And the other thing that happens as a body gets more adapted to low-carb over two or three or more weeks, and thus it improves the body’s ability to manage its fuel supply, then the body becomes an extremely effective scavenger of the various breakdown products that can be used to make more glycogen.  A lot of athletes and trainers fear a chemical compound called lactate.  Lactate is what your muscles make out of glycogen when you’re sprinting.  Lactate collects in the muscles.  It accumulates in the bloodstream.  It’s said to be a factor causing fatigue and muscle pain.  It changes the pH in the blood to breathe hard.  That makes you pant.  That’s the pH lactate effect.

That used to happen to me, when I was eating a higher carbohydrate diet.  But now that I’m adapted to a ketogentic diet, when I’m sprinting on my bicycle, for instance, when I’m chasing some younger person I don’t want to let go by, I breathe hard but I never huff and puff.  That’s because I don’t make as much lactate, so I don’t have that lactate surge.  But even more important, my muscles have become extremely efficient at taking lactate back up and using it to make glycogen.  That was discovered by some Scandinavian scientists fifteen years ago.  They found that the muscles that you’re not using doing exercise actually become a sponge for taking up lactate to make more glycogen.  Your liver can take up lactate and make it into glycogen.  You can use the skeletons from the amino acids in the breakdown of protein to make glycogen.  In these ways, a keto-adapted athlete is probably much more efficient at recovering and rebuilding the glycogen stores they need.

An example of that is a study done in Arctic sled dogs by a scientist from Oklahoma State University, named Dr. Mike Davis.  He’s a doctor of veterinary medicine, and he took a couple of racing sled dogs up in the Yukon and raced them 100 miles a day for five days in a row.  They did a half Iditarod distance, going around the same 100 mile loop every day for five days in a row.  He fed the dogs a high fat, moderate protein, low carb diet.

He measured muscle glycogen in the dogs before they started.  At the end of five days, he did muscle biopsies on the dogs again.  That’s after racing 100 miles a day, pulling a sled, being fed adequate calories in a low carb, moderate protein, high fat diet.  At the end of five days, they had more glycogen in their muscles than they did when they started.  Their muscle cells were sucking up every little bit of what they could find and putting it right back in the muscle as glycogen.  And doing it much more efficiently than when they were fed a high carb diet.