Double Edge Fitness

Monday Update 12/22-Why Cutting Carbs Can Quietly Kill Your Performance

• Derek and Jacob Wellock

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0:00 | 16:10

Ready to train harder, recover faster, and actually feel better doing it? We take a clear-eyed look at new research on elite race walkers comparing high-carb and ketogenic diets under caffeine, then translate the findings into simple, actionable steps for your own high-intensity training. The early bump from caffeine shows up in both groups, but by week two the high-carb athletes surge ahead with stronger VO2 max, quicker paces, and lower heart rates. That’s not just a lab win—it’s a blueprint for anyone chasing performance in fast intervals, metcons, or hybrid events.

We get practical about why carbs matter biochemically, how ATP production speed sets your ceiling during hard work, and what happens when you chronically train on low carb: sluggish recovery, flat sessions, and even rising blood glucose despite restriction. Then we move from theory to plate with a simple roster of whole-food carbohydrates—fruit, oats, potatoes, sweet potatoes, quality grains, and honey around sessions—and a macro strategy that flexes with your training week. Protein stays high for muscle and satiety, fats come from quality sources, and carbs scale up on heavy days and down on easier ones.

You’ll also hear where low-carb can fit for medical reasons, why performance nutrition and clinical nutrition are different conversations, and why a cup of coffee still beats flashy pre-workouts. We lay out our coaching offer for Double Edged Fitness members, including how to book through our WhatsApp group, what to bring to your session, and how we provide straight talk, not fluff. Plus, we share important holiday schedule updates and a preview of our upcoming six-week training cycle so you can plan your work and fuel with intent.

If you’re serious about not being average, this is your roadmap. Subscribe for more evidence-backed training and nutrition breakdowns, share this with a teammate who’s stuck on low-carb, and leave a review telling us your go-to pre-workout carb.

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Honest Check-In And Newsletter Setup

SPEAKER_00

Right, everybody, happy Monday. It's time to get the newsletter done out to you, fill you guys with some knowledge, a couple updates, a little bit of information going through the end of the year. Now I'm gonna tell you the truth. Right now, I'm struggling to make this video. I'm just not feeling it today. Not feeling it. Don't know, a little tired, this or that. But if you feel like I've lost my influencer touch, I apologize and I'll do my best to bring it back. All right. So, educational piece this fine Monday afternoon that I want to talk about. So I subscribe to examine.com. And examine.com is it's an aggregation of research. So they go through and research supplements, keep you up to date on current research articles coming out, and it can't be funded. It's all independently funded by people like me who pay for the subscription. So it's not influenced by outside influencer influencers, outside influences, such as you know, supplement companies, food companies, whatever, right? So it's it's pretty independent. I think they do a good job aggregating data. And I do get information from them, and I found this quite interesting. And I want to share it. So this study was a study following elite race walkers. No, those people that got that wiggle that are walking like 20-minute 5Ks or something ridiculous, but it's a walk, but they're doing it faster than most people can run. All right. So the study was done with these folks. All right. But one group was put on a high carbohydrate diet. One group was put on ketogenic diet. Both groups got caffeine. All right. So the goal here was to see if caffeine improved performance and which diet was better for performance at improving VO2 max. Shocker. So for the first week or two, both diets were pretty equal. Both diets got a boost from caffeine intake. All right. And I've always believed caffeine to be the best pre-workout. There is. No, just a cup of coffee. It's all you need. Nothing crazy. So after two weeks, though, the higher carbohydrate diet made significant improvements in their VO2 max. They were going further, faster, at a lower heart rate than the ketogenic people who, after two weeks, started falling off, couldn't keep up. So, in short, if you do high intensity training and you are anti-carbohydrate, you are blunting your performance. And when you blunt your performance, you blunt your recovery, you don't get as fit or as lean as you think you would otherwise. So the high protein, low carb, carnivore, keto, they have their place for specific reasons, but I am very anti-extreme diet. And I consider those two, along with vegetarianism, veganism, these are extremes. People have their personal religious feelings or not feelings, uh, viewpoints on doing these diets. But when it comes to living a healthy lifestyle, a balanced diet that consists of protein, fats, and carbohydrates from healthy whole food sources and enough carbohydrates to support your training, your activity is the best recipe for success in weight management. If you're doing weight loss, you need to be at a caloric deficit, but you're still going to eat protein, fats, and carbs. Optimizing protein intake for muscle sustainability and muscle development and being satiated. But the anti-carb bullshit that has taken over so much of the health space, I think it's maybe fading a little bit, but I found this out the hard way on myself. I went pretty heavy keto diet for a time being, a couple months in the past. And my training absolutely fell to shit. Wasn't recovering, felt like I was pushing hard in the workouts and I was just doing terrible. Felt like trash. And shocking enough, my blood glucose kept going up, and I wasn't even eating any fucking carbohydrates. Hard my French on that. I get passionate about this topic. So your muscles can become resistant to glucose. They don't use it anymore. They're using ketones. So your blood glucose keeps going up. You're not using it, but your liver still creates it. Your body is meant to function on carbohydrates, fats, and proteins for different purposes, different reasons. If you deplete all the glycogen in your body, your muscle or your liver is going to convert protein and fat to carbohydrate, to glucose, because your body needs it. It's going to make it for you. So when you're consuming it and burning it, training, especially high intensity, because the efficiency to take carbohydrate and turn it into ATP is tremendously faster than fat into ATP. And let's not even get down when the body starts breaking down proteins into ATP. That's like survival shit. So in your body's starving to death. All right. So to optimize your performance, which means optimizing your training, and to optimize your recovery, do not look down on carbohydrates. Now you guys know me. I'm a big fan of whole food, carbohydrates, quality foods, fruits, um, you know, quality grains, like oh like oatmeal and starches from potatoes, sweet potatoes, and that's my main source. And honey, those are kind of my main sources of carbohydrates. And I eat a lot of it, especially now that I'm amped up the training for high rocks. So if you guys want to learn more about this, let me know, right? If you need to meet up, I'm happy to meet up and dial in your macros for you, give you a starting point for this. Now, there could be medical reasons why you need to be on a low carbohydrate diet. If you're type 2 diabetic and you're going for one of those uh metabolic resets, there's a period of time that you might want to limit carbohydrate. But even in that, there's still some research out there that shows type 2 diabetics have a worse response and becoming more insulin sensitive when they restrict carbohydrates too much. Okay. So make sure you consult your healthcare provider on this stuff when it comes to those topics. All right. I'm pretty much talking about sports performance here. There are medical reasons, which is beyond my scope of telling you what to do. So don't do it for medical reasons from some shit I say. All right, talk to your medical person, do that, right? Love you guys. So back to what I was saying. If you want to dial in your macronutrients, I will help you. You might ask, how much do you charge for this? Nothing. If you are a member of Double Edged Fitness, I'm your guy. We just have to book an appointment. All right. Kind of busy. Gotta do this influencer shit. All right. Try to influence you guys to make healthy decisions. That's my goal of influencing. I just want to help you guys and influence you. All right. To join me on this path of eating healthy, working out a little bit every day, treating the body like it actually means something to you. You know, you only got one life to live. One. And I want you guys to treat your body like that actually matters. We don't know when our tickets are gonna get punched. We don't know. I could trip going out the door right now and it'd be all over. Good news is my life insurance policy is dialed. So, that aside, try to avoid those things, but treat your body like it matters to you. What you consume. I'm not saying you can't have the treat on Christmas. Have the damn treat. Enjoy it. Because you don't know, you might trip and fall. Enjoy it, but do these things intentionally. Have the cocktail with your friends and family. You know, take a full rest day. Do these things intentionally. Treat your body with respect. Like you actually care about this gift of life. All right. Deal. Deal. So if you need a book of time and we need to dial in your shit, let's do it. All right, let's do it. So that is how this is gonna work. In WhatsApp. I have my coaching channel in there. I pinned my calendar to my coaching channel. In this newsletter, all right, you can click the WhatsApp deal and subscribe or whatever it's called. I don't know, join the group. This is for double-edged members only. You quit the gym, I boot you out. It's that simple. But this is where I want to be available for to help you guys on this stuff. If you need to sit down, have a deep dive into your eating, into your training, we can do that, right? We just to book an appointment. I need some structure to it. So that's how that's gonna function. So you join the double-edged WhatsApp group, you see my deal there, you join it, you see my calendar pinned to the top, you click on it, open it up, find an opening, book that thing, and let's dive into this stuff. Crush our goals in 2026. No New Year's resolution, bullshit. No, I'm gonna start on Monday, bullshit. Like, let's just make a decision and start, you know, getting after it. All right, let's do that. I'm here for you. Let's do this, all right? Shit. But a little recap there. Carbohydrates fuel is the best fuel, especially for high-intensity workouts. If you're sedentary and you sit on your ass all day and you don't do a goddamn thing, the low-carb diet's probably gonna be the better choice for you for your long-term health, right? But I'm not speaking to those people, I'm speaking athletes. I'm speaking to people that take their fitness seriously. That's all of you. That's why you come to this gym. We don't come to this gym to be average. Go walk around. I went to Costco the other day. You want to see average, go walk around that place. You want to see real average, go walk around Walmart. Like our society is sick. 65% of our society is obese. Obese. We aren't undercaloried in this country by any means. We don't want to be with that crowd. We're aiming to be in the top 1% of health and fitness. That's why we come here. That's why we do the things that we do to not be average. All right. So let's do that. And I'm here to help. All right, I want to help. It's my job. I'm excited about it. A little bit fired up. Now I will tell you the truth during these meetings. That might be one of my downfalls. It might be one of my strengths as a coach. I don't sugarcoat shit. And if we need to dial something in, I'm gonna tell you to dial it in. All right. And it's your job to execute and reach out when you need help. All right. Deal. So if you guys want a link, um, I can't really share a link to this study because you have to become a subscriber. I'll see if I can put in a PDF. Yeah, I'll be able to put notes in the newsletter from this study so you guys can read it for yourself. All right, get the deets on it. Right, real quick. Next two weeks through New Year's. So this week and next week, there will be no sweat workouts. I'm sorry. Sorry. But there's some gym closures and I'm traveling, and the workouts are gonna be sweaty, anyways. All right. So they're gonna be sweaty and just a better flow for the next two weeks, right? Workouts are gonna be general physical preparedness, basic stuff, no strict focus the next two weeks. All right, we're gonna wrap up the year and then starting that second week of January, whatever day that is. So not this week, and not next week, but that following Monday. All right. We'll be starting a new cycle. Uh Jacob and I are working on it right now, pretty pumped about it. We're gonna go probably up to six weeks on this next block. Um we'll see. It won't be more than that. I don't like not changing. Neither does my brother. Uh, I don't like three months of like we're doing this, okay? And neither does my brother. So we're gonna we're looking at six weeks here for this next little little little deal. In the programming video that I put on Sugar Wad, I did put more details in there on programming and stuff. So, you guys, if you want more deets on the deets, when the hell did I start saying that? It must be something my kids are saying. If you want more details on the programming each week by week, I'm really trying hard to get that knowledge out to you guys. Our thoughts behind it, our reasoning behind it, tips and tricks. It's all in sugar wad. All right, it's all in sugar wad. The videos in there, I try to put on there on Monday. It's my goal, and then notes for each day, and I'm continuously refining and building that process to get you guys informational content to help guide your training. But it's all in sugar wad. All right. Then last things on Christmas Eve, this Wednesday, the last class is 3:30 p.m. class, and then we're close Christmas and we're closed the day after Christmas. Closed. All right. Enjoy your time with your family, eat good food, have some drinks, enjoy yourselves. All right. Saturday, normal class with CrossFit code, and then we're back at it Monday, New Year's Eve, last class. Reminder 3 30 p.m. again. That's it. Close New Year's Day, all right? I will be in the tropics. It's been a lifelong goal of mine for my family to give up giving a bunch of gifts and crap. And we switch to our family buying a trip, right? Doing a little vacation together instead of all the stuff. And that's happening this year. You might be like, Well, your brother's not going, that's fucked up. You're right, that is messed up. But traveling with the two-year-old is always um a little bit difficult. So he will be on the next one, right? And um, yeah, we didn't leave him out. You know, he's my brother. All right, so if you're concerned about that, he's gonna be here holding down the gym with you guys. All right. So but I will be gone. I will be in warm weather, and I hope you can be a little bit jealous of that. It's gonna be nice and warm, right? And I think that's all I got, you guys. Just a reminder, I'm here to help. If you need dialing in your food, reach out, right? It's really simple. People on the internet try to make this shit sound super complex and overwhelming. It's really not, and I'm here to sort through the bullshit and just been doing this a long time. My household has found pretty solid success in this department, and yeah, I want to help you guys. So if we need to dial in some things, nutrition training, if you got some injuries going on, if we need to dial in, I'm here to help. All right, like I said, my calendar is pinned in WhatsApp. You could join the double-edged WhatsApp group, find that, ask me questions in there. That's where I want to be engaged at with all this stuff, all right? That's where I want to be engaged. So let's do it. All right, love you guys. Peace. And you know what? You might miss next Monday's gym update. Might not do it because I'm gonna be on trip. I might do it, I might not. So I don't count on it. So if I do it, it's because you know, I just really wanted to talk to you. All right. That's it. Love you guys. Peace. Have a good holiday season. Be safe out there, be smart, and uh kick some ass in the new year.