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Pictured: Arsenal’s Theo Walcott (right) and team-mates during a September training session at London Colney.
FOOTBALL AND CARB PERIODISATION FEATURE/DR TOM LITTLE & MARK HEARRIS Nutrition is a field that is awash with contradictory information. In particular, carbohydrates or carbs present a dichotomy of interests. For years carbs have been associated with improved exercise performance and athletes have intuitively consumed high carb diets to support performance.
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owever, in recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest amongst social media users in the use of low carb and/or high fat (LCHF) diets as the optimal fuel for athletes. Additionally, the marketing prominence of protein and cultural support of low carb dieting has led to some athletes actively avoiding traditional carb choices. However, in contrast to both dietary extremes, it appears athletes should ‘meet somewhere in the middle’ and switch between periods of high, moderate and low carb intake, whereby carb intake is periodised in accordance with the goal of the session, the individual athlete and the weekly training schedule (Anderson, 2017),
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Carbs are seen as the prominent fuel for intermittent exercise as they are capable of producing energy at a faster rate than fat or protein. Although the oxidation of fat provides a higher energy yield than carbohydrate, its rate of energy production is certainly insufficient for high intensity actions that are frequently performed in intermittent sports like football. Indeed, key moments in football are typically made up of high intensity actions, such as sprints, shooting and jumping, with matches typically containing 150-250 such actions. In accordance, numerous studies have shown that starting a match with high muscle glycogen stores, via a high carb diet, is beneficial to football
performance as it allows players to cover greater distances and more of this distance to be covered at higher intensities (Saltin, 1973), whilst maintaining technical performance. Therefore, there appears to be an overwhelming case for footballers consuming a diet rich in carbs. Somewhat paradoxically, however, an emerging body of evidence suggests that restricting carbs at selected times surrounding training can augment the aerobic training effect (Bartlett, 2015) via increased mitochondrial production, resulting in a greater capacity to produce energy aerobically, utilise fat for energy production and spare precious muscle glycogen for high-intensity actions. As the