Keto as a Tool vs. Performance Disaster

i think like you know before we got on we were talking kind of about keto and things like that. I mean, I, I don't, I like keto. I've been doing keto on and off since I was 18 years old. I turned 42 next month. And so I consider myself pretty, pretty well first in all the various types of ketos because I've been doing it for, you know, 20, 20 something years. Um, but it's a, it's a tool, right? So if I'm a, if I'm just worried about physique and not performance, then a low carb diet works fantastic, right? If I need performance, is disastrous. If I went and did another Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu comp and I tried to do it low-carb, I would be done. You just can't. There's no way. And you can tell too when you go to a Jiu comp who well and who not because their performance match starts to get worse and worse and worse and they get gassed really early, whereas if you're well-conditioned and you have a lot of carbs on board, you don't get gassed as easily. You might have seven or eight matches all day, and your performance on match eight should be the same as match one if you're well-conditioned and prepared and if you're fully loaded with carbs. but a lot of these guys they want to get in the lower weight class so how do they do that they pull the carbs and the water out and then they try to put it back in while they're while they're competing and it just doesn't work whereas if you're smart you know your weight class fully carb loaded so then all you have to do is kind of maintain that over over the course of the event i tried to do keto and uh and jujitsu just to see what it would do and after two or three days of training, you go and you're all the guys that you're usually really good against about like about controlling them and submitting them and that type of thing. All of a sudden, they're just completely destroying you. And you realize I'm slower. I'm making I'm making mental mistakes. I'm not playing physical chess anymore. And then you learn really quick. OK, it's time for a carb load. So now you can you can get around some of this stuff. If you if you feel like you feel better on keto, some people might feel better. It might be a little bit more efficient for them to lose body fat. Just keeping in mind that if you need performance, then you might look at like a targeted keto approach or like a cyclical keto approach where, you know, once you feel like you've drained all of your glycogen, it's time for a carb up and then re-drain it and then carb up. And that's how you kind of get around making keto more for performance is you definitely need those carb load days or at the very least carbs before, during, and after you train. yeah that will give me my next question if you did like a tiger to keto could you do that on a daily basis and your pre-workout meal would be just be carbs and the rest of the day essentially just protein fat yeah you could absolutely do that but you also have to think too like keto is a lot of the a lot of people will talk about keto when it's unrelated to exercise When you throw exercise in the game, that throws a lot of the information off, right? And then depending on if it's low-level VO2 max or high-level VO2 max exercise, everyone says that keto has to be low-carb. Well, in order to understand it, we have to dictate what low-carb means. If I'm training three hours and grappling a day, low-carb for me might be 300 grams. I could have 300 grams if I'm training three hours hard and still be in ketosis. And I make that statement to people, that's impossible. You have to do a 20-gram induction phase and no more than 50 grams of carbs a day. All right, go train hard for three hours. Go eat 300 grams of carbs. Measure your blood on a ketometer, and you'll see that you're still making 1 to 2 millimoles of ketones. They all say that it has to be a high-fat diet. That is not true. Like if you do a protein-sparing modified fast and let's say you eat 200 grams of protein a day, so you're eating much higher protein than let's say you can eat in keto and you don't eat any fat and any carbs, I guarantee you, you're going to see a lot of ketones on there, right? But that's kind of the ultimate thing to do is you've got to test things. If you don't test things, then you have no idea how you're responding to it. And I've done all this stuff, right? I've worn continuous blood glucose devices, and I've taken so many sticks on my fingers for blood that my fingertips were purple. I couldn't get blood anymore. I started considering sticking my toes. That's how you know you're serious about the testing is when you're considering sticking your toe to get blood out so you can measure it on your glucometer and your ketometer, right? But most of the information that people are getting is bad information from people who they've got – they read the literature, but they've never applied anything. and so they actually don't even understand what happens when you take a high level athlete and you try some of these things out and they're not doing any experimentation and that's what you have to do to truly understand this stuff