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Old Fri, May-25-12, 15:38
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Seejay Seejay is offline
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Posts: 3,025
 
Plan: Optimal Diet
Stats: 00/00/00 Female 62 inches
BF:
Progress: 8%
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I'm a quick burst sports lover too.

Maybe you could start with doing the math based on the standard formulas of carbs and intensity, and see how you do? And adjust from there?
I don't do much (being still too heavy) but that's what I would do.

For instance, a quick search on "tennis calories per hour" and "percent fat burned intensity exercise" turns up 728 calories for a 200 pound person. Course they don't say how much of that 200 pounds is fat but oh well.
Of those calories, if you are at high intensity heart rate, and your metabolism is like the mythical math average (ha), 40% of that energy might come from fat, and 60% might come from carb.
That would be 436 calories of carb, and dividing by 4 cals per gram, 109 grams of carbs.
So if you are needing 109 grams of carbs for an hour of tennis, it has to come from somewhere! Or else you get no energy for recovery between points. Yuk.

Mark Sisson has written that a fat burner makes better use of glucose so over time you don't need as much as a sugar burner for the same exercise, but still, that is more carb than non-athletes need for sure.

Somewhat aside - I think of energy partitioning a little more detailed than from the "car fuel" analogy. Glucose is like the energy in spark plugs - must have it for starting at all, for bursts, and for acceleration. Fat is like the energy in gasoline. If you are exercising hard, you need way more sparks than when idling. For those bursts and to keep up speed. Just like RPMs in a car. More RPMs, more sparks, more glucose.
(you also don't want sparks/glucose coming too fast if you are not using them, ha ha)
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