What is carb cycling?
Carb cycling is an approach we can use to optimize the way we manage our diet and improve our muscle growth or losing weight. It is used to cycle our intake of carbs and fats during our microcycle (that period between two same trainings in our training plan).
To better understand how this works I made a sample (tailor-made on myself) which you can find and try at the end of this post!
How to apply it in our microcycle?
Basically to get an idea of what a good carb cycling would be for you is taking your daily average caloric intake (calculate it here) and then consider a stable amount of proteins throughout the week (but in some particular cases this can and should be in a cycle too) then you will have some “standard” days of training with a certain amount of carbs and fats and you will also have some “focus” days of training (the more difficult trainings such as a leg day or some other training with more effort and volume) in which you will have a higher amount of carbs and a lower amount of fats in order to improve the performance. Finally in your rest days you will focus on actually resting so you will need the highest fat intake of the week and most likely you will not need as much energy as in the other days so you will have the lowest amount of carbs of the week.
My example
In my new mesocycle I have the first and last day considered as focus days with a high amount of carbs and low amount of fat and the second and third with a medium amount of carbs and fat (see my new training split for reference)
Here you can try my sheet to calculate a carb cycling for yourself. Obviously this is adapted to myself and my situation (bulking at the time I am writing this post) so I suggest to use it with a grain of salt. Obviously if you need some help just contact me and I will try to guide you.
Here is an example of my carb cycling
DISCLAIMER: this is not medical advice.