What is considered “low carb” for an athlete?

If you’re doing a little sport, you still need between three and five grams of carbs per kilogram of body weight per day and if you’re doing very high amounts of sports, and you have extreme commitment according to mainstream, you need to have somewhere between 8 g and 12 g per kilogram body weight per day.

That is a staggering amount of carbohydrate that we are guiding athletes to eat. But think about it if you are getting on a bike for four or five hours and you are a carb burner then you’re just burning through your glycogen, so every time you deplete it, you need to replete it.

So, it makes sense why you need that amount. These athletes are very metabolically inflexible, so they have to feed that carbohydrate line all the time. So, then what’s low-carb?

Well, I guess by default throwing a dart to the dartboard, you can see that low-carb is pretty much anything less than 3 g per kilogram per day in the low carb sports world or under 150 grams per day. How did I get to that number? Well it is a little bit like throwing a dart.

If you weigh 70 kilos and you have 3 g of carbohydrates per day, that is 210 g of carbohydrates which is still not in our world, not hugely low but certainly lower than what mainstream guides.

And then of course keto and keto is a lot more well-defined in terms of its macros because the goal is nutritional ketosis.

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