leave the good fats off this meal, lets save it for later in the day, or outside training time.
One thing I used to do to speed up recovery and can be applied by the non-diabetic athlete, is to antecipate the release of insulin into your bloodstream BEFORE finishing off a workout. Once you complete the main set, grab a banana or two, an apple and a bottle of gatorade, and ingest that during your cool down, the raise in sugar levels will trigger insulin release into your bloodstream and you will have that big meal ready to be eaten and carried into your empty muscles cells.
-Avoiding insulin to lose weight:
Avoid high densed carbs meals, go for protein and good fats based dishes, an omelet, chicken salad (with lettuce and olive oil), any sort of nuts and lean meats are great options for meals that are not close to training. The goal here is to avoid releasing insulin into your bloodstream, if you ate correct after training, your glycogen stores are going to be amost full and all the extra carbs are going to be carried by insulin into your fat cells.
Those guidelines are even more important for meals later in the day, its been proven that high insulin levels are related to low HGH levels (Human Growth Hormone), which means less repair in your body and a slower recover from that day’s training.
Stay tuned, in the next article I will comment about some common (and WRONG!) nutritional habits endurance athletes do all the time without even knowing.
Vinnie