Voxel
January 8, 2021, 6:53am
2
Could it be that during your peak weak you don’t need to use glycogen as fuel, or not a much, and thus are refilling your glycogen stores? Since glycogen holds water (4g water per g of glycogen), that’s how you are gaining weight. This would be reconcilable with the weight coming off in the weeks thereafter.
CT wrote the below cases to explain glycogen use in different training styles
CASE 1 – Marius is an Olympic lifter, each of his workouts last about 2 hours because he needs more mobility work, then he needs plenty of warm-up sets to work on his technique. When he gets to his work sets he does 5 sets of 2 on the snatch, 5 sets of 2 clean & jerks and 5 sets of 2 front squats. This is a total of about 30 work reps… maybe up to 60-70 reps when we count warm-ups. And none of the sets are longer than 10 seconds (this means that he never needs to rely on glycogen for fuel).
CASE 2 – Will is a powerlifter. His workout lasts about 90 minutes. He does one main lift (squat for example) for 5 sets of 3 reps, 2 main assistance exercises (let’s say front squat and goodmorning) for 5 sets of 5 each. He finishes off with some muscle building work, 3 sets of 8 leg curls and 3 sets of 8 leg extensions. He has a total volume of about 115 reps. 16 of his sets last a little over 10 seconds. So he does use a little more glycogen for fuel than Marius but doesn’t rely heavily on it.
CASE 3 – Danko is a bodybuilder. His workout lasts about 60 minutes. He is in pre-contest mode and does supersets to have a higher caloric expenditure. He does three supersets: A1 Bench press + A2 Bent over row ; B1 Incline DB press + B2. Chin-ups ; C1 Weighted dips + C2 Seated cable row. He does 4 sets of 12 reps per exercise using a fairly slow tempo. His volume is around 290 reps and his sets all last longer than 20 seconds, relying heavily on glycogen for fuel.
CASE 4 – Taz is a Crossfiter. He does a WOD with a time cap of 30 minutes. During those 30 minutes he does 4 rounds of:
20 deadlift @ 225lbs
Each round has 100 reps so his workout includes a total of 400 reps. He uses mostly glycogen for fuel since the 30 minutes are non-stop