Ketocycle is a ketogenic cycling diet. The human body goes through cycles in which it uses glucose (sugar) for energy. When you cycle keto, you trick your body into using fat for energy because your body can’t process carbs. The fundamental idea behind cycling keto is to burn fat when you’re not active, so that when you’re working out, you have a ready supply of fat-burning fuel.
The ketogenic diet is comprised of 70-75% fat, 20% protein, and 5% carbohydrates. On a high carb day, if you’re following the correct keto cycling strategy, you’d eat 15-20 grams of carbohydrate per day on average. Now that’s just to meet your fundamental requirements.. When you’re going through a training cycle and trying to lose weight, you want to have a higher amount of carbs on high intensity days so maybe 50 grams. Then when you go low carb, you’d drop the carbohydrate down to 10-15 grams per day.
The ketogenic diet is very much about timing your food to maximize recovery and minimize inflammation. There are a lot of people that go to the gym and they’re feeling good that day, but maybe they don’t feel so good leaving the gym or in their recovery period. Then you just ate something that isn’t good for your body, which will sit there and rot and ferment because you’re not utilizing it as energy even though it’s real food.
Cycling keto
Cycling keto is all about replacing carbohydrates with fats before, during, and after exercise because the fat may be utilized to carry out what you need to do at the gym while also enhancing recovery and reducing inflammation. So when you’re on a high carb day, say 50 grams of carbohydrates per day, you need to take in a lot of carbs to meet the demands of exercise. On low carb days you wouldn’t do any activities because your body can’t process carbohydrates for energy so it’s going to sit there and ferment which is probably not the best thing for your body.
When you’re in a fasted state after sleeping on an empty stomach, that’s your fat-burning period. Of course, if you’re fasting for 24 hours every day, it’s essential to do so while being exercising in a fasted state. So training in the morning before breakfast, post workout which is the most important time for recovery according to research (I’m not sure where I read this but it’s a good reference) and the evening time before you go to bed.
So if you did fast overnight, wake up in the morning and train, then have breakfast afterwards it would be a high carb day. If, instead of training in the morning, you trained at night after fasting for 20 hours during the day and then ate whatever carbs you had for dinner, it would be a high carbohydrate day.
I’ll go through three distinct sorts of cycling based on my own expertise with it, as well as research and reading from other keto athletes. You can mix these up as you see fit depending on your schedule and lifestyle. The first is the standard 2-3 days on, 3-4 days off which is pretty popular. The second one is a rotating week where you have two high carb days in a row once a week and then four or five low carb days in a row. Then the third one is just a quick snapshot of where you eat high carbs for three to four meals 3-4 times in a row and then low carbs for three to four meals 3-4 times in a row.
Ketogenic diet
The first one, cycling for 2-3 days on, 3-4 days off every two or three weeks, works well for people who have a conventional routine with Monday through Friday workdays and two days off each Saturday and Sunday, which is the case for the majority of individuals. It works well with those people because they do their high carb days on the weekend and then they train during the week in a fasted state first thing in the morning. So it’s not a problem to go from a ketogenic diet to a standard higher carbohydrate diet on Saturday and Sunday which preserves that fat burning state almost all week long.
When you have only one day off in a week, as I do, the rotating week is fantastic since it allows you to exchange muscle glycogen for fat metabolism throughout the week. You can do two high carb days back to back with this system but then afterwards, when your workout is over, it’s like a reset button. With this system you can start off Monday morning burning fat and training in a fasted state because your muscle glycogen is depleted from the high carb day you had on Sunday.
The third one, which is my favorite, is basically just three to four days of higher carbs followed by three to four days lower carbs and then you do that three to four days in a row. Then when your carb day comes around again, you just repeat the process either going high carb for three to four meals or low carb for three to four meals. I prefer this one because it is fast, provides effects quickly, and doesn’t disrupt my work life in any way.
It’s practical, and I like practical stuff like that because it allows me to cycle my carbohydrates according on what I require at any one moment, so if I’m traveling out of town or anything, it’s easy for me to change the carbs based on when they’re needed, I can just go with this kind of system. It’s quick and dirty because the times when you eat low carbs you’re not eating a ton of them or when you do high carbs you’re not eating a lot of them either.
At times, I’ll choose one of these three systems to suit my specific requirements. For example, in my own life, I’ll utilize these three techniques based on what I need at the time. It’s a basic high carb low fat cycling with a conventional training routine and a normal working schedule, but it isn’t appropriate for my current requirements, therefore I’ll be using one of these other two systems that are more suited to males who don’t have as many choices or can’t do different types of training sessions.
