When I was a kid all we had was Gatorade to drink, and my wrestling coach was very adamant to assure we did not drink it before the match or practice. That seemed odd to me at the time particularly because I knew how good it felt to have a cold Gatorade after training. I thought it just had to be good for you before physical activity. It just seemed right. Now, if I Google “pre-workout drinks,“ the results seem to confirm my suspicions that the myriad of preparatory drinks should certainly confirm their scientific legitimacy – it appears that my old coach was right after all. A recent article on PubMed has shown that pre-workout ingestion of carbohydrates actually worsens your performance and actually decreases fat burning during and after exercise. According to the article, fasting before you exercise greatly increases muscle efficiency and causes them to switch to fat burning for fuel during the activity. Somewhat counter intuitively, fasting (as opposed to ingesting carbohydrates) prior to exercising best prevents low blood glucose levels. The more we understand about exercise physiology, the more strange it seems.
