My BJJ class with David Boehme, was scheduled for the morning today, so I couldn’t eat breakfast at my normal time. Since I didn’t want to throw up or start burping in Dave’s face during the class, I decided to just go without eating anything.
With my prior experience I knew that since I’m ketoadapted (my AM ketones today were 1.0 mmol), I wouldn’t bonk out from hypoglycemia, so I felt pretty comfortable going in a fasted state.
We had good training with some reviewing of techniques, position specific drilling, and some light rolling. It was a good hour of full body activity (which is one of the reasons I love BJJ), where I worked up a good sweat and got my heart rate up.
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On a scale of 1-10 in terms of intensity, I would give it a 6. We both didn’t want to push it too hard because we’re both a little banged up.
Right when I got home, about 45 minutes after class, I decided to check my ketones again… I wanted to see what effect my exercise had on these measurements.
According to Volek and Phinney, exercise can increase your ketone levels 0.25 – 0.5 mmol immediately afterwards.
Anyone want to hazard a guess as to what mine were?
0.6 mmol
My fasting ketones after waking up were 1 mmol, and now after 1 hour of activity they went down to 0.6 mmol. Not sure how to explain this… maybe I didn’t check them “immediately” enough.. I’ll have to try to look into this.
Go figure…
(I also checked my blood sugar again, 82, which just confirms that my body is good at keeping my blood sugars stable and that I’m not ask risk for hypoglycemia at least while in the ketoadapted state)
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I just got a blood tester and did a 2x10min race pace xc-ski. I did drink some Super Starch before/after but my glucose levels directly after were just 4.7 mmol/L which is on the low end ish. My Ketones were also only 0.4 mmol/L directly after.
While the results kind of screwed up because of the Super Starch I took, it kind of makes sense. I used a lot of both ketone bodies and glycogen in my intensity, causing my body to not be able to keep up. Maybe it’s just long slow distance stuff that causes ketones to rise. More intense stuff might just be too demanding.
Three hours after my recovery drink my ketones were back up to 2.1 mmol.
Could it be that we r using the ketones as fuel for high intensity workouts? I have experienced the same thing after a really heavy weight training session.
I think this is a big part of it. I also think that the epinephrine/cortisol released with exercise stimulates glycogen break down and then small subsequent insulin release that contributes to the decrease in ketone production.
Then a few hours later ketone production will be increased.