I just hit the halfway mark in the 2019 Season for WB Fitness and my excitement is off the chart. As I design each phase’s workouts, diets and mental conditioning I can almost feel the burn in my muscles. One of the things we are going to be doing (at least for part of the workout) is carb cycling.

I will be writing several posts here on exactly what carb cycling is, why we are going to use it and how to do it. In a very quick nutshell, we are going to have 3 days. A no carb day a low carb day and a high carb day. The amount of carbs will dictate the amount of cardio. So on a no carb day we will do much more cardio since the body is bereft of the fuel carbs gives it and will require burning fat to fuel the cardio work. On high carb days we will be working larger muscle groups, usually legs, because the high carbs will give the body the glucose and glycogen it requires to add the muscle and support those heavy lifts.

Next week there will be a much bigger post detailing this a lot more, but there is one thing I recently figured out that I will be adding to the plan this year and which I have fucked up every year I have been lifting! Always learning something.

So I want my body to be depleted of carbs when I do my cardio and to be loaded with carbs when I do my big squats and deadlifts. So it would make sense to eat my carbs on leg day and no carbs on high cardio days and this is what I’ve been doing for years. However, this is all wrong for me. If you are like me and get to the gym and bang out your lifts in the AM then you will be carb depleted when you lift and then eat a bunch of carbs because it is leg day. That doesn’t make sense. Instead of seeing it in terms of days, the diet should be pegged to a workout so we can have the fuel we need for a particular workout. This means that we want our largest carb meal not to be ON legs day but the night before leg day so we wake up carb loaded. Instead of a split that looks like no carb, low carb, high carb day it will look like this:

The night before our back and chest we will be low carb so we have some carb fuel for those lifts. After that, however, we will go no carb the rest of the day leading into our evening cardio and then in the morning we will bang out our big cardio day and moderate lifting of smaller muscles like arms and shoulders. After this we will go from no carb into heavy carb which will go through lunch and dinner so that the next morning we wake up carb loaded for legs. After that we reduce our carbs so that he next day we wake up ready for the chest and back again.

If you plan to do evening workouts this is obviously not relevant for you and I will customize your diets to work with your schedules, but for us guys who hit our workouts early in the morning I can promise you that manipulating our glucose and glycogen levels while depleting carbs several times a week will allow us to put on lean muscle much faster.

We will see a lot of this in the first 14 weeks of the program with the second 14 weeks changing it up a bit to really shread us out.

61 days you fat lazy fucks…61 days until we become warriors.

tick tock