Anyone who’s serious about fitness, working out and building muscle needs to know about glycogen, glycogen depletion, and how it affects workouts.
However, if you’re new to fitness, you may not know what glycogen depletion is or why it matters.
I know when my husband and I first became serious about the gym, we kept hearing the term being bounced around and had no clue what it meant, which is largely why I decided to write this article.
What Is Glycogen?
In order to learn about glycogen, you first have to understand how carbohydrates work.
In a normal person’s diet – i.e. – people who aren’t on low-carb or ketogenic diets –carbohydrates are the body’s main source of energy.
When you consume carbohydrate-heavy foods, the body breaks those carbs down and releases them into the bloodstream, providing you with the energy you need to function.
If you consume more carbs than can be broken down and used immediately, however, they’re linked together in what are known as “glucose chains” and converted into glycogen molecules, which are then stored in both the liver and the muscles.
Glycogen makes up about 6% of the liver’s weight and about 1%-2% of muscles.
How’s Glycogen Used?
Normally, there are about four grams of glucose in a healthy person’s blood.
As long as the body maintains that level of blood glucose, insulin levels stay where they’re supposed to be.
However, when you’re more active, that glucose is converted into energy and burned away. As the glucose levels drop, insulin levels drop.
The body then starts breaking down your glycogen molecules to replenish your blood’s glucose levels.
When you’re working out or doing other strenuous activities that cause you to burn more energy than normal, even more glycogen is converted into glucose, resulting in glycogen depletion.
Eventually, you can deplete your entire glycogen stores.
Hitting the Wall
Severe glycogen depletion can lead to what most people refer to as “hitting the wall.”
Hitting the wall happens when you use up your body’s glycogen stores and suffer both mental and physical consequences as a result.
When your glycogen levels become extremely low, your brain automatically goes into preservation mode, filling your mind with negative thoughts and the urge to quit.
Physically, your body experiences an almost overwhelming sense of fatigue and exhaustion.
In this way, both your mind and body are telling you, “You have nothing left! Your only reasonable option is to give up, go home and replenish those glycogen stores! Stop!”
How Long Does It Take to Hit the Wall?
If you eat a normal, balanced diet that includes the recommended daily intake of carbs, you can usually last between 12 and 22 hours on your glycogen stores at normal activity levels.
That’s why most people have no trouble fasting intermittently or even for a full day. By the second day, though, their energy levels have dropped significantly.
If you’re working out at a normal, steady pace, your glycogen stores should last you about an hour and a half to two hours.
If you’re undertaking hardcore, high-intensity training, though, your glycogen stores can be depleted in as few as 20 minutes.
What Does Hitting the Wall Mean for Workout Regimes?
When most people talk about hitting the wall, they’re talking about running, but a runner hitting the wall is somewhat different from a weightlifter hitting the wall.
For a runner, hitting the wall means they start to slow down; they become fatigued and may even experience leg cramps.
Their running performance is impacted drastically.
For a weightlifter, the underlying principles are the same, but the results are a little different.
Those same negative feelings start creeping into your brain, and you certainly feel that overwhelming sense of fatigue and exhaustion.
Lifters, though, aren’t running; they’re lifting, so instead of slowing down, they get shaky. Your muscles begin to burn and ache until you feel like you can’t move them.
Suddenly, picking up a ten-pound weight seems unimaginable, even though you were just lifting six times that much a few moments before you hit the wall.
You may even get that “noodle arm” (or legs, shoulders, etc.) feeling. You simply feel like you can’t go any further.
However, if you keep stopping each time you hit the wall, you’re going to hit a fitness plateau that’ll be impossible to overcome.
You have to find a way to push through the pain.
How Can You Avoid Hitting the Wall?
The methods employed to avoid hitting the wall differ depending on what, specifically, you’re doing.
For instance, people preparing to run long distance marathons will use much different methods to avoid total glycogen depletion than people who plan on hitting the gym for super high-intensity workouts lasting only 30-40 minutes.
For lifters, there are a few different things you can try to combat glycogen depletion. Keep switching between them until you find out which one works best for you.
Try Using Carbohydrate Powder
Dr. San Millan, when writing for Training Peaks, notes that the recommended carbohydrate consumption can be as high as 100 grams per hour during high-intensity training and long, marathon-type runs.
While you theoretically could consume that many carbs from food alone, it’s going to be difficult, and there’s going to be a high calorie consumption factor.
That’s why many athletes and lifters choose to use carbohydrate powder instead.
Carbohydrate powder is simply powdered carbs designed to be mixed with water or other sports drinks.
You pour X spoonfuls of carb powder into X ounces of water (the X amount varies depending on the brand), mix it up thoroughly and drink it.
The carbs used are specifically designed to be digested and absorbed rapidly.
They can quickly provide you with a needed energy boost, and when consumed after workouts, they can help you quickly replenish your glycogen stores.
There are many types of carb powders.
Many are designed to be consumed before workouts, while others are meant to be consumed mid-workout or after workouts during the recovery stage.
All are used in an attempt to offset glycogen depletion or to replenish glycogen stores.
Adjust Your Diet
If you find that you’re hitting the wall more often or sooner than you feel you should be, it might be a problem with your diet.
People trying to lose weight are often told to avoid carbohydrates whenever possible, and because we hear it so much, sometimes we unconsciously pass up the carbs without even thinking about it.
If you aren’t eating enough foods that are high in carbohydrates, you could seriously be shorting yourself in the gym.
Keep a food diary if you need help keeping track of the amount of carbs you’re consuming each day.
There are also some great apps out there that can help you keep track of not only your carb consumption but also your calorie, protein, fat and vitamin consumption.
Many of these apps are even free to download and use.
Don’t Forget to Take Time for Recovery
When you’re on a true fitness kick and feeling really dedicated, it can be easy to fall into the routine of hitting the gym every day after work, but as the old adage goes, “It is possible to have too much of a good thing.”
That even applies to your workout regime. Make sure you’re scheduling downtime to aid in your recovery. Occasionally, you may even need to take more than a single day.
Continually hitting the wall – especially after you’ve adjusted your diet and begun taking supplements – is usually your body’s way of telling you it needs a break.
Listen when your body talks.
Take It Down a Notch
Sometimes the problem isn’t how often you’re working out or even for how long; it’s how intensely you’re working out, instead.
While it’s never a good idea to give into glycogen depletion fatigue every time it hits, it does do some good to back off a little every once in a while.
For example, when you feel you’ve done all you can do on your arms, try pushing through the pain three days out of five.
On the other two days, when you hit that wall and feel like you can’t lift your arms another rep, switch to your legs instead.
Additionally, you may need to rotate low-intensity workouts in with your high-intensity workouts occasionally as well.
You could also lower the weight that you’re lifting in one of your reps, maintaining the higher weight during your other two or four reps.
Just remember you can’t give into the fatigue every time. Doing so will plateau you faster than you can imagine.
What about Ketogenic Diets?
Some trainers argue that ketogenic diets (keto) are the way to go when you want to lose weight and put on more muscle.
They claim that, after the initial weeks of sluggishness and energy loss, your body will adjust to burning fat instead of carbs for energy, resulting in your ability to gain just as much or even more muscle without having to ingest the extra load of carbohydrates, which can admittedly have a detrimental effect on some people’s blood sugar levels and insulin resistance.
If your only goal were weight loss, the trainers would be half right.
Keto is a great way to shed fat quickly, and it’s also true that your body will adjust to burning fat for energy as opposed to carbs after several weeks, resulting in the pounds just shedding off you more quickly than you could imagine.
Even So, I Wouldn’t Recommend Keto
The problem with keto and building muscle is that to build the kind of muscle most lifters are hoping to gain, you must engage in regular, high-intensity workouts, and high-intensity workouts will require your body to burn glycogen rather than fat, no matter if keto has conditioned your body to burn fat during normal, everyday activities.
In short, the answer is no. Keto isn’t going to work for high-intensity, muscle-building workouts.
Truthfully, it also has its downsides when it comes to weight loss, and I can attest to that personally.
When I first tried the ketogenic diet, I dropped 40 pounds in less than six months and because at that time, I was considered obese, losing those 40 pounds was a real blessing to me.
The problem came when I started trying to add carbs gradually back into my diet so that I could tone and build muscle as opposed to just losing the weight.
The moment I started adding carbs in, the weight started to come back, and it wasn’t coming back in muscle.
It was coming back in fat. In no time, I had gained back most all the weight I’d lost, and then I had to lose it again in my quest to start building muscle, stamina and endurance.
Final Thoughts
The only surefire way to build up endurance and gain new muscle is through high-intensity workouts several times a week.
High-intensity workouts rely on your body’s glycogen stores to provide you with the energy you need to make it through to the end of each session, so it’s imperative that you find a way to combat glycogen depletion and regularly and quickly restore glycogen to your body.
Many people find it easiest to do this by using supplements such as carbohydrate powder, while others try to absorb the carbs they need through diet alone.
My husband and I have found the best way to “carb up” and avoid hitting the wall is through a combination of a well-balanced diet including the recommended daily dose of carbs and supplementing our glycogen pre- and post-workout with carbohydrate powder.
The important thing is to find what works best for you.
Luckily, knowing about glycogen depletion and how to combat it is half the battle. The rest is fairly easy to manage.
