Is a depletion workout any good for general muscular endurance

[petergr]

I am currently on Vince Gironda's steak and eggs diet, and it appears to be working OK. I also am doing about 3.5 workouts per week of about an hour and a half, doing a general whole body weight training program. I bought a book and picked the program for muscular endurance.

I am 56 and my main aim is to keep fit and active, and I like to hang-glide, which involves a little upper body muscular endurance I suppose.

The diet is a form of cyclic ketogenic diet, and I find it interesting that people on this type of diet discuss doing a depletion workout before the carb-up, which would correspond to the cheat day in the Gironda diet. The purpose of the depletion workout appears to be to get more glycogen into skeletal muscle so as to bulk up for body building competitions. I wonder if there is any useful purpose to a depletion workout and subsequent glycogen loading so far as general fitness is concerned.

 

[Jrahien]

Aerobic training in a fasted state has been shown to promote mitochondria production, so yes, doing that will improve endurance. (It suuuuuuuuuuuucks to run hungry though. And you have to find the balance so that you can still go hard enough to make it beneficial.)

Resistance training while depleted won't give you the same effect though. Being in a fasted state will just mean that you'll run out of gas sooner and be able to do less work.

 

[petergr]

I assume that the only point of the depletion workout is to deplete the glycogen in muscle cells, so as to allow a subsequent carb-up to refill and indeed overfill the cells. So what I really meant, is there any other advantage to this over-filling of muscle cells that would be an aid to general fitness, muscular endurance, and muscular strength, as opposed to body building.

So I am thinking of doing a depletion workout with lots of light reps in a circuit fashion before the refeed, then the day after the refeed doing an extensive heavy workout with slightly higher weights perhaps, assuming ones muscles will have been significantly recharged.

 

[CrazyOldMan]

Looks a lot like carb loading that a lot of distance runners swear by. I have done it a few times and personally found it made 0% difference on marathon day and reduced my ability to train in the week before it. I will stress this is my personal experience not a proven and peer reviewed scientific study and as I said others swore by it, some not given to fads.
It will only help on steady state or predominantly aerobic cardio, like no rest circuits with moderate to low loads as Jrahien has already said. This is because it only improves performance within the aerobic or slight oxygen debt where using occasional anaerobic energy systems. If using predominantly anaerobic and phospo-creating energy systems you will gain absolutely nothing but disappointment at a pathetic session.

I am 15 years your junior and have been training in various ways for approaching 25 years. I used a few fad diets and supplements in my early years of doing weights. Then I started reading into nutrition in books rather than weider comics and realised that it's not that complex. Eat in balance according to your bodies needs, the balance changes very little regardless of your training it's the overall quantity that changes.
My diet is very high in complex carbs the normal recommended calorific carb percentage is 60 to 65 mine is likely over 70 of this maximum sugars is supposed to be 5% mine may be a bit above this but my sweet tooth is nowhere near as bad as it once was.
Protein hailed as the miracle food that can make you gain and lose weight according to your whim, there is a reason this looks too good to be true, needs to be around 17% or calorific intake. Mine is likely a bit lower than this because I eat a lot of calories, around 3,500 a day. The purpose of this for training is repair, growth and creating the enzymes that help metabolise our food. Eating loads of it doesn't make you fitter or more muscular, I cover this properly in mythbusting the fitness files.
Fat has recommended 25% of calorific intake which many think is too high so they switch fat and protein percentage. This makes little difference as most excess protein the body actually can absorb gets converted to fat anyway. Fat is not your enemy if you are burning it and muscular endurance training can do this during training and recovery. Obviously as with anything over eating it will pile on pounds you don't want but remember most of your vitamins and minerals are fat not water soluble and I did read of one case where a woman had the fat removed from her food and was in the emergency room a couple of days later practically dead.

Eat in balance for general improvement. Try other things by all means but keep a track of how you progress on a normal diet and compare them and your effort levels honestly. Some will work, others will be snake oil.

 

[Jrahien]

I assume that the only point of the depletion workout is to deplete the glycogen in muscle cells, so as to allow a subsequent carb-up to refill and indeed overfill the cells. So what I really meant, is there any other advantage to this over-filling of muscle cells that would be an aid to general fitness, muscular endurance, and muscular strength, as opposed to body building.

So I am thinking of doing a depletion workout with lots of light reps in a circuit fashion before the refeed, then the day after the refeed doing an extensive heavy workout with slightly higher weights perhaps, assuming ones muscles will have been significantly recharged.

Being depleted won't cause your glycogen stores to subsequently fill up any more than they would after a non-depleted state. Being at 0% won't let you fill back up to 110% after. 100% is still the cap.

A lot of these fad training diets do involve carb fasting for days and then filling up only once or twice per week in order to burn more fat. Really though, you may as well go every day just on lower carbs rather than carb-free. The effect will be the same and you'll feel less like crap.