Improving and Training into your Metabolic Efficiency
I just listened to an incredible webinar from Bob Seebohar about training into and improving your metabolic efficiency. The premise behind metabolic efficiency is teaching your body utilize fat stores instead of carbohydrate during training and racing. As a quick background, your body burns fat and carbohydrate as fuel during exercise, and the relationship between the amount of fat and carbohydrate that it uses changes as the intensity of exercise increase. As exercise intensity increases, fat is used less and carbohydrate is used more. And, in some instances, fat is hardly used at all if the athlete does not have a good aerobic base or eats too many carbs.
Even the leanest athletes have internal fat stores that hold about 80,000 calories as fat. Conversely, only 1500-2000 calories are stored on the body as carbohydrate at any time. Therefore, if you exercise at an intensity in which you are only utilizing carbohydrate (i.e, higher intensities) you have to supplement more during exercise so that you do not bonk, or run out of energy. For longer events, the risk of GI distress increases as you replace calories due to the blood being shunted to muscles and not being available in the stomach to digest your food. So, the idea is to train your body to burn fat as long as possible so that you can sustain your intensity without having to eat as much during the race.
Metabolic Efficiency is defined as the crossover point where the percentage of utilization switches between a higher percentage of fat to a higher percentage of carbohydrate. The great news is that you can train your metabolic efficiency through an increase in aerobic training. Aerobic training is, for simplicities sake, lower heart rate intensities. It’s important that during the off season you keep your training aerobic and not go over that intensity to teach your body to utilize fat better. Let me repeat that for those of you who need not be named, NOT going over when you are supposed to be doing base miles no matter what the person in front of you decides to do. Secondly, metabolic efficiency can be improved by prescribing to a nutrition periodization- cycling through the way you eat based on the time of year in your race season, just as you do with your training. I can talk for hours just about nutrition periodization but the concept is this: a diet higher in carbohydrate means that your body has to oxidize (or burn) more carbohydrate. This results in increased insulin, which decreases your fat utilization. Therefore, if you can train your body to survive on protein and fat and less carbs, you will tap into fat stores for energy. The off-season is the best time to do this when intensities of training are low and carbohydrate isn’t needed.
To sumarize: an underdeveloped aerobic system and higher carbohydrate intake at less appropriate times of the year equals a poor fat utilization, which leads to the need to intake more carbohydrate, which makes this a viscious cycle. By tapping into fat stores, you can actually decrease the amount of calories that you need to intake during training and racing which will also decease the likelyhood of GI distress.
Now for the cool part: I am now offering Metabolic Efficiency testing in a laboratory setting so that we can determine what your fat utilization is, and then I can help guide you through diet and training changes to make you more efficient. Bob mentioned a case study with one of his IM athletes that, after training this way, PRed at IM Kentucky and qualified for Kona, while only intaking 800 calories during the ENTIRE RACE! This is how efficient he became in burning fat for fuel. If you have any questions about metabolic efficiency or the testing, email me at info@annefinch.com. It could change your race- or even your life!
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