Analysis Report

One pound of body fat has approximately 4,080 calories, so even extremely lean people have plenty of fat to keep the body moving if necessary. The problem is that fat is a survival fuel, not a high performance fuel. Your muscles use glycogen (glucose) as their fuel source. If your glycogen stores are tapped out and you don’t take on additional calories, you will be dependent on fat and your performance will suffer, potentially significantly. When relying on fat, it has to go through a slow, inefficient conversion process, thus reducing the available fuel to your muscles. If you’ve ever BONKed (run out of glycogen), you felt horrible, your performance dropped and you may have quit your race – but you still had fat fuel available! The body seems to prefer to operate the way is was designed!

This is a two part answer.

First, everyone has heard of the golden rule – don’t change anything on race/competition day. When possible you want to train the way you are going to compete. You often hear it about your footwear, but it’s even more important for your nutrition. The human body is amazingly adaptive and by taking in calories during your training it will become more efficient at absorbing, transporting and utilizing it to power your muscles. In addition, your stomach and gastrointestinal system have to get used to it. Many products on the market cause GI issues with some athletes for various reasons (artificial sweeteners, slow digesting ingredients, etc.) so you need to figure out which products work best for you, and the time to do that is in your training.

Second, by supplementing your energy during your training you will be able to train harder and longer, and most likely recover quicker as well. This will allow you to become a faster, stronger athlete compared to training with less energy.

Because your body can uptake more energy when you use complex carbs instead of simple sugars. If you’re doing any kind of endurance sport, then the more energy you can get from your nutrition the better you’ll perform. This is due to the fact that complex carbs have a much larger molecular structure than simple sugars which in turn allows the fluids to transport more calories as it is absorbed in your gut. For an in depth explanation, see this article

Short answer:

Fats and proteins have to go through a full digestive process, thus taking oxygen away from your working muscles.

Detailed explanation:

If you remember the Lance Armstrong scandal, it was all about blood doping. By illegally increasing the amount of oxygen in your blood, more oxygen is then provided to the muscles. The more oxygen you have available the better you will perform, period. Likewise, if you reduce the available oxygen to the muscles your performance will suffer.

When your are training or competing, your body is amazingly adaptive and it does everything it can to help you out. One way it does this is by drawing blood form parts of your body that don’t need it at that time so that it can route more blood (and therefor oxygen) out to the working muscles. A large user of blood is your stomach and intestinal tract, and it will draw on this blood supply.

The beauty of liquid calories from carbohydrates (like both our e-Gel and e-Fuel products) is that they are absorbed via osmosis instead of going through a full digestive process. However, when you consume anything with fat and/or protein, these ingredients must be digested. This means that your body has to route blood back to the stomach and intestines for the digestive process, thus taking blood and oxygen away from the working muscles. 

If you are trying to set a personal best, run a qualifying time, etc., consuming something that takes away from your performance, even a little bit, should be avoid if possible.

It’s really up to you, just be sure to study the labels of your favorite products and get to know the ingredients. We strongly recommend using complex carbs instead of sugars (for the reasons explained above), avoid fat and protein during your event and make sure you are getting enough fluids and electrolytes.

Lots of products can potentially work for you, and some people like to experiment with making their own. There are no set rules. We would obviously love for you to use our products, but what’s most important is that you find the combination of products that works best for you!

If you enter the same distance workout but do it slower, the analysis may recommend more calories even though you may also be burning fewer. This is because the amount of calories you can uptake is limited by your fluid consumption. Water is the transport vehicle that carries the carbohydrate calories into your cellular system via osmosis. You can only transport a limited number of calories per ounce of water. The amount you can transport is higher for complex carbs  and lower for sugars (one of the reasons we recommend complex carbs). The more energy you can provide to your working muscles the better off you’ll be, particularly in longer events.

The amount of water you can absorb is also limited, but the longer your workout the more water you can absorb, and therefor you can take in more calories. If you try to just drink more water/fluids than recommended thinking you can therefor take in more calories, that unfortunately probably won’t work. Drinking more than you can absorb just ends up sending excess fluids to your bladder, and then you’ll be visiting the port potty!