Contents:
- Medical Video: Tim Tebow Explains How The Keto Diet Breaks Down Fat
- Overview of the keto diet
- What are the effects of the keto diet for sportsmen? Is it useful?
- Carbohydrates still have an important role to maintain muscle strength
Medical Video: Tim Tebow Explains How The Keto Diet Breaks Down Fat
The keto diet is one of the diets that are currently popular because of the effect that can lose weight quickly. There are even studies that say that this diet can improve the performance of athletes or sportsmen. But is this true and there is a lot of scientific evidence supporting the results of this study? So what is the effect of the keto diet for people who have high training schedules like athletes? Check out the reviews.
Overview of the keto diet
The keto diet is a diet that is done by consuming very little carbohydrates, but high in fat and sufficient amount of protein. This diet will force the body to replace the commonly used fuel from sugar (carbohydrates) with fat.
The theory is in the keto diet, if you don't eat carbohydrates (or just a little), your body will burn fat and make you lose fat quickly.
Low carbohydrate diets are usually only allowed to consume less than 30 percent of energy from carbohydrates, while the keto diet only allows 5 percent of energy derived from carbohydrates. The rest is dominated by 75 percent fat and 20 percent protein in moderate amounts.
The average person on a low-carbohydrate diet consumes only 50-150 grams of carbohydrates per day. Whereas in athletes whose carbohydrate diet can consume an average of 200 grams per day. However, in people with a keto diet will greatly limit the carbohydrate diet to 30-50 grams per day with a combination of high fat.
The effect of this keto diet can vary from one person to another. There are also people who are easy to adapt to changes in the use of fat as energy, there are also those who experience very severe symptoms, making it difficult to consume carbohydrates up to 5 percent in their diet.
Therefore, good adaptation is needed in accordance with the body's ability to adapt using fat.
What are the effects of the keto diet for sportsmen? Is it useful?
The effects of the keto diet can vary. Keto diets can be an option for healthy people who have high exercise routines. However, at present there is no strong evidence that after a keto diet they will always have better performance than people on a high carbohydrate diet.
Reported on the Verywell Fit page, the keto diet can help athletes control weight, reduce body fat, and maintain muscle mass. The resilience of athletes who carry out sports activities for a long time can adapt to a low-carbohydrate diet such as keto by burning fat more efficiently.
Even though it has a positive effect, fat cannot produce energy fast enough to meet the energy needs of the athletes' muscles which are usually obtained from sugar, so the power to recover the body is not too fast.
Another positive aspect of a low-carbohydrate diet such as keto can train the body to burn more fat, thus helping the body maintain energy stores (muscle glycogen) during exercise.
You could say the energy reserves do not run out quickly with a keto diet. That means, a low-carbohydrate diet such as keto can help prevent fatigue during prolonged exercise.
Reported on the Healthline page, people who do the ketogenic diet do experience lighter fatigue during low-intensity biking, this is presumably because the body uses more fat to burn, leaving more energy stores.
Positive, the influence of the keto diet is not found in all types of exercise. Often, this can be seen in low intensity exercises and long training times. While the influence of the keto diet for athletes who do high intensity exercise or exercise less than 2 hours is not so significant. For example, like sprint training that requires high intensity for a short time.
Carbohydrates still have an important role to maintain muscle strength
Reported on the Healthline page, until now there have been no studies that show that a low carbo diet such as keto is better for high-intensity exercise, and sports that require high muscle strength. Because, in this sport the role of carbohydrates is very much needed. Carbohydrates are needed during exercise to:
- Helps muscle recovery after exercise. If the recovery phase is not done optimally, then the next performance can actually decrease
- Reducing muscle breakdown. Carbohydrates and insulin help maintain muscle mass to be more optimal and many muscle fibers are formed.
- Improve nerve ability. Carbohydrates also play an important role in increasing resistance to fatigue and increasing mentality to focus when exercising
- Provide fuel. Carbohydrates have an important role in the energy system as the main energy producer
Even though it is also needed, it does not mean you have a high carbohydrate diet and leave a keto diet or other low-carbohydrate diet. All nutrients are needed to produce good performance.
So, the most important thing is not to ignore one particular nutrient to maximize sports performance. Keep the balance of carbohydrates, fats and proteins to get the best sports performance.
