Why They Can Eat the Pancakes

You have seen the videos. An athlete you follow sits down to a mountain of rice, a stack of pancakes, bread with every meal, and stays lean doing it. It looks like a trick, or good genetics, or something they are not telling you.

It is none of those. They are putting out so much work that the carbohydrate goes where it is meant to go: into the muscle, into the next session, into recovery. Their plate matches their output. That is the whole explanation, and once you see it, it also explains the rule most of us learned when we started CrossFit.

The rule, and who it was written for

Meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar. Most of us can recite it. Most of us have tried it and felt better for it, at least for a while.

The rule was right. It was also written for a particular person, and it never said so. That person trains hard four or five times a week and sits at a desk the rest of the time. If that is you, be honest about what it adds up to: a hard hour inside a still day. It is not an active life, however hard the hour is. A plate low in starch suits that life, and the rule holds.

Why the athlete's breakfast does not work on your day

Carbohydrate is fuel for work. That is not a moral position about bread, it is what the body does with it. The athlete in the video has a day's worth of work waiting for every plate they eat, so the fuel gets used.

Copy their breakfast with a desk worker's day behind it and the fuel has nowhere to go. That is the logic behind the low-starch rule. It was never that carbohydrate is bad. It was that most of us do not do enough to use much of it, and pretending otherwise is how people train hard for a year and wonder why nothing changed.

The people the rule was never written for

Because the rule never named its audience, everyone applied it. Including the few it was never meant for.

You know who they are, and you might be one of them. They Rx most days. Then they run, ride, swim, or sign up for a race on top of class. They are putting out real work, week after week, and they are eating like the person at the desk. They train Rx and eat scaled.

Sooner or later they feel it. Flat in the second half of a workout. Slow to recover between sessions. Fading late in the week and blaming sleep, or age, or the programming. For them the answer is more carbohydrate, not less, and the place to start is around training: before and after, when the body will actually use it. The rest of the day, fruit and vegetables still carry the load.

One caution for that group, because it runs the other way. Eat a lot of carbohydrate and it is easy to crowd the vegetables off the plate. Keep them. Fibre and micronutrients do not get less important because you are fit.

Nutrition works like training

Nobody in our gym trains at one extreme. We do not send a beginner to a Games athlete's volume, and we do not keep an experienced member on the beginner's version forever. We scale to the person, and the results live in the middle, not at the edges.

Nutrition is the same. The results are in the middle ground, and the mistake most people make is picking an extreme because an extreme is easier to follow than a judgement. All carbs or no carbs is simple. Matching your plate to your actual week takes a look at your actual week.

Which person are you

Three honest questions get most people there:

1. Count the real week. Class hours, plus everything outside: the run, the ride, the event you entered. Not the week you mean to have. The one you had.
2. Where do you fade? If the second half of workouts and the end of the week are where you fall apart, and you are eating low starch, you may be the person the rule was not written for.
3. Where does your starch sit? If it is spread across the day, move it to around training first and watch two weeks of workouts before you change anything else.

Most of us guess at this, and the guess usually flatters us. The person at the desk likes to think they are the athlete. The athlete who is under-eating likes to think discipline is the problem. Neither is helped by the guess.

Ask us

This is what our nutrition coaching is for. One session, your real week, your real plate, one of us across the table, and you leave knowing which rule is yours and what to change first.

Email hello@crossfitironsky.com with "nutrition" in the subject, or ask any of us at the gym at Ayiou Lazarou 83 in Larnaca.

Stay strong, stay wild, stay IRONSKY.