Because bodybuilding places high energy demands on the body to reach an aesthetic goal, rice cakes, a source of refined carbohydrates, may fill a functional role in the diets of some bodybuilders.
In the bodybuilding world, attaining a lean, muscular physique tends to be a higher priority than optimizing nutrition just for the sake of health. Rice cakes aren’t a superfood, but they can provide quick energy in the form of rapidly digesting carbohydrates and help you refuel in time for your next training session.
Why Are Carbohydrates So Important for Bodybuilders?
When you eat carbohydrates, your body breaks them down into glucose, or sugar, notes Cleveland Clinic. It then uses what it needs immediately for energy, and converts the rest to a storage form called glycogen. That glycogen is kept in your liver or your skeletal muscles, which you use during exercise.
When you do any type of exercise — especially when it’s high-intensity — your body breaks down glycogen and turns it into a compound called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which the body uses for energy and muscle contraction, according to research.
If you don’t have enough glycogen stored in your muscles, it can lead to lower endurance — translating to shorter, less intense workouts — and reduced muscle contraction, notes a study.
High-intensity strength training workouts are the foundation of most bodybuilding regimens, with many bodybuilders hitting the gym twice a day to optimize muscle gain and fat loss. Getting through these workouts is much more difficult if there isn’t enough glycogen in the muscles.
Because carbs are critical to muscle function, according to a study in the International Journal of Exercise Science and other research, they play a key role in both phases — “bulking,” or building muscle, and “cutting,” or losing excess mass — of most bodybuilders’ diets.
In addition to making sure glycogen stores are full, carbs provide immediate energy, prevent the breakdown of protein necessary for building muscle, and support protein synthesis, or the creation of new proteins that the body uses to build muscle, notes a study published in Current Research in Physiology.
Low-Glycemic vs. High-Glycemic Carbohydrates
Carbohydrates can be low or high on the glycemic index (GI), a system for measuring a food’s impact on blood glucose. While low-GI carbs are full of fiber and digest slowly, providing a more sustained release of glucose and steady energy, high-GI carbs have little fiber and digest quickly, providing a quick energy boost.
Like most refined carbohydrates, rice cakes are a high-GI food. In other words, they cause a more rapid and significant increase in blood glucose and often provide extra carbohydrates that convert to glycogen and are stored in your muscles and liver.
High-GI, high-carbohydrate foods like rice cakes can be an effective way for bodybuilders to quickly refuel muscle glycogen between high-intensity training sessions, notes research. Because rice cakes have little fiber, they’re also less likely to cause gastrointestinal symptoms like bloating, which are less than ideal when prepping for a bodybuilding competition.
One study also found that high-GI carbohydrates could help athletes who exercise at high intensity — in particular, endurance runners — optimize muscle glycogen storage, meaning more energy stored in the muscles.
Benefits of Rice Cakes for Bodybuilders
When looking for quick digestion, bodybuilders may opt for high-carb foods that don’t have much protein or fat. Rice cakes, with their high-carb and low-fiber status, can serve as a helpful tool for meeting weight goals while keeping up enough energy to train.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), a single rice cake provides about:
- 7.5 grams (g) carbohydrates
- 0.75 g protein
- 0.25 g fat
Rice cakes are also low in calories, with only 35 calories per cake.
Research reports mixed results when it comes to the amount of carbohydrates you really need to fuel an intense strength training session and whether the exact amount makes much of a difference in performance.
However, one systemic review recommends eating 15 g carbs within three hours of training, and increasing that amount if you’re performing more than 10 sets per muscle group, or more than one workout in a day.
Since rice cakes contain only 0.4 g fiber per cake, they’re quick to digest and absorb, so they can provide a good source of pre-workout energy. Eating two rice cakes within three hours of a workout could help a bodybuilder meet their energy needs without providing an excess amount of calories or other macronutrients.
When to Eat Rice Cakes
Rice cakes may serve different purposes for bodybuilders depending on whether they’re in a muscle-building, bulking phase of consuming more calories and protein versus a cutting phase of reducing carbs and calories while maintaining protein, according to a study.
During the bulking phase, rice cakes can serve as an easy source of fuel for your workouts. You could even follow the advice of some research and pair them with protein to potentially optimize glycogen resynthesis, or the postworkout process of replenishing the energy in your muscles.
If you’re losing body mass to prepare for a contest, on the other hand, rice cakes could be just the snack to deliver smaller doses of necessary carbs without additional calories or fat.
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