Brown Rice?

Good PWO choices are: sweet potatoes, yams, brown rice (or course – in honor of the thread title), whole wheat pasta.

The reason the starchy carbs sources above are optimal PWO carbs is that they are nutrient dense (quality carbs), they have a slightly higher GI than green veggie carbs and will refill muscle glycogen a little more quickly than your higher fiber green veggie carbs. Remember, you’re trying to take full advantage of that annabolic window of opportunity.

So even though you’re limiting carbs, you could have a little spaghetti or stirred fried rice. The trick on your whole food P+C PWO meal is to keep fat intake as close to zero as possible. If you did eat fat, it would delay gastric emptying.

I just saw something I missed, Mo. I’m suggesting you skip your morning oatmeal on days you work out. Maybe have a spinach omelette with chese and onion instead. Have 5-10g of flavor carbs (onions, garlic, green pepper, a spoonful of salsa) or green veggie carbs or salad with a few different meals during the course of the day. Take in the bulk of your carbs PWO.

On days you don’t work out, go back to your original plan and eat your oatmeal first meal of the day.

topsirloin,

this is an interesting point you make. Given a limited amount of carbs on a cutting diet, you would rade a liquid PWO shake for a mid-GI solid PWO meal?

I was just wondering if you could might explain your resons for that a bit. The devil’s advocate would say good insulin spike is needed at the end for glycogen replendishment and protein re-synthesis, etc etc, thanks

hiro-

You certainly don’t need an insulin spike to replenish glycogen. We take advantage of the anabolic properties of the insulin/glucose-loading process PWO when going for mass. When cutting, I just feel that we want to keep insulin as steady as possible, especially those of us over 15% BF. Not to mention your body can resynthesize glycogen stores using various fuels without an insulin spike, from dietary fats and proteins, to adipose fat and skeletal muscle. We don’t water the later happening, so we do want some PWO carbs even when cutting. But a medium glycemic carb meal will do the trick without risking any fat storage.

In fact, the old high-rep/low-weight glycogen depleting recommendations during cutting were to allow the body to replete glycogen in the several hours after the bout using bodyfat. We now know that this method can also burn skeletal muscle off very easily to satisfy energy needs. So now medium to heavy loads are generally recommended to “save” skeletal muscle.

Another interesting technique is to do 15-20 min of PWO low-level activity, such as walking at 3-3.5 MPH. Since you would be in fat-oxidation mode at this low intensity, your cells would be mobilizing and oxidizing stored fat for fuel. If you consume your PWO carbs+whey during this walk nearly 100% of those carbs would go directly toward glycogen repletion. This works because your body cannot mobilize fat and store fat at the same time (but there may be some exceptions… as there always are!). All though, this is probably unnecessary as long as your workout was intense enough to deplete muscle glycogen in the first place.

Finally, keep in mind that you never know exactly how much glycogen was depleted during the bout. If you over-compensate with too many PWO carbs and even worse, spike your insulin in the presence of excess carbs, you might store some of those excess carbs as fat!

Just some glucose for thought…

TopSirloin