What Are Depletion Workouts

If you are more advanced with your workout training and regularly converse with others who are also heavy into it, you may have heard the words 'depletion workout' being thrown around. What exactly is a depletion workout and what are the benefits?

What Benefits A Depletion Workout Has

Basically a depletion workout's sole purpose is to deplete the muscles of their glycogen supply, which is the storage form of carbohydrates in the body. Doing this has a couple of different advantages.

The first advantage comes to the endurance athletes out there. When the muscles are fully depleted, upon loading them back up with nutrients, you can increase your bodies' efficiency of being able to store glycogen and utilize them during exercise. So for example, a distance runner may go and do a long run until the 'bonk' (a common term for meaning they run out of muscular fuel and are forced to stop). After finishing this they begin eating very large portions of carbohydrates in an effort to replenish their muscles. Since the muscles are going to be extremely susceptible to taking up the nutrients at this time, they will literally soak the carbohydrates up, put them into storage thus training the body how to effectively store more carbohydrates. If you do this on a regular basis (not every training session though as depletion workouts are very intense and do require a fair amount of time to recover from from a CNS perspective as well), your body will become more equipped with putting the carbohydrates you eat into the muscle stores.

Another advantage to depletion workouts will come to those who are looking to lose body fat. Typically the depletion workout will be performed in conjunction with a 'refeed' when you are on a diet. For more information on a refeed, see this article. Because the whole idea of the refeed is to feed your body a fair amount more carbohydrates than it is used to, you can use this to your maximum benefit by performing a depletion workout right beforehand. When you do, you will limit the amount of fat you gain while also helping to raise the metabolism.

You can also utilize depletion workouts when you are on a bulking (muscle building program). To do this, what you will do is right before you plan on eating a very high carbohydrate, calorie dense meal, perform a depletion workout so that your muscles will then suck up those carbohydrates and help use them to grow (since you are eating in a calorie surplus muscle mass will hopefully be added). Usually this type of set-up is placed on those who are on a carb-cycling or low carbohydrate diet to begin with, as it will then be coordinated with their workouts (the high carbohydrate day is placed on the depletion workout day).

What To Eat After A Depletion Workout

The last question you need to ask yourself if you are thinking about performing a depletion workout is what to eat after you are finished. First and foremost, it is very critical that you eat immediately after you are finished. This is so very important because your muscles at this point are exhausted and need fuel very badly. If you fail to give them carbohydrates, you will drastically slow your recovery process and it could take days after that to be able to workout effectively again. Generally there is about a one hour window after the workout in which you should be getting some fast absorbing carbohydrates into your system. Don't stress too much if you want to take a quick shower first, however do keep within that one-hour time frame. You may very likely find yourself extremely hungry right after the workout and will naturally want to eat a great deal of food. Don't feel bad about this at all. Many people, when in the 'dieting' mind frame will feel guilty for eating so much and will be worried they are going to gain weight. This is not the time to worry, as overeating at this point will be the least likely time that you will put on body fat. Essentially overeating after the workout is the main purpose of doing the depletion workout in the first place so you would be silly to skip it.

Specific foods to aim for would be things such as bagels, sugary cereal, white rice, rice cakes, candy, chocolate milk, cereal bars or protein bars. All of these foods have rapidly digesting carbohydrates and will help get into your muscle cells faster. You should also try and combine that with some form of protein (the chocolate milk already has protein built into it however you might want to add a scoop of chocolate protein powder to bump this up even more).

Then, after that meal you will need another meal again consisting of carbohydrates and protein, although this time you want the carbohydrates to be slightly slower burning in nature.

The total amount of carbohydrates you take in for this day after the depletion workout will depend on your goals. If you are trying to lose fat, you will eat less than say if you are trying to gain muscle (in which you will eat quite a bit beyond maintenance for example, or if you are specifically trying to train your body to absorb carbohydrates better - the endurance athlete). You will have to play around with the numbers yourself and base it on real world results to see how much you can handle. Again though, don't be afraid to eat well on this day as if there is one time you aren't likely to gain weight from eating high carbohydrate foods, this is it.

So if you are looking to step your training up a notch and either lose more body fat or condition yourself to better utilize fuel, consider doing a few depletion workouts once in a while. They aren't exactly all that pleasant to actually perform however the results you can get from them can be quite remarkable.