Carbo Loading Caution- Health

Everyone has heard about carbo loading…fueling up on high-carbohydrate foods before a game or competition. Is carbo loading necessary for high school athletes getting ready for a game or meet? Not unless they’re doing an endurance sport such as triathlon or marathon. Most high school athletes who are playing basketball, volleyball or baseball do not need to carbo load.
Diet plays an important role in performance, but so does conditioning. The better condition you’re in, the more efficient your muscles are in utilizing nutrients and calories.
All athletes need a diet that provides enough energy in the form of carbohydrates, fat, essential proteins, vitamins and minerals. In a healthy diet, 55-60 percent calories should come from carbohydrates. Of those carbohydrate calories, 10-15 percent should be from sugars (simple carbohydrates) and the rest from starches (complex carbohydrates). No more than 30 percent of the total calories should come from fat, and the remaining 10-15 percent should be from protein. Nutrition can be specialized to an individual athlete, but these are the general rules.
Every day you should concentrate on eating nutritionally balanced meals throughout the day. Before a big game, eat bananas, bagels and fruit juices which can be broken down quickly to provide glucose to the muscles.
So where did this idea of carbo loading come from? It was introduced many years ago, but not until the 1970s did the current concept come into fashion. It does have its place, but you have to be a conditioned athlete and competing in long distances for carbohydrate loading to be necessary or effective. The reason you would fuel your body with extra carbohydrates is because you only store so much glycogen in the muscle. When you hear about distance runners “hitting the wall,” that has to do with depleted glycogen stores after running for a significant amount of time. Glycogen is an important fuel source for the body and is directly tied to carbohydrate and protein intake.
There are number of ways of carbohydrate loading. At one time, athletes would fast from carbs and then load up for a week. The most prevalent type of carbo loading is simply eating a big pasta meal the night before a big run to get the glycogen in your muscles so you can go a long distance. Eating balanced meals on a regular basis and eating a meal rich in complex carbohydrates (not simple carbs) the night before ensures maximum stores in the muscles.
That said, you can’t have unconditioned muscles and carbo load and it be effective. The muscle doesn’t know how to use all those carbohydrates unless it is conditioned. Our bodies are very good at remembering what we do with them and the body tries to be as efficient as it can. When the athlete depletes his or her glycogen stores on a regular basis and demands endurance performance, the body starts to store more glycogen because it knows it will go through the process again and wants to be ready. This is the importance of training.
The bottom line is, most high school athletes do not need to load up on carbohydrates before competition. A nutritionally balanced diet is sufficient. Only if you are competing in an endurance sport should you think about carbo loading, and even then, only under the supervision of a trainer or nutritionist.