rigourous sports calorie intake question

[Eric Larousse]

I have read your TBAB article and I was wondering how many carbs/fats I should be looking to add in order to maintain my strength/bodyweight/muscle mass while playing about 4 nights a week of an hour or hour 1/2 of basketball? Currently I have been cutting and maintaining my strength to try and get down to ~12% from 19% because I did not think carrying around an extra 35 pounds of bodyfat was to bright for a basketball player. I am about 5'9" 185 at the moment roughly 14% bodyfat and am planning on starting up the playing pretty soon. What do you think would be by rough maintenance calories and then how many calories in the form of carbs/fats should I add to that when I do play? thanks

[Jordan Feigenbaum]

I think in a sport like basketball that conditioning, skills, and game experience far outweigh body fat percentage. Strength helps, of course, but the leanest, most conditioned, strongest guy is going to get rolled by the guy with better skills most of the time since it's so skill dependent. That's an aside, of course. At any rate, I have no idea how many cals you're burning with the new found activity and what, if any, compensatory decreases in metabolism are occurring at other times of the day (e.g. resting). Ultimately, seeing how your weight is trending over the week will give you information as to what you should do,but I think conservatively adding 30-40g carbs for each session would be reasonable.