Carb Cycling — a beginners guide

The concept of carb cycling is a relatively well-established concept at this time. As any nutritional strategy, consistency, above everything else will determine your success. If your selected approach requires you to fundamentally alter your lifestyle you can, with a high degree of certainty, expect failure. Carb cycling is great for many reasons, but it shines due to its ability to fit into any goal whether that be gaining weight, reducing weight, or maintaining weight.
Carb cycling, the alteration of carbohydrate intake on a daily basis, comes with a multitude of options in its approach and none of them are right or wrong. That said, I have ideas around what I find to be optimal, and I will outline that below. A well-planned program will have a pattern to follow, i.e. Monday — high carb, Tuesday — low-carb, Wednesday — no-carbs and so on. As I mentioned there needs to be a plan as changing from day to day, randomly, will yield zero results from this strategy.
Lean weight gain strategy
Whenever you decide to gain weight or strength, you will need to eat a surplus of calories, or nothing will happen. What is more complicated (for some) is not to overeat as you will see a great increase in body fat at the same time you are increasing your strength. Now, depending on your aesthetic goal, you might not care about the fat and only about the strength, but most people are much more self-conscious than that.
Planning to eat more on workout days or have a lot of activity planned is a time tested and well-working strategy that I will recommend as this means your energy reserves will be full and ready to be utilized. In reverse, days with no workouts or activity there is no need to be over-consuming nutrients. Let me give a quick example. If you eat 3000 calories on days you exercise, and this being 500 calories above maintenance, there is no need to eat that much on rest days. We keep protein and fat at a steady level and only modify our carbs on these rest days. Here is an example.
Statistics
Male
5’9
180lbs
15% body fat
TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure): 2468
Workout days: Monday, Wednesday, Friday
During our lean bulk (another word to describe weight gain) we want to keep him as close to the original body fat as possible or potentially even lower it. With this in mind, we are going to eat 3000 calories on workout days, and the macronutrient breakdown becomes the following:
Macronutrients on lifting workout days
Protein: 153g = 612 calories
Get your protein by calculating your lean body mass times 1g.
Fat: 80g = 720 calories
I always keep fat at 75–90g
Carbohydrates: 417g = 1668 calories — These are the remaining calories
High-carbohydrate days
Monday/Wednesday/Friday — 417g
Moderate-carbohydrate days, he is doing cardio on these days
Tuesday/Wednesday/Friday — 208g
Low-carbohydrate days
Sunday — keep carbohydrates under 50g
As you can see calories vary from day to day also due to the cycling and this is intentional and will keep fat gain to a minimum. On the day he is resting carbs are almost zero, but this is Ok as we have been filling up our glycogen stores all week and should be close to full if not full. Many people who want to gain muscle tend to eat way too much. It becomes a good excuse to go a bit crazy, and those Burger King fries just look too yummy.
A reminder that this is an example and will need modification according to your needs. As a general rule, days with big muscle groups engaged or heavy workouts should be high-carb days. Never make adjustments before you have eaten a certain way for at least two weeks as your body needs time to see results.
Lose weight strategy
If you fall into this category, you have chosen an excellent tool to reach your goal. Carb-cycling is one of the best approaches to cutting body fat there is with minimal muscle loss.
The single reason we chose this approach is that we can deplete glycogen stores and then refill them. Simply put, the glycogen molecule consists of water and glucose stored in your muscles and liver. Glycogen, being the primary energy source we use, will get depleted using this approach forcing the body to use fatty acids instead of or in combination with glycogen. Keeping this in mind the approach to cutting fat is different from gaining lean muscle. We will use the same man as above in our example.
Statistics
Male
5’9
180lbs
15% body fat
TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure): 2468
His goal this time around is to reduce body fat to a reasonable level of 10%. He is starting with a slight calorie deficit of 400 calories bringing it down to 2068. Based on this number we will work out the carb-cycling.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday — Moderate carb days
Thursday, Friday, Saturday — Low carb days
Sunday — Refeed
Considering my 2068 calorie limit and use that as my base for my moderate carb days. It will look like this.
Moderate carb days
Protein: 229.5g, this is 1.5x my lean mass. Higher protein will have a slight thermic effect.
Fat: 55g
Carbs: 150g
Make sure your more intense training happens on these days. Remember, this is about cutting fat not generating the best performance in the gym.
Low carb days
Protein: 229.5g
Fat: 55g
Carbs: 0g*
We are only eating about 1,413 calories on the low carb days and if you are concerned that this might be too little do not worry. It is only for 3-days and will have a negligible impact on strength. Remember, refeed day is only a few days away.
I put an asterisk at 0g carbs. Consider this the target, but many foods have trace carbs in them. Not much we can do about that unless we want to fast for 3-days straight which we do not want.
Make sure to have workouts that will help deplete your glycogen stores on the low carb days. Examples of this would be higher repetition exercise with light weights or heavy cardio cycles.
Assuming you put your effort into depleting your glycogen stores, they should be empty after about one day to a day and a half. There are some guides out there for exhausting the stores ridiculous fast but if you use them be prepared to be completely fried for the rest of the time. Once you are low, you have suppressed insulin and are closing in on being in a ketogenic state. We do not care about entering a ketogenic state here as we are about to refeed.
At this point you might be ready to chew your arm off but do not despair, refeed day is here. On Sunday, our high-carb day, we will be overfeeding a bit. Your body is at this point in a very anabolic state but if your body looks a bit flat be prepared to be surprised. On this day we eat plenty of carbs and you can, depending on how lean you are, see your body change over the course of a day. Consider this a serious rest day, absolutely no training.
High carb day, a.k.a refeed
229.5g protein
55g fat
414g carbs
You will be happy to see that on this day you are eating in a surplus. Relax, eat anything you like as long as it fits into those macros. Do not overeat as you can lose the benefit of one week in a single day and having to start over, well, it’s not fun. Hopefully, you also get a mental break during this day as dieting can be a complete mindf%*k.
The key to success
Carb-cycling is a nutrition tool like anything else but unless you are consistent your results will never show. It’s not magic, and there is no perfect plan, but if you apply the knowledge you picked up in this post I can guarantee you will see results.
