Just a few days ago, I decided to low carb after about 6 weeks of lifting and loving it. This has led to me reading a bunch of stuff about weightlifting and low carbing, some of which is true, some of which I'm questioning.

So, I'm hoping to get some info from some of you who might have more personal experience with this than the journalists I've been reading. This article on LiveStrong pretty much sums up all the articles I've been reading. http://www.livestrong.com/article/256559-low-carb-diet-weight-lifting/ None of the authors speak from personal experience, though, which makes me wonder a bit.

Basically, I'm hearing that it is possible to lift while LCing, but it depletes your endurance and diminishes your volume. I'm not quite sure what that means, but I noticed today, my second lifting workout since I began the LC thing, that I have slightly less endurance than before. I usually do 4 sets of 10, and used to have to really push to make those last reps in the 4th set, but I could do them. Today, I found that if I tried to push myself, I couldn't do it. I ended up doing 2 normal sets of 10 reps, then 4 sets of 5 reps. I felt so wussified, and I really wonder, is it okay to do it that way, or should I lower my weight so I can return to the 4 sets of 10?

They also advised my post workout shake be some crazy concoction I cannot imagine wanting to spend the time trying to make. I don't even know where to buy most of the ingredients.

I was just planning on eating a couple of boiled eggs, lol. And I was looking at taking creatine, but I have no clue if that's even something I should be considering right now. Would creatine be beneficial to a woman who low carbs? I had a couple ex-boyfriends who lived by the stuff, but I actually never tried it.

I knew I didn't know what I was doing when I decided to combine lifting with LCing, but I figured I have a PC connected to the internet. No knowledge will be hidden from my eyes! ERNT! Knowledge you read but cannot understand is hidden, and having the feeling that maybe they're complicating something needlessly makes me wonder if it's really that important.

So, here are my questions:
1) My body no longer has tons of glucose it can use for energy while I lift, but the Atkins book says your body will make the transition to burning fat for your energy needs. It seems to me that my episode of lower endurance might just be a passing thing, as my body goes from looking for glucose for energy to using fat. (a)Tell me how wrong (or right) I am on that one, and (b) if my solution of doing the same number of reps but splitting them up differently is inadvisable, let me know that, too.

2) I know the post-workout snack is pretty important. I'm doing Induction right now, which means my carbs are limited, so if I ate my normal protein bar with 14 carbs, I'd basically be eating very few veggies for the next two weeks. I considered boiled eggs, two of those will provide 12 grams of protein. Is that going to be enough, or should I add a couple slices of bacon or sausage, too?

3) Is Creatine even an option for a low carber? I don't know how much (if any) carbs it has, and I also don't know how to mix it with a drink. Would it make me gag if I mixed it with water or SF lemonade/Kool-Aid?

How frequently, how many reps, and how heavy are you lifting?

The feeling of power and energy while lifting comes when your body can readily serve up the glucose needed for lifting. This includes both glucose in the blood stream and glucose stored as glycogen (stored in muscle). Exercise above resting requires glucose; how much of it depends on intensity. Higher intensity muscle work like strength training requires more,. lower intensity requires less.

So how much glucose you have available for strength training, depends on how fast your body can make glucose available, versus how fast you use it up.

When conventional fitness people say that low-carb is bad for lifting I think they usually mean daily hard or long exercise, and then something VLC like Atkins Induction makes glucose too slowly to keep up with the exercise demand (it comes from protein which gets made into glycogen, not as fast as glucose from carb).

When conventional LC people say you can adapt to run on fat I think they usually assume high intensity work that is shorter with more days in between sessions. In that case, there is time for glycogen to get refilled, plus when a person is fat adapted, glucose is spared somewhat so you essentially make a little glucose go farther.

You might check out Robb Wolff or Crossfit for people who love to exercise heavy and are smart about the carbs to support it.

Thanks for the advice, Seejay! Right now, I'm trying to lift 3 days a week, cardio 2 days a week. I've been doing 4 sets of 10 reps each. I'm still a beginner, so I work every muscle group when I lift right now (about 9-10 exercises total), just because that's what someone told me to do, lol. So, I do one exercise for my shoulders, back, lats, biceps, triceps, glutes, calves, etc. per lifting session. I'm planning to eventually seg over to alternating between my upper and lower body after a couple more months.

Maybe a dumb question, but is Rob Wolff an author or a blogger? What about Crossfit? I really appreciate your help with this! I want to do this, and I want to do it right, so I'm open to any and all advice.

And how intense is your cardio? (age and heart rate, or however you figure out how hard you're working)

Have you seen Mark Sisson's Carbohydrate Continuum? I think that's pretty accurate. If you are working out "hard" 5 days a week you can probably have more carbs than if you weren't doing that.

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-...rate-continuum/

Bottom line, if you start a food and energy journal, you will be able to tell the kind of food that fuels your best workouts. don't be alarmed if you don't know everything about your food and your energy the first week. Every single person has to learn this. I know some top-level athletes and even they pay attention - because the body changes over time, their workouts change because they try something new, their food changes because they try something new... it's all a big fun experiment.

Hm, if you're a beginner and you are doing body-part workouts, then forget about Crossfit (a web site and gyms all over the country) and Wolff (a blogger and author) because they are about whole-body movement.

In my totally non-expert and non-scientific opinion, there are some people who can work out hard on induction-level carbs and some people who can't, no matter how long they've been at that carb level. Count me in the second group. Secondly, I think if you are working out hard on minimal carbs, it's good to time your intake of those carbs close to your workouts, both before and after.

Let's see, what else do I want to give unsubstantiated advice on? Oh, yeah, don't go down in weight to be able to finish your reps. Lift as heavy as you can, even if you you can only squeak out 5 or 6 reps on your last set. Four sets of 10 might be kinda overkill anyway. Most programs are 3 sets of 8-12 reps, and then some really strength-increasing programs are 5x5.

Oh, yeah, and when someone told you beginners should lift whole body? That's true, but you should be focusing on compound exercises that use more than one muscle group at a time, like squats, presses, rows, pushups. That gives you the most bang for your buck, so to speak. Then if you have energy left over, you can throw in some of your favorite isolation exercises. (I do calf raises just b/c I have naturally strong calves and it's good for my ego that I can keep adding plates on those and preacher curls because I like looking at my biceps in the mirror like a dork when I do them. )

HTH.

Seejay - I tried to use online formulas and calculators for figuring out my target heart rate, but I psyched myself out of believing any of them. It just all seems kind of arbitrary, being that I have always had a very low heart rate, due to my hypothyroidism. If I had a higher resting heart rate, like a 'normal' person, my THR would be very different. For example, my RHR is 65 bpm, but I know if I weren't hypothyroid, it would probably be higher. I try to keep my HR around 130 while I'm working out. I walk at 2.7 mph, 8.0 incline for a 10 minute warm-up before I work out and 2 thirty-minute sessions at the same settings for 1/2 hour each on my cardio days. Do you think I'd benefit from cutting down or eliminating my warm up?

Andrea - Valuable advice on reps. And the more compound exercises, the better, IMO. Any advice on compound exercises for my arms? I'm currently doing compound exercises for my legs/glutes, but I'm not sure what compound exercises I can use for my upper body. I think maybe I am wearing out my upper body with too many exercises. One for shoulders, one for chest, biceps, triceps, etc. Maybe that's why I'm having trouble with my reps.

The 4 sets of 10 reps was advice from a guy at the gym. He was trying to help me with my squats, until we both just gave up (I just can't keep my back straight without support yet) and I started on the squat press, lol. And I don't start pooping out really badly until the end of the third set on some of my arm exercises. Maybe I'll cut out the fourth set, depending on how I feel.

Oh, and I found a post-workout drink with only one carb today but with 17 grams of protein! It tastes like vanilla flavored water, but I can deal with it, I think.

Thanks for the advice, girls! I really think it's doing me good to not just look to men for advice on this.

No problemo Pokey, you are making me remember how exciting it was to learn about movement. I had read 10,000 books on diet and didn't know the first thing about exercise and I also had to learn everything from scratch.

Mark Sisson has a free PDF, Primal Blueprint Fitness, that talks about the compound movements, how to start from the beginning. His arm exercises are pushups, pull ups, and overhead presses so you could use those instead of the isolation exercises you're doing.

He also talks about heart rate in there. I don't know how old you are but 130 sounds ok. Just as long as you aren't doing an hour a day of super hard workouts. That is counterproductive.

Sissons talks about how to set up a schedule for learning what he calls the "basic 5." and for further learning...

Mistress Krista has a web site on strength training for women, with a nice article on how to squat starting from nothing. LOL. She has the same sort of thing for pushups and pullups. Very cool!

http://www.stumptuous.com/lurn-to-squat-good-e-zy

Thanks for all the info, Seejay. You are the awesomest helper I could have found! "Mistress Krista", lol. I'm sorry, but I immediately thought of something other than exercise when I read that. I've obviously got a very dirty mind.

And, at this:
That was exactly the vibe I was getting off the guy at my gym who tried to help me that day!

I must have been thinking about all of this in my sleep, because I went to the gym and had a really good workout. I reduced my reps to 3 sets of 10 and traded bicep curls and lat pull-downs for seated rows. Just out of nowhere I decided to do that; fortunately I had to wait for two people to use the thingy, so I hope they were doing it right! I totally copied them, though I think I still need to work on my form. Maybe I'll go in tomorrow on my day off working out and just work on getting the movement right with no weights, so I can make this a part of my workout for right now.

Sisson sounds really interesting, too. I can see I've got a lot of learning to do.

I'm sorry I forgot to mention, I'm 39-1/2. And you're right. This is very exciting, especially at my age. I"m old. I'm past that stage where I don't want to ask questions for fear of looking stupid. If I"m going to learn anything, I've got to let my ego take a back seat. Criminy! I sound so... mature. That's not right.

Ha ha at that guy at the gym. I know what you mean about Krista. I think she's funny and was surprised that some people find it edgy.

wow you sound like you really are exploding with readiness to learn. I know what you mean about, eyew, mature. Why don't you fast forward past mature all the way into curmudgeonhood where you don't give a darn what others think. LOL

did you see the comments on the squat article? One lady asked how to deal with well-meaning folks at the gym who come up and tell you all kinds of advice. Krista says she just says, "I was trained by a coach for Olympic powerlifting. how many Oly powerlifters have you trained" and then they shut up. ow! No one comes up to me at the gym however. I think that might be a younger more attractive woman's issue.

Then I have no clue why the guy chose to correct me, except that I musta been doing it REALLY, REALLY WRONG and he couldn't help but try to help. I look horrible at the gym, seriously. I was just noticing today how you could see my bumps of cellulite through my workout capris, but that my oversized t-shirt very nicely concealed my gut until the material got caught between a couple layers of fat. Then again, there's no accounting for taste.

I was at the grocery a couple days ago, and I saw this very large woman in a very tight dress. I was thinking, "Loosen things up, Sista." Until I saw a guy totally checking her out. Go figure.

I didn't check out the comments. I was more focused on Krista's methods. I think I could do these at home until I graduate to the full squat. I love the way she eases you into the squat, and I'm going to start learning like this. I think it'll be much better than using the machine.

Hm maybe that's one reason I exercise at home. Something about looking at lumps and gut and things getting caught in the creases of fat - isn't that best done in the privacy of one's boudoir? lol

as to people's taste and clothes fitting. Tight-fitting on a fat figure does seem to be a fashion option. Google images "plus size gabourney" for a TV star who dresses fancy. Yowsa!

wow... That was, um, eye-opening. I'm not as big as she is, but I think I'm still to big to dress like that! Yikes!

I have to thank you, Seejay and Andrea. Thanks to your advice, I"ve gotten together yet another workout to give a try. With more combination exercises but less reps. You girls put it very nicely, but you made me realize I was trying to do too much too soon. That was okay when I had an endless supply of glucose, but I was really going more for reps than weight. I have seen the error of my ways! Hallelujah!

So, this is what I'll be trying, starting Thursday. I want to put together another plan for every other lifting workout, just because I fear getting bored at the gym. But this is enough work for today. Here's what I have planned: Shoulder press, lat pull down, bench press, concentration curl/kickback and squats. Three sets of ten, and I'll figure out the weights I'll be lifting when I"m actually doing it.

That should take me less time, which means I'm less likely to conk out. I'm excited, and I'll let you girls know how it's working out for me. Thanks again for all the great advice! You two have really, really helped me figure out what I want/need to do.

Awesome! I'm glad I could help a little.