Carb cycling involves staggering periods of low carb consumption with a high carb day or days. During the low carb days, the body’s insulin levels and blood sugar levels will be stable and low. This is ideal for fat burning.
After a few days of being on a low carb diet, the body’s metabolism will naturally start to dip. That’s when you incorporate a high carb day to shock the body and get the metabolism roaring again. This will result in accelerated fat loss without reaching at fat loss plateaus.
There is a way to train if you are carb cycling. This is crucial to successful weight loss. If you train wrongly, you’ll sabotage your success. Many beginners and even a few advanced athletes who adopt carb cycling follow their old methods of training and suffer as a result.
During a low carb period, you will want to avoid excessive cardio. It is true that cardio burns fat. However, cardio requires your body to have carbs. It will burn these carbs as fuel. When you’re on a low carb diet, your body will start burning precious muscle for fuel. This is detrimental since you need muscle mass to burn calories.
Furthermore, your metabolism will drop drastically and your fat burning process will halt.
During your low carb days, you may engage in low cardio such as a walk or slow jog. Do not push it. You do not want to be panting and gasping. Just nice to break a light sweat. It is also recommended that you engage in resistance training during the low carb days. This will ensure that you retain your precious muscle, burn some calories and keep your metabolism up.
On the high carb day, you want your training to be intense. Consume pure, natural carbs about an hour before you train. Then, engage in resistance training or high intensity interval training. After the workout, consume more carbs. This will ensure that your muscles have glycogen and fuel. Your metabolism will shoot up and you will be in fat burning mode.
Keep your workouts to about 45 minutes and not longer. During these 45 minutes, give it your all and sweat like your life depended upon it. Use heavier weights and less rest time between sets.
The key point to note during the high carb day is to only consume clean, natural carbs and combine your carbs with a protein to reduce the insulin spike in your body. Also, your calorie intake for a high carb day should not exceed 600 to 700 calories than your maintenance amount.
You can check out your calorie requirements by visiting http://www.freedieting.com/tools/calorie_calculator.htm
There are many more ways to get the best results from carb cycling. However, the best place to get those tips and tricks would be to visit The 4 Cycle Fat Loss website. It is one of the leading websites on this topic and the creator, Shaun Hadsall, is a true master at getting people who shed the stubborn fat quick and easy with carb cycling.