Simple Table Sugar can Supercharge Workouts.
Exercise Intolerance is more than just a simple dread of working out. For some people, those with a disease known as Mc Ardle’s disease, exercise can be a toxic affair. Mc Ardle’s disease is a rare affliction that affects the body’s ability to store glucose in the muscle, otherwise known as glycogen. As anyone who has practiced low carb dieting can attest to, anything above a moderate intensity can be laborious if you’ve cut out carbs for even a few days.
I’ve always stressed that the problem of fatness comes down to excess carbohydrate and the detrimental effects it has on hormones involved in fat storage. To be more precise, metabolic syndrome arises due to an excess of insulin, and more recently realized – decreased growth hormone. But for some people with a unique metabolic disease, if intense exercise is part of the cure, then cutting out sugar completely can lead to intolerance, and rhabdomyolysis, leading to kidney failure.
Do you find that working out sucks? That might be natural. But if you’ve been exercising with consistency for a while now and you still experience muscle aches, pains, weakness, the kind of ache and weakness that stops you in your tracks, especially if it happens initially and then you catch a second wind, it might not hurt to get checked out for Mc Ardle’s. Now I’m sure there would be a lot of debate about the specific criteria used to determine whether or not you are truly intolerant of exercise. After all, very few of us actually enjoy or feel good after intense exercise. But I am willing to bet some of you out there may in fact have a biological reason why you are intolerant of intense exercise, and it may be killing you.
With that doom and gloom out of the way I still think it’s worth noting that even those of us who are not inflicted with this disease may very well be doing ourselves a disservice by not training with some kind of sugar in our bloodstream. During the rest of the day when the body is at rest it’s paramount to avoid simple sugar. It serves one purpose - to deliver instant fuel source for intense energy demands. Delivered in an environment where that energy is not in demand, and we get a surge of insulin, and we get fatter.
If you’ve been dedicated to lower carb existence, but your workouts have gone to shit, there’s no need to turn to any kind of fancy preworkout supplement. BCAA’s are always a recommendation from me, but if you are really hitting the gym hard, throw in a tablespoon of plain old table sugar into that intra-workout drink and sip on it. See what that does for you. If it means the difference between killing it in the gym, or just plain feeling dead, then it’s worth every single extra calorie it provides to the mitochondria of your muscle cells, who need that instant energy while the metabolic processes involved in breaking down glycogen are slowly working to provide that second bump of intensity for your workouts.
Read more about Mc Ardle’s Disease on Wikipedia. Study referenced here.
