The relationship between ketogenic diet and strength training

I have seen some interesting controversies about the ketogenic diet. A study [1] claims that if a trainer does not perform high-capacity differentiated training, then the ketogenic diet has no adverse effects on strength training (the study lasted for 6 weeks and used experienced trainers).

Here is my opinion on this conclusion:

1. Firstly, the conditions of the participants (all trainees with an average training period of more than 6 years), who are not trainees, understand how to maintain their training level under different dietary energy states. Even if they adopt a strict carbon water diet plan, they can still maintain their training level. Of course, you can explain that a ketogenic diet does not affect strength training, but I can also explain that it is precisely because the participants have rich training experience that they can better maintain their training level under strict dietary conditions (conversely, if they are replaced by novice novice trainers, they may not be able to persist at all)

2. Training content: The intensity range for all trainees is 10 times (RIR1-2) or 70% 1RM, and five movements are performed. Each movement is only done in three groups (a total of five movements, two compound movements: barbell push and squat, and three single joint movements: high pull down, bent leg lift, sitting leg flexion and extension). Each training session will be repeated once, three times a week.

This training method may have some effect on completely novice beginners, but the participants in this experiment are all experienced veterans with at least 6 years of training experience. All the content is added up to a total of 15 groups, and it is estimated that even their usual warm-up intensity is not enough after training. The consumption of muscle glycogen is naturally a drop, and whether to eat ketogenic diet should not affect their training recovery at all.

Friends who have a certain understanding of exercise physiology should know to some extent that there is a close relationship between muscle glycogen and training capacity. If the muscle glycogen reserve is sufficient, it can support a larger training capacity; On the contrary, if the training capacity is small, the consumption of muscle glycogen will not be particularly high (and the difficulty of recovery after training is also smaller). Therefore, such a small training capacity itself will not bring any trouble to these experienced trainers. According to the basic theory of power development, "progressive overload", it is not difficult to imagine that this training capacity, which is almost indistinguishable from warm-up, should not have any substantial improvement effect on these trainers.

3. This experiment was only conducted for 6 weeks. In such a short period of time, novice beginners or low-level trainers may be affected by changes in their diet, but how could these trainers with more than 6 years of training experience drastic fluctuations in their strength levels in such a lack of intensity and capacity? Even in terms of muscle endurance, 6 weeks may improve beginners by 5% -10%, but for those who have practiced for more than 6 years, this level of improvement may not necessarily be achieved in a year. So no matter what you eat (whether it's ketogenic or normal carbon water), a short training time will significantly affect the appearance of physical adaptation.