Workout carbs

You shouldn't worry about this if you're a beginner.

Having carbohydrates during your training is beneficial, especially for high volumes. The shorter the session, the less important it is.

Drinking the carbs is preferable. Consume about 1/3 of the drink 10-30mins before your workout and the remaining 2/3s during your workout, sipping on it while you rest.

No need to be precise with this, just eye-ball it. If you’d like to make it simpler, you can just have everything intra-workout. I recommend having Gatorade powder or a similar sports drink with only sugar and electrolytes. Dextrose also works very well, and it’s very cheap.

Here is a guideline for your intra-workout carbs:

Level 1:

Under 10 sets

Low importance, optional

15g of carbs in 250ml of water

Level 2:

Between 10 and 20 sets

Medium importance, optional but recommended

30g of carbs in 500ml of water

Level 3

Between 20 and 30 sets

High importance, very recommended

60g of carbs in 1000ml of water (

Level 4

Over 30 sets

High importance, very recommended

90g of carbs in 1500ml of water

You can count isolation exercises as half sets. So let’s say your workout is 5 sets of pull ups, 5 sets of barbell rows, and 6 sets of bicep curls. You can count the bicep curls as half, so that would be 3 sets, and then with the pull ups and barbell rows, it totals 13 sets. That would be Level 2, and you would get 30g of carbs in 500ml of water.

If you’re dieting and you don’t want to waste the calories on sugar, you can choose a workout carbohydrate 1 level under what you would normally do. So if you have 27 sets, while technically that would put you in Level 3, you can use Level 2 instead.

It might have a very slight performance detriment, but it will make your diet easier (in this example, you would save 120 calories, which is a lot). The water amount doesn’t need to be super precise, but try not to deviate too much as it will affect absorption (and also potential GI issues).