How to Optimize Your Pre-Workout Meal Timing 

There are two parallel agendas in a new paper from the science team at Supersapiens, the company promoting continuous glucose monitors for endurance athletes. The obvious one is to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding rebound hypoglycemia, a plunge in blood sugar that afflicts some people when they eat too close to a workout. The underlying one is to show that sticking CGMs, which were initially developed as medical devices for managing diabetes, on thousands of perfectly healthy athletes yields some useful insights that we wouldn’t be able to obtain otherwise. Both goals are interesting—at least to me, given that I’ve experienced occasional bouts of rebound hypoglycemia for as long as I can remember.

The initial pitch from Supersapiens was that a CGM could function as a “real-time fuel gauge” to track levels of glucose (i.e. sugar) in the bloodstream. I dug into the details of this claim in this 2021 article, but the key point is that glucose levels are way more complicated than the gas dial in your car. Exercise burns glucose, but triggers the liver to dump more into circulation. Eating carbs raises…