What is the Best Diet for Endurance Athletes? A Case Study

It is no secret that nutrition plays a critical role in exercise. Despite that truth, it only took one nutrition class for me to get my undergraduate degree in biology with exercise science. Thus I graduated college with no knowledge of the ketogenic diet.

I do believe that the keto diet is one of the best diets for endurance athletes though. I learned this shortly after finally being introduced to the diet in early 2015 when I attended a sports science conference at the University of Tampa just months before starting my Master’s in exercise and nutrition science at the university.

Both of these doctors presented on the ketogenic diet, introducing it to me for the first time. Due to my lack of awareness and knowledge on the topic, I left their talks thinking that the keto diet was great for weight loss and endurance performance, but not much else.

While I was extremely wrong about this and went on to be corrected as I continued to study the topic, I was right about the diet being great for weight loss and endurance performance.

Before all of this, Dr. Volek conducted a lot of research on endurance training, shedding light on the benefits of low carb dieting for endurance athletes. To understand the importance of this research, you must know that for decades it was believed that endurance athletes needed carbohydrates to perform. You know the story, “carb-up” before you go for a run. Volek’s research played a big role in debunking this.

This study was conducted on 20 elite endurance athletes who had been habitually following either a high carb or a low carb/ketogenic diet.

What made this study so unique was that it was in elite ultra-endurance athletes. A population that had not been as extensively studied. What was even better about the study was that the subjects were adapted to their respected diets. Significant because so many studies looking at nutrition for sport are short-term studies where performance is being measured while the subject is still adapting to the diet being examined.

Volek found that athletes who were adapted to a low-carb diet burned 2.3x more fat, burned more of their energy from fat, and to everyone’s surprise showed no significant difference in resting muscle glycogen (stored carbs), depletion during exercise, and repletion after exercise.

This was huge. This demonstrated that not only do fat-adapted athletes have a greater capacity to tap into a much larger fuel supply in stored fat compared to stored carbohydrates (glycogen) but they also still have the same amount of glycogen available to them during training without the consumption of carbohydrates. That’s right, these athletes were synthesizing glycogen without the need to actually eat carbs. This virtually put an end to the debate on whether carbohydrate loading was an absolute necessity for athletes and that athletes could get their fuel by other means. Fascinating.

While studies like this are always so intriguing, the question is how replicable are the findings. Cool enough for me, I had a fat-adapted endurance athlete for a friend who just decided to test his numbers. Let’s check it out.

My friend Eric, is a beast of an endurance athlete. He does a lot of long- distance cycling and running and just recently finished the Austin marathon. A few weeks after the Austin marathon, Eric had a chance to go into the University of Texas exercise physiology lab to undergo testing on his metabolic characteristics during training.

What they found was incredible. When Eric was running 11 mph, he was burning almost the same amount of fat as he was carbohydrates. Naturally, the first question I asked Eric was, “Did you have carbs before?” He replied with “No.” I said, “When was the last time you had carbs?” He replied, “2019”.

Eric is a low-carb, fat-adapted endurance athlete that is able to tap into two fuel sources during his training despite the fact that he doesn’t eat any of one of them. Carbs.

Why is this significant? It’s significant because it means an ability to tap into multiple fuel sources during endurance exercise, otherwise known as the “dual-fuel” approach. The benefit is that this can occur without the need for carbs which can mean lower inflammatory markers, better body composition, more mental clarity, and most importantly, not having to load up on sugary gels during your endurance performance.

Not all athletes need to be on a ketogenic diet or would even benefit from being on a ketogenic diet. However, the strongest case can be made for endurance athletes given the nature of the demands this type of exercise has on the body.

What my friend Eric demonstrated was something that Dr. Volek found years ago. A fat-adapted athlete has metabolic characteristics much different from a carb-adapted athlete and in the case of endurance exercise, this is advantageous.

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