In the past few weeks, Kiefer has been ramping up his marketing for his new Carb Shock supplement, first with a release of a special Supplement Blackbook (which I plan on reviewing later) followed by this special Body IO episode where he answers some of the questions generated by the Supplement Blackbook.

These were only released to Kiefer’s e-mail subscribers.

I just want to clarify that this is NOT the special Q&A webinar that he just had last night on October 16, 2014, one day after the official release of Carb Shock.  I managed to catch the last hour, so I also plan on posting some of the notes I took from that… but these are not it.

I don’t want to post a link to the file itself because he hasn’t released it publicly on his website yet.

Here’s Kiefer:

The process in creating Carb Shock was more difficult than he thought because nothing like this was on the market. He needed to have a lot of testing done.

This was 2 years of work coming to fruition.

 

Does this mean that there’s no more banana right after a workout? Can I still have a banana right after my workout?

It depends, but for goal of trying to maximize the benefits of training (strength, hypertrophy, or body recomposition), you should wait a little bit. Ideally 30 minutes to an hour.

Don’t need to take it immediately after workout at the gym. Better to wait until you get home to have something.

More research coming out that you don’t want to introduce nutrient loads immediately after work outs, at least none that will create an insulin response.

 

What about waiting an hour after a work out? If this is actually the case, then why does every other nutritional expert advocate eating within an hour for maximal results? Do you know something that they don’t?

Kiefer answers, obviously, yes, he does know something that they don’t, and that it isn’t EVERY other expert because some are coming around.

Other nutritional experts have seen this research, but they haven’t taken it to its full conclusion.

If the immediate post-hour window is not the optimal time for post-workout nutrition, then when is?

The experts that say “oh don’t worry about it,” that’s their problem, is that they’re not worrying about it.

There IS an optimal time to use natural hormone production to optimize things. The training window is catabolic and it activates a lot of growth signals. In this process of degradation, some of these processes are very healthy.

An example is a rise in cortisol, which is in general a catabolic hormone. That doesn’t mean it has to deteriorate muscle tissue or lean tissue. When given the chance to operate properly, Kiefer actually considers it a magical hormone. In the absence of insulin, it helps mobilize body fat, it allows catecholamines to be more effective at mobilizing fat and intramuscular glycogen stores. We want cortisol to be able to do its work post training. Studies have shown that your results in the gym more strongly correlate with how high your cortisol goes during training than any other training, more strongly correlated than testosterone and growth hormone.

There is a lot of evidence that this catabolic trigger is hormetic. Body needs this slight damaging process so that when it recovers, there is a bigger effect. We need to have the hormetic effect of training set in for an hour, and just a let a lot of healthy processes take hold, to better prepare you for the next days training.

 

How do you feel about the insulin spike kicking you out of ketosis, or does it because it’s not from carbs? If I monitor blood glucose spike from carb shock, what should I expect to see as far as rise and duration? I’m also curious as to whether it will bump me out of ketosis? It seems like adequate glycogen depletion and GLUT activation may absorb this spike with little disturbance of ketone levels.

This is a complex question and is probably brought about by a lot of confusion in the industry as a whole. There’s no evidence that ketone production is something special that you need to worry about. The key evidence is that ultra-low-carb is what is important. It’s the lack of carbohydrate availability and not the levels of ketones.

We can see that ketones may increase the effectiveness of an ultra-low-carb diet, because they can kick start certain processes like mono-carboxylate transporters in the brain. Ketones can quickly causes a rise in this expression in the blood brain barrier.

Ketones may accelerate our transition and may give us better endurance in our cardiac muscle and diaphragm, but really they don’t seem to play another major role aside from the limited availability of glucose. That is really the key here.

So whether we are worried about being knocked out of ketosis or not. Basically when you train, you do get slightly higher levels of ketones, but post training, these normally fall on any regular diet. Any type of post-workout nutrition that we usually see recommended will also stop ketone production.

So actually waiting that hour after workout, will help you keep up ketone production.

What you will see with introducing an insulin spike without the carb load, is glucose clearance increase and blood sugar levels drop a little bit, and ketone levels will drop, because insulin can actually drive ketones into tissue for utilization.

This may be (research is pending) why we don’t see very high utilization of ketones on a long period of a ketogenic diet. In general, skeletal muscle tissue stops using ketones after a few weeks of a ketogenic diet. This might be because of a lack of insulin excursion that we experience on a ketogenic diet.

Ketones are not something you should have a super-myopic focus on. There are some people out there do focus on it, and it is unjustified and unwarranted at this point. The research is pointing to the fact that they’re really not that important unless you are looking at pure endurance during an event.

There isn’t any evidence that they will cause an increase in endurance that will stick. It is not a training modality, but is just a quick fix, which is why ketone salts have become so popular.

Yes the insulin will drive the ketone levels down, but it won’t necessarily stop ketone production. It could actually increase ketone production but that doesn’t mean we’ll see a rise in blood ketone levels.

We may see a dip in blood glucose levels, but these questions are actually why the formulation of Carb Shock took such a long time, and one of the early formulations made Kiefer hypoglycemic because it was too strong!

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It is stated that the autophagy and high cortisol rise during the workout is beneficial for extreme hypertrophy. What would be the role of intra-workout nutrition as this would raise insulin and decrease cortisol to decrease the muscle protein breakdown? What’s the point of it?

Kiefer says actually he’s not sure what the point is. The research has to be taken in context, and as he’s learned more, he’s seen that any type of intra-workout nutrition appears to be detrimental to hypertrophy gains.

What is far more important than introduced nutrients, is actually the nutrients your body has available at the location of work. That means the more that you have stored in the muscle tissue, the better effect you’ll have for training.

You need to have glycogen levels elevated to be able to handle the workload. You need to have intra-muscular triglyceride levels full in order to fully get the benefit from the resistance training. You also need to have intra-cellular lipid pools around the mitochondria in muscle full.

By not introducing intra-workout nutrition allows your body to utilize these sources of energy rather than trying to rely on what you’re ingesting.

There doesn’t seem to be a benefit to try to limit protein break down during training. Training is catabolic and we don’t know of any way to prevent that.

Best thing we want to do is to trigger that catabolic response, so that we can turn it into huge anabolic gains.

The point of intra-workout nutrition is that there IS NO point to it.

Supplements that base their protocols on this idea are a canard.

 

On a ketogenic diet will the formula give you sufficient insulin spike once a week to prevent down regulation of thyroid output? Are high glycemic carbs even necessary at this point?

Right now, this could be the case. Unfortunately he doesn’t have the data. The experiments he was doing was specifically focused around training and not trying to replace the carbs on Carb Nite. He still finds a lot of evidence to show that the carbs are important on Carb Nite.

Glucose itself can have a lot of beneficial effects, aside from insulin. So to totally replace the carb nite with just a hit of Carb Shock is probably not the wisest thing to do, but it might be something that is usable by extreme diabetics.

Again, he doesn’t want to speculate on medical conditions, it could be beneficial to help correct thyroid down-regulations that are often seen with ketogenic diets.

In lieu of that, there’s more that’s actually going on with thyroid down regulation with ketogenic diets and also with any type of low calorie diets. There are actually signaling mechanisms from the cell upward.

Essentially, if you’ve been eating carbohydrates for a long period of your life and you’re just making these transitions your mitochondria are somewhat sick. They’ve been bombarded by their own waste products and have degraded mitochondrial membranes.

This is the carbonylation where creatine kinase at the mitochondrial interface becomes damaged, so it can’t transport electrons as effectively as it once did, or protons for ATP synthesis.

When mitochondria get sick, they can send a signal to the body to say, “hey, we need to down-regulate metabolism because we are sick. If you force us to burn more energy, it’s going to make us more sick.”

So this thyroid problem doesn’t just start at the thyroid or hypothalamus because you haven’t had an insulin excursion in a while, it actually can be starting at the cellular level.

Once he learned about this he began working on a secret product to address this. Carb Shock actually needs some assistance, it needs a healthy cellular makeup for full effectiveness.

He’ll talk about this secret product later. It’s an awesome adjunct for Carb Shock and for anyone who wants to be healthy, lose weight, thyroid issues (particularly down regulated thyroids), helping the thyroid come back online without getting a negative signal from the body that it is sick and doesn’t want the thyroid to come back online.

This is why he has a problem with some thyroid medications because you can actually be driving the body to be more sick by introducing these without solving the underlying problem.

 

What if you can’t take whey protein? Is plant based protein a source that will still work with Carb Shock?

That’s a hard question. The proprietary enzyme blend in Carb Shock, which is surprisingly from black mold, which are the enzymes they use to break down whey and casein protein into hydrolysates. If you ingest these enzymes with those proteins, the enzymes will break down the protein into hydrolysates while you’re digesting it, so you can actually get much faster absorption of proteins when taken with these enzymes.

In the tests they’ve used these on a variety of protein sources, but they were all animal based. There were a few ‘P’ protein studies that showed increased absorption, so it could potentially work (I’m not sure if he is talking about P Protein or Pea Protein, although the more I’m googing the more I think it’s Pea Protein).

So if you can’t take whey protein or if you have a problem with whey or casein proteins, a plant protein may work as well, but the only data out now are on Pea Protein extracts, so that may be the best choice for plant proteins.

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As a female, I don’t want to bulk, and I’ve been following your Carb Nite Solution with good results, however I do want lean muscle, will this do the trick?

Most women never want to get bulky. For most women, it is actually difficult to get bulky. The unfortunate scenario is when they go with a coach that gets them to strength train and eat more, so the bulk they’re seeing isn’t necessarily muscle mass, but an accumulation of fat tissue and bigger muscles more full with carbs and water, so they feel like they’re bulky.

Carb Shock is actually an excellent supplement in this case. You don’t need to take nearly the same level of carbs and still get the same insulin excursion. Insulin is really important in all of this. Unfortunately insulin has been recently villainized OR being touted as needing to be elevated all the time.

Insulin needs to be controlled very specifically and that is what Carb Shock is about. Trying to create a product that gives more control of our body, which is the end goal of everything Kiefer does.

The more control we have over our body, the more incredible results we can get with less effort.

So yes, as a female, this is a product you can use on Carb Nite.

 

When would you spike insulin on a two a day training program?

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to spike insulin after both training sessions, which will take a little bit of tweaking. If you do this without the carb load, that would be really powerful because you don’t have the glucose to interfere with things later on in the day.

This could ultimately be a very powerful adjunct for folks who are training twice a day and doing something liked Carb Back-Loading where they are eating their carbs at night, with both a morning and evening training session.

 

Is it still worth supplementing with creatine monohydrate post workout?

Creatine monohydrate is one supplement that you can always take, all the time. It really doesn’t interfere with much of anything, other than in positive ways. It can cause water accumulation in some people, but this is normally seen in people on a carb based diet.

If you’re eating carbs all day then creatine will cause water retention, otherwise it’s just pure benefit.

He did not include creatine monohydrate in Carb Shock for the sole reason that it’s cheap and widely available, and not everyone has the same goals to where creatine would be appropriate all the time.

 

Carb Shock is interesting, but I do Carb Back-Loading and I really don’t mind eating sweets to get an insulin spike. Is it strictly for Carb Nite, low carb dieters, or paleo? How does this product work with the Carb Back-Loading paradigm? Does it take the place of high glycemic index carb sources or any other ingredients in the hypertrophic shake?

It is an additive process. You always want to add it to your shake. It doesn’t really take the place of high glycemic carbs if you enjoy using them and they work for you. What it does do is allow you to get an initial spike with a lower amount of carbohydrates so that you can use the high glycemic carbs later and not get an overload of carbs. So it can still be appropriate in Carb Back-Loading… he designed it specifically for Carb Back-Loading to get better effects.

Even with the high glycemic carbs, Carb Shock will amplify the amount of insulin released. This will help clear blood glucose even faster to the main site of disposal after training, which is muscle tissue.

There will always be an advantage to taking Carb Shock.

He hates to say it, but Carb Shock would be considered paleo approved if you look at the ingredient list.

It can actually turn any carb based food into something appropriate for Carb Back-loading or on a Carb Nite.

Does anything change if I workout in the morning (5am)? Would I still benefit from Carb Shock?

People in the test group have had amazing results with Carb Shock, when taken after morning workouts without any carbohydrates. They’re reporting a sense of fuller muscles and quicker recovery while using Carb Shock without any of the detrimental side-effects of using carbs in the morning which can be slightly smoothing out of muscles, potential fat gain, slower fat mobilization.

Carb Shock could be an incredibly powerful adjunct for morning trainers.

 

How does Carb Shock affect someone who is pre-diabetic or type 2 diabetic? Can the supplement reverse some of the insulin resistance?

He doesn’t want to comment on medical conditions, BUT what he can say for sure is that resistance training can actually reverse symptoms of pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes, and Carb Shock could be used appropriately in this context.

 

I usually do my cardio after I lift, should I take Carb Shock an hour after my resistance training or after my cardio?

That’s a tough question because he’s not a fan of cardio post training anymore. There is research showing that if you’re going to do cardio, you should do it before resistance training.

His recommendation is that you should probably take Carb Shock pretty soon after cardio. So you might still want to wait the 30 minutes after resistance training, but you probably don’t want to wait the full hour after resistance training.

 

Just curious, have you or your peers and or athletes you train incorporate this product in their nutrition protocols? Are you performing new studies?

Yes. That’s what he’s been doing after completing the first formulation. He didn’t want to put anything out there that was untested.

The feedback he’s gotten from his testers are that they’ve reported fuller muscles, better recovery, and no interference with fat loss. So far it’s been all positive.

Some people who are a lighter body weight have reported being a little light headed after Carb Shock, because it is such powerful product in terms of insulin excursion.

 

What is the recommended protein powder to be used with Carb Shock?

It’s designed to be used with high quality protein powders… but it will also work with low protein powders.

He doesn’t want to call out any specific companies… but he has found that Isopure is one of the higher quality protein products out there. But you can add it to whatever your favorite post workout protein shake/powder after.

 

Can those on Carb Nite also use Carb Shock?

Some of the test groups have been using it while on Carb Nite. On their very low carb days, they actually use it after they train at around 3pm, and are seeing their body fat levels continuing to drop, recovering faster, and are seeing fantastic gains in the gym, even after feeling a little sluggish from being on Carb Nite for a very long time.

 

When will Carb Shock be on sale?

October 15^th in a limited supply at carbshock.com

(Wish I can say that I was quick enough on the trigger to pick some up, but the damn thing was sold out by the time I entered my CC info.  I guess I’ll just have to wait for the next batch!)

 

UPDATE – If you want to learn more check out my notes from Kiefer’s Insulin Timing Tricks webinar where he further discusses Carb Shock

Carb Shock Notes from Kiefer’s Insulin Timing Tricks Webinar Part 1

Carb Shock Notes from Kiefer’s Insulin Timing Tricks Webinar Part 2

Carb Shock Notes from Kiefer’s Insulin Timing Tricks Webinar Part 3