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High-carb diet in freediving

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Kero

Member
Oct 16, 2011
6
1
13
Hey guys

I'm following a high-carb diet, mainly 80/10/10 (80% of calories from carbs, 10 from fat, 10 from protein) or 70/15/15. My energy levels have skyrocketed since switching to this diet. I now have some questions:

- How could a high-carb diet affect my freediving performance?
- How would the intake of simple sugar (fructose from fruits or grape sugar) shortly before a performance affect its outcome?

If you could answer me those questions, I'd be happy. If you could even link me some science papers and studies, I'd be more than happy! Thank you!
 
Depends on the situation, there's been studies showing that fasting before apnea improves performance as the basic metabolic activity is lower but this was only for static apnea.

For dynamic, the situation is more complex but anyway taking any food before the performance might not be a good idea. Any digestion will move blood flow to your stomach and increase your metabolic levels so in that sense it's probably not smart. Anyway the performance is so short that you will mostly use HCO from your liver and muscles, no additional energy is needed.

I have wondered also about carb loading before dynamic performances but it would need testing to find if there is a perfect balance of loading vs. not increasing metabolic activity too much.
 
Kero, Just curious, why are you on a hi-carb diet? I'm on a lo-carb diet for losing weight and it seems to be slowly working for me.
 
A high carb diet would be fine for recreational diving but high carb leads to higher insulin, which blunts the body's response to apnea training. Extremely low carb diets make apnea training also very difficult because they tend to decrease anaerobic performance. Quite the puzzle, eh?
 
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